by Oliver Sacks
When I returned to New York, the thought receded to the back of my mind. Then, some months later, I got a long letter from Frances Futterman, a woman in Berkeley who was herself born completely colorblind. She had read my original essay on the colorblind painter and was at pains to contrast her situation with his, and to emphasize that she herself, never having known color, had no sense of loss, no sense of being chromatically defective. But congenital achromatopsia, she pointed out, involved far more than colorblindness as such. What was far more disabling was the painful hypersensitivity to light and poor visual acuity which also affect congenital achromatopes. She had grown up in a relatively shadeless part of Texas, with a constant squint, and preferred to go outside only at night. She was intrigued by the notion of an island of the colorblind, but had not heard of one in the Pacific. Was this a fantasy, a myth, a daydream generated by lonely achromatopes? But she had read, she told me, about another island mentioned in a book on achromatopsia – the little island of Fuur, in a Jutland fjord – where there were a large number of congenital achromatopes. She wondered if I knew of this book, called Night Vision – one of its editors, she added, was an achromatope too, a Norwegian scientist named Knut Nordby; perhaps he could tell me more.
Astounded at this – in a short time, I had learned of not one but two islands of the colorblind – I tried to find out more. Knut Nordby was a physiologist and psychophysicist, I read, a vision researcher at the University of Oslo and, partly by virtue of his own condition, an expert on colorblindness. This was surely a unique, and important, combination of personal and formal knowledge; I had also sensed a warm, open quality in his brief autobiographical memoir, which forms a chapter of Night Vision, and this emboldened me to write to him in Norway. ‘I would like to meet you,’ I wrote. ‘I would also like to visit the island of Fuur. And, ideally, to visit the island with you.’
Having fired off this letter impulsively, to a complete stranger, I was surprised and relieved by his reaction, which arrived within a few days: ‘I should be delighted to accompany you there for a couple of days,’ he wrote. Since the original studies on Fuur had been done in the 1940s and ‘50s, he added, he would get some more up-to-date information. A month later, he contacted me again:
I have just spoken to the key specialist on achromatopsia in Denmark, and he told me that there are no known achro-mats left on the island of Fuur. All of the cases in the original studies are either dead…or have long since migrated. I am sorry – I hate to bring you such disappointing news, as I would much have fancied travelling with you to Fuur in search of the last surviving achromat there.
I too was disappointed, but wondered whether we should go nonetheless. I imagined finding strange residues, ghosts, of the achromatopes who had once lived there – parti-colored houses, black-and-white vegetation, documents, drawings, memories and stories of the colorblind by those who once knew them. But there was still Pingelap to think of; I had been assured there were still ‘plenty’ of achromatopes there. I wrote to Knut again, asking how he might feel about coming with me on a ten-thousand-mile journey, a sort of scientific adventure to Pingelap, and he replied yes, he would love to come, and could take off a few weeks in August.
Colorblindness had existed on both Fuur and Pingelap for a century or more, and though both islands had been the subject of extensive genetic studies, there had been no human (so to speak, Wellsian) explorations of them, of what it might be like to be an achromatope in an achromatopic community – to be not only totally colorblind oneself, but to have, perhaps, colorblind parents and grandparents, neighbors and teachers, to be part of a culture where the entire concept of color might be missing, but where, instead, other forms of perception, of attention, might be amplified in compensation. I had a vision, only half fantastic, of an entire achromatopic culture with its own singular tastes, arts, cooking, and clothing – a culture where the sensorium, the imagination, took quite different forms from our own, and where ‘color’ was so totally devoid of referents or meaning that there were no color names, no color metaphors, no language to express it; but (perhaps) a heightened language for the subtlest variations of texture and tone, all that the rest of us dismiss as ‘grey.’
Excitedly, I began making plans for the voyage to Pingelap. I phoned up my old friend Eric Korn – Eric is a writer, zoologist, and antiquarian bookseller – and asked him if he knew anything about Pingelap or the Caroline Islands. A couple of weeks later, I received a parcel in the post; in it was a slim leather-bound volume entitled A Residence of Eleven Tears in New Holland and the Caroline Islands, being the Adventures of James F. O’Connell. The book was published, I saw, in Boston in 1836; it was a little dilapidated (and stained, I wanted to think, by heavy Pacific seas). Sailing from McQuarrietown in Tasmania, O’Connell had visited many of the Pacific islands, but his ship, the John Bull, had come to grief in the Carolines, in a group of islands which he calls Bonabee. His description of life there filled me with delight – we would be visiting some of the most remote and least-known islands in the world, probably not much changed from O’Connell’s time.
I asked my friend and colleague Robert Wasserman if he would join us as well. As an ophthalmologist, Bob sees many partially colorblind people in his practice. Like myself, he had never met anyone born totally colorblind; but we had worked together on several cases involving vision, including that of the colorblind painter, Mr. I. As young doctors, we had done fellowships in neuropathology together, back in the 1960s, and I remembered him telling me then of his four-year-old son, Eric, as they drove up to Maine one summer, exclaiming, ‘Look at the beautiful orange grass!’ No, Bob told him, it’s not orange – ’orange’ is the color of an orange. Yes, cried Eric, it’s orange like an orange! This was Bob’s first intimation of his son’s colorblindness. Later, when he was six, Eric had painted a picture he called The Battle of Grey Rock, but had used pink pigment for the rock.
