Crashing Through

by Robert Kurson

  • Purses (“Men don’t carry things over their shoulders, at least not in the United States.”)

  • Tight pants (“Women sometimes paint them on; men’s are more baggy.”)

  • Skirts (“They flap in the wind more than shorts do.”)

  • Bellies (“Women show them a lot these days. Men almost never do.”)

  • Jewelry (“Some men might wear necklaces, but very few wear shiny bracelets.”)

  These clues were a treasure map to May. He memorized and contemplated them at home, then returned to Peet’s with his wife a few days later.

  “Okay, I see a person: medium-long blond hair, I think she’s got a purse, and her walk is bouncing,” May said. “It must be a woman. And I think she’s hot.”

  “Good job, Mike, she is hot,” Jennifer said. “Okay, now look to your right at ten o’clock. What do you think?”

  May gazed for several seconds, forcing his head to stay still.

  “Very nice. Bright shoes. Definitely cute.”

  Jennifer looked mildly annoyed.

  “I’m cuter than she is,” she muttered.

  “Hey, Jen, what about that one? Long hair, belly showing, good walk, nice sound from her high heels. Looks good to me.”

  “That’s a guy, Mike.”

  “It is? What about the high heels?”

  “Those are flip-flops. But he does have a sultry walk, I’ll give you that.”

  Armed with his quiver of new clues, May began haunting Peet’s daily, assessing the women and thrilling to the idea that he could touch so many of them from a distance without ever touching them at all. Often, he brought Jennifer along; it took just a few minutes for her to assess his progress and then help him refine his technique. Sometimes she feared that she had burst his bubble, as when telling him that women he thought to be Miss Americas were in fact dowdy and drab. He reassured her it was no disappointment at all; in fact, he was coming to think himself lucky for his inexact ability to detect a woman’s every defect—it made him much less picky and therefore populated the world with more beautiful women to savor. Other times, she worried that she confused him, as when she told him that a woman with a gorgeous face also had a naturally angry expression. He said he couldn’t imagine such a thing—how could a face be beautiful and ugly at the same time?—but the paradox fascinated him and made the prospect of every face more interesting.

  May continued to practice. Soon he could guess a passing person’s gender with 80 percent accuracy. Jennifer celebrated his daily progress reports. When he reminded her that most wives wouldn’t help their husbands delight in other women, she told him that she knew he was going to look and wanted him to be good at it. At home, he noticed that Jennifer had started to wear the kinds of tight-fitting clothes he responded to when they sat together girl-watching at Peet’s.

  At the end of April, May asked Dr. Goodman for permission to ski. Kirkwood was the one place he’d dreamed of seeing, and it was closing for the season. Goodman wasn’t thrilled: May could get poked in the eye, hit with flying debris, cracked in the head. Ultimately, he left it up to his patient, which meant that May was going.

  May never moved his eye from the window during the three-hour drive to Kirkwood, soaking in the tiny gold-mining towns and slushy S-curves he’d known by story and feel for more than twenty years. Near the snow line, the family competed for the title of “First to See Snow.” Carson won, but May was in the game. It was the first time he’d ever seen snow.

  May squirmed in his seat as Jennifer pulled into the resort’s entrance—he couldn’t wait to see this old friend. She drove slowly, and he gazed at everything. Every side street was where he knew it would be and every speed bump on the road looked familiar. Yet other parts seemed invaders to his eye. Orange cones steered cars to the lodges, while glowing yellow people took money at the parking lot.

  “Why are those people so bright?” May asked.

  “They’re wearing fluorescent vests,” Carson said.

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me about all this orange and yellow?” May asked.

  “I guess we just didn’t think of it,” Wyndham said.

  May still could not get over the number of amazing things sighted people never bothered to mention. It seemed the same as if he’d forgotten to mention to his family that he had a brother or that he played guitar.