Bob, as I had hoped, was fascinated by the prospect of meeting Knut and voyaging to Pingelap. An ardent windsurfer and sailor, he has a passion for oceans and islands and is reconditely knowledgeable about the evolution of outrigger canoes and proas in the Pacific; he longed to see these in action, to sail one himself. Along with Knut, we would form a team, an expedition at once neurological, scientific, and romantic, to the Caroline archipelago and the island of the colorblind.
We converged in Hawaii: Bob looked completely at home in his purple shorts and bright tropical shirt, but Knut looked distinctly less so in the dazzling sun of Waikiki – he was wearing two pairs of dark glasses over his normal glasses: a pair of Polaroid clip-ons, and over these a large pair of wraparound sunglasses – a darkened visor such as a cataract patient might wear. Even so, he tended to blink and squint almost continuously, and behind the dark glasses we could see that his eyes showed a continual jerking movement, a nystagmus. He was much more comfortable when we repaired to a quiet (and, to my eyes, rather dimly lit) little café on a side street, where he could take off his visor, and his clip-ons, and cease squinting and blinking. I found the café much too dark at first, and groped and blundered, knocking down a chair as we went in – but Knut, already dark adapted from wearing his double dark glasses, and more adept at night vision to begin with, was perfectly at ease in the dim lighting, and led us to a table.
Knut’s eyes, like those of other congenital achromatopes, have no cones (at least no functional cones): these are the cells which, in the rest of us, fill the fovea – the tiny sensitive area in the center of the retina – and are specialized for the perception of fine detail, as well as color. He is forced to rely on the more meager visual input of the rods, which, in achromatopes as in the rest of us, are distributed around the periphery of the retina, and though these cannot discriminate color, they are much more sensitive to light. It is the rods which we all use for low-light, or scotopic, vision (as, for instance, walking at night). It is the rods which provide Knut with the vision he has. But without the mediating influence of cones, his rods
quickly blanch out in bright light, becoming almost nonfunctional; thus Knut is dazzled by daylight, and literally blinded in bright sunlight – his visual fields contract immediately, shrinking to almost nothing – unless he shields his eyes from the intense light.
His visual acuity, without a cone-filled fovea, is only about a tenth of normal – when we were given menus, he had to take out a four-power magnifying glass and, for the special items chalked on a blackboard on the opposite wall, an eight-power monocular (it looked like a miniature telescope); without these, he would barely be able to read small or distant print. His magnifying glass and monocular are always on his person, and like the dark glasses and visors, they are essential visual aids. And, with no functioning fovea, he has difficulty fixating, holding his gaze on target, especially in bright light – hence his eyes make groping, nystagmic jerks.
Knut must protect his rods from overload and, at the same time, if detailed vision is needed, find ways of enlarging the images they present, whether by optical devices or peering closely. He must also, consciously or unconsciously, discover ways of deriving information from other aspects of the visual world, other visual cues which, in the absence of color, may take on a heightened importance. Thus – and this was apparent to us right away – his intense sensitivity and attention to form and texture, to outlines and boundaries, to perspective, depth, and movements, even subtle ones.
Knut enjoys the visual world quite as much as the rest of us; he was delighted by a picturesque market in a side street of Honolulu, by the palms and tropical vegetation all around us, by the shapes of clouds – he has a clear and prompt eye for the range of human beauty too. (He has a beautiful wife in Norway, a fellow psychologist, he told us – but it was only after they married, when a friend said, ‘I guess you go for redheads,’ that he learned for the first time of her flamboyant red hair.)
Knut is a keen black-and-white photographer – indeed his own vision, he said, by way of trying to share’it, has some resemblance to that of an orthochromatic black-and-white film, although with a far greater range of tones. ‘Greys, you would call them, though the word ‘grey’ has no meaning for me, any more than the term ‘blue’ or ‘red.’’ But, he added, ‘I do not experience my world as ‘colorless’ or in any sense incomplete.’ Knut, who has never seen color, does not miss it in the least; from the start, he has experienced only the positivity of vision, and has built up a world of beauty and order and meaning on the basis of what he has.5
As we walked back to our hotel for a brief night’s sleep before our flight the next day, darkness began to fall, and the moon, almost full, rose high into the sky until it was silhouetted, seemingly caught, in the branches of a palm tree. Knut stood under the tree and studied the moon intently with his monocular, making out its seas and shadows. Then, putting the monocular down and gazing up at the sky all around him, he said, ‘I see thousands of stars! I see the whole galaxy!’
‘That’s impossible,’ Bob said. ‘Surely the angle subtended by a star is too small, given that your visual acuity is a tenth of normal.’