  The family geared up in their rented condo, then made their way to Chair One, a gentle beginners’ slope. Riding the lift, May watched an escalator of trees pass to his left and the ground fall away beneath him. Jennifer looked like a cloud in her ski suit, except for the bright orange bib on her chest that read GUIDE—a signal to others that she was helping another skier. A moment later, they’d reached the top and had begun coasting downhill, a stroll more than a run down this docile incline, and it took May’s breath as he found the corridor of trees he’d expected and watched the line-etched snow streak past his glinting yellow-and-red skis. Jennifer called out directions, but May didn’t need them at these leisurely speeds. Everything was coming together, and he looked into the blue of the sky and felt goose bumps rise over his body, and it occurred to him that he needn’t stop there, that he could look farther than the sky, and as he raised his head he saw a crown of jagged dark edges atop the blue. And he thought, “Those are the mountains. That is my panorama.”

  Jennifer knew the next part was coming. She knew it was hopeless to protest.

  “Let’s ski Chair Six,” May said. “Let’s go for it.”

  Chair Six was perhaps the most difficult and treacherous run at Kirkwood, a plummeting black diamond run pocked with moguls, the mounds of hard snow that turn a skier’s legs to pistons. Speeds could reach thirty miles per hour on this mountain, and falls could send a person’s body cartwheeling—an event called a “yard sale” for the mess of equipment the poor soul usually left behind on the mountain.

  The lift carried May and Jennifer above the trees, and it didn’t stop there. It seemed to rise above the mountains themselves, and for the first time in twenty years May felt himself gripping the handrail to make sure he didn’t fall out.

  The view from the top froze May in his skis. The mountain dropped into a sea of trees and collected in a meadow, then caught its breath and rose up again on the other side and climbed and climbed until it became a roaring skyline of rock that romanced the clouds. He yearned to reach out and touch the panorama—it looked that close to him—but he knew, of course, that it was miles away. When he reminded himself of its distance it looked farther to him, as it should have, and he understood that in order to touch it he would have to fly to it, and for a moment he felt like he could.

  Instead, he allowed the sunshine to cut through the chill air and soothe his face. Then he looked to his wife, who hadn’t moved, who seemed ready to wait as long as he needed, and he told himself, “Lock in this feeling. This is what you came for.”

  Just before the run, May reminded Jennifer that he would need to concentrate on her guidance this time—there would be no more playing and talking as on Chair One—and asked her to remember to call out “Traffic!” if other people skied close to them. They pulled on their goggles and set off down the hill.

  The steely white snow streaked underneath May’s skis. This was a much different motion from before, this was speed, raging speed, maybe twenty-five miles per hour, and when he looked up angry dark lines whizzed toward him from every direction—were they people?—yes, they must be other skiers rushing in too close: Move away! Move away! Where was Jennifer, where was her orange bib, why wasn’t she saying anything? There she is, there’s the orange, but here comes another skier. Jen! Jen! Why is she leading me into another skier? I can see his shape, he’s coming right toward me, HE IS COMING RIGHT TOWARD ME!

  WHOOSH!

  May passed right through the skier. His heart sledgehammered inside his chest.

  “Jennifer! Stop!” he yelled.

  Jennifer skidded to a halt. May pulled up beside her.

  �
�What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Jesus, Jennifer!” he said, panting. “You’re supposed to yell ‘Traffic!’”

  “There wasn’t any traffic.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “What was what?”

  “The person…the dark shape moving at us so fast.”

  Jennifer looked around.

  “That’s the shadow from the chairlift.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me about that?”

  “I didn’t even notice it, Mike.”

  May looked down the hill. Dark lines jutted out across the mountain’s white canvas. Some were moving, some were not. A skier whooshed past them, his dark suit indistinguishable from the chairlift’s shadows.

  “There’s moguls coming, Mike. Can you see them?”

  May squinted and surveyed the slope.

  “I don’t think so. Maybe when I get closer.”

  “You should stop, Mike. You can’t even see the moguls. We can stop here.”

  “Let’s keep going,” he said.

  The pair headed down the hill. Soon they were back to speed. May fixed all his powers of concentration on the shadows—if he just reasoned through their angles and shapes and direction he could distinguish real from imagined threats, people from trees, and here in front of him, this must be just a shadow because—

  WHOMP!

  May’s skis plowed into a mogul, collapsing his knees and sending his limbs flailing. He fought to stay upright, but his jackknifed torso whipped him to the snow, where his arms and legs ragdolled and the world rushed by in torrential paint strokes of sky and snow. When his skid ended he wiped the snow from his goggles and looked back for the mogul that had crumbled him. He saw nothing but flat white snow. Jennifer stopped but gave her husband space to decide what to do next.

  May got to his feet and kept going.

  “Look for the bumps,” he told himself as he gained speed. “Forget the other shadows.”

  He saw a patch of snow rushing at him; it looked like a patch because it was lighter on top than on the sides, and it occurred to him that this might be a mogul and—

  BOOM!

  The mogul exploded into May’s knees, short-circuiting his balance and catapulting him face forward into the snow. Adrenaline choked his throat as he uncrumpled and pushed himself back onto his skis. He had to figure things out faster. He needed to tell shadows from trees, people from moguls, bright from almost bright, but the thought of working through all that at these speeds made his stomach tighten and his arms lock, the opposite of the liquid cool he’d become at Mount Jahorina during the Olympics. Again, he pushed himself forward with his poles and continued downhill. This time he didn’t last ten seconds before another ambiguous shadow torpedoed his legs.

  May looked for the color of Jennifer’s bib. He saw only an orange dot in the distance. He began to push himself up, his face red with snow and tears, but he could feel the series of crashes that were still to come, the collisions with nothing and everything he couldn’t avoid, and he stopped trying to push himself. He watched shadows dance around him, and he thought, “I’m done. I can’t make it the rest of the way.”

  May closed his eyes and the world went still. He was safe here. In the darkness, he could hear his heart pounding. It was the only sound on the mountain. He’d never heard it move like that. He was safe here.

  May lifted a pole and pushed it into the snow. He breathed in as far as his lungs would go, then pushed himself up, first to one knee, then to his feet.

  “There’s a way to do this,” he said.

  He opened his eyes.

  “There’s always a way. If I have to crash through, I’ll do it.”

  He thrust his poles backward and began moving down the mountain, tentatively at first, then faster, then as fast as he could go. Over the next twenty minutes he fell thirty more times. Each time, he pushed himself up and started again. By the time he reached the bottom he could barely stand.

  Jennifer rushed to her husband.

  “Oh, my gosh. Are you okay?” she asked.

  May just stood there for a moment, inhaling and exhaling.

  “I think I’m done for the day,” he said.

  A few weeks after skiing at Kirkwood, May was invited by a friend to speak to a fourth-grade class near San Francisco. He told them about the unusual nature of his vision. Their questions were among the best he’d heard:

  “Can you see your dog’s tail wagging?”

  “Definitely. I’m really good at seeing things that move.”

  “Can you see his tail if it’s not wagging?”

  “Yes, but that’s only because I know dogs have tails.”

  “Can you see when your kids do bad stuff?”

  “Yes. And I can see when their room is messy, too.”

  “What company makes the drugs you take? My dad will want to invest money in it.”

  “I don’t know. That’s a good question.”

  “Did they put needles in your eye?”

  “I think so. I’ve got stitches in there.”

  “How many stitches?”

  “I’m not sure. That’s another good question.”

  “What am I holding up?”

  “I can’t tell; I need to touch things before I can really see them.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “Would you want a guy driving a car who has to touch things in order to see them?”

  “Will you ever be able to drive a car?”

  “Well, I’m trying to teach my dog to look out the window to help me steer. And I’m trying to teach my kids to turn the wheel while I press the pedals. Why is everyone laughing?”

  After talking to the fourth graders, May hopped a ride with a friend to Baker Beach, popular for its crashing waves and panoramic view of the Golden Gate Bridge. For several minutes he stood at the lip of the beach, watching the frothing white bubbles atop the water, astonished to see that sand changed from light to dark when lapped by the water. He removed his shoes and began walking in the wet sand, and a moment later he looked up and found the orange silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge, its suspension towers aglow against the gray sky. For a time he walked toward this bridge, this structure he’d known all his life in his imagination, certain he could not reach it by foot but walking to get there still, a bridge that had called to him by legend for forty years and now called to him by orange.

  After a time, he stopped walking and turned around to see how far he’d gone. There, lying atop the sand, were shapes that hadn’t existed moments before, which meant he must be looking at his footprints. He had never conceived of footprints as visual; to him, they were the press-grind-and-pivot feel of sand on his feet—a texture, not an image. He looked at the trail and immediately felt connected to the footprints; they were a part of him, each step connected to the next until they arrived at and became him. He bent down to feel them, but the first one mushed away under his touch, and though he always wanted to touch things, he didn’t want to touch his footprints anymore. It didn’t feel like a good thing to do, so he stood up and left the rest of himself undisturbed.

  On a lovely summer day, May met his brother Patrick in Palo Alto. Busy work schedules had kept them apart for much of the time since May’s surgery. Today would be different. Today, Patrick brought the Limo.

  The Limo was a long, sleek, black tandem bicycle built for performance and guts. The brothers had made countless rides with it down the Pacific Coast, always with May churning in back while Patrick steered in front.

  “Let’s do it different today,” Patrick said. “You ride up front. You steer.”

  “You sure?” May asked.

  “I’m sure I’m terrified,” Patrick said. “I’ll have no control. You have no experience. The bike is built for speed. But let’s do it.”

  May smiled the way he had when he was six.

  The men climbed aboard the Limo. Hydrants of adrenaline opened inside May’s body. The brothers began pedaling. The front seat felt foreign to Ma
y, wobbly and heavy, like he was trying to wag a dog by the tail.

  “Aim for the white line in the center of the road,” Patrick called. “Easy left…left…okay, hold steady!”

  Soon the tandem’s speedometer read twenty-one miles per hour. May kept the bike pinned to the white line. He felt like he could keep riding forever, wind in his face, brother as his engine, this ferocious and beautiful machine his servant.

  The road, however, was ending, and the Limo needed to be turned around, a tricky maneuver even for sighted riders.

  “Want to try the turn?” Patrick asked.

  “Definitely,” May called back.

  May began to lean left, looking to the outline of trees on either side of the road for guidance. He leaned harder left. The bike bent with him. Each man pedaled harder to defy gravity and calamity. The Limo banked farther, the brothers’ knees churning to keep it aloft, until May again saw the white line that meant the center of the road, and a moment later he was guiding his brother back to where they’d started.

  At ride’s end, May and Patrick checked the odometer. They’d covered three miles. They embraced and vowed to go even faster the next time out. On the way home, May replayed the ride in his mind. It seemed curious to him that he hadn’t seen the edges of the road narrowing in the distance the way sighted people always described it; to him, the edges looked parallel for as far as his eye could see. The disparity didn’t bother him much, but he wondered if, after almost four months of vision, he shouldn’t be seeing things more normally than this. Still, it had been a thrilling adventure, and he couldn’t wait to get home to tell his family about pulling a U-turn even some sighted riders couldn’t manage.

  Enchanted Hills Camp turned fifty during the summer of May’s new vision. This was the place of his boyhood adventures, where he’d wooed Jennifer, where it always seemed he could run without stopping. He took his family to celebrate for the weekend.

  Late on Saturday night, after hiking the upper camp, he and the boys began the long trek back to their cabin. The sky was jet-black, and Carson and Wyndham said they were scared.