Knut responded by identifying constellations all over the sky – some looked quite different from the configurations he knew in his own Norwegian sky. He wondered if his nystagmus might not have a paradoxical benefit, the jerking movements ‘smearing’ an otherwise invisible point image to make it larger – or whether this was made possible by some other factor. He agreed that it was difficult to explain how he could see stars with such low visual acuity – but nonetheless, he did.
‘Laudable nystagmus, eh?’ said Bob.
By sunrise, we were back at the airport, settling in for the long flight on the ‘Island Hopper,’ which calls twice a week at a handful of Pacific islands. Bob, jet-lagged, wedged himself in his seat for more sleep. Knut, dark-glassed already, took out his magnifying glass and began to pore over our bible for this trip – the admirable Micronesia Handbook, with its brilliant, sharp descriptions of the islands that awaited us. I was restless, and decided to keep a journal of the flight:
An hour and a quarter has passed, and we are steadily flying, at 27,000 feet, over the trackless vastness of the Pacific. No ships, no planes, no land, no boundaries, nothing – only the limitless blue of sky and ocean, fusing at times into a single blue bowl. This featureless, cloudless vastness is a great relief, and reverie-inducing – but, like sensory deprivation, somewhat terrifying, too. The Vast thrills, as well as terrifies – it was well called by Kant ‘the terrifying Sublime.’
After almost a thousand miles, we at last saw land – a tiny, exquisite atoll on the horizon. Johnston Island! I had seen it as a dot on the map and thought, ‘What an idyllic place, thousands of miles from anywhere.’ As we descended it looked less exquisite: a huge runway bisected the island, and to either side of this were storage bins, chimneys, and towers: eyeless buildings, all enveloped in an orange-red haze…my idyll, my little paradise, looked like a realm of hell.
Landing was rough, and frightening. There was a loud grinding noise and a squeal of rubber as the whole plane veered suddenly to one side. As we skewed to a halt on the tarmac, the crew informed us that the brakes had locked and we had torn much of the rubber off the tires on the left – we would have to wait here for repairs. A bit shaken from the landing, and cramped from hours in the air, we longed to get off the plane and stroll around a bit. A stair was pushed up to the plane, with ‘Welcome to Johnston Atoll’ written on it. One or two passengers started to descend, but when we tried to follow, we were told that Johnston atoll was ‘restricted’ and that non-military passengers were not allowed to disembark. Frustrated, I returned to my seat and borrowed the Micronesia Handbook from Knut, to read about Johnston.
It was named, I read, by a Captain Johnston of the HMS Cornwallis, who landed here in 1807 – the first human being, perhaps, ever to set foot on this tiny and isolated spot. I wondered if it had somehow escaped being seen altogether before this, or whether perhaps it had been visited, but never inhabited.
Johnston, considered valuable for its rich deposits of guano, was claimed by both the United States and the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1856. Migratory fowl stop here by the hundreds of thousands, and in 1926 the island was designated a federal bird reserve. After the Second World War it was acquired by the U.S. Air Force, and ‘since then,’ I read, ‘the U.S. military has converted this formerly idyllic atoll into one of the most toxic places in the Pacific.’ It was used during the 1950s and ‘60s for nuclear testing, and is still maintained as a standby test site; one end of the atoll remains radioactive. It was briefly considered as a test site for biological weapons, but this was precluded by the huge population of migratory birds, which, it was realized, might easily carry lethal infections back to the mainland. In 1971 Johnston became a depot for thousands of tons of mustard and nerve gases, which are periodically incinerated, releasing dioxin and furan into the air (perhaps this was the reason for the cinnamon haze I had seen from above). All personnel on the island are required to have their gas masks ready. Sitting in the now-stuffy plane as I read this – our ventilation had been shut off while we were on the ground – I felt a prickling in my throat, a tightness in my chest, and wondered if I was breathing some of Johnston’s lethal air. The ‘Welcome’ sign now seemed blackly ironic; it should at least have had a skull and crossbones added. The crew members themselves, it seemed to me, grew more uneasy and restless by the minute; they could hardly wait, I thought, to shut the door and take off again.
But the ground crew was still trying to repair our damaged wheels; they were dressed in shiny, aluminized suits, presumably to minimize skin contact with the toxic air. We had heard in Hawaii that a hurricane was on its way towards Johnston: this was of no special importance to us when we were on schedule, but now, we started to think, if we were further delayed, the hurricane might indeed catch up with us on Johnston, and maroon us there with a vengeance – blowing up a storm of poison gases and radioactivity too. There were no planes scheduled to arrive until the en
d of the week; one flight, we heard, had been detained in this way the previous December, so that the passengers and crew had to spend an unexpected, toxic Christmas on the atoll.
The ground crew worked for two hours, without being able to do anything; finally, with many anxious looks at the sky, our pilot decided to take off again, on the remaining good tires. The whole plane shuddered and juddered as we accelerated, and seemed to heave and flap itself into the air like some giant or-nithopter – but finally (using almost the entire mile-long runway) we got off the ground, and rose through the brown, polluted air of Johnston into the clear empyrean above.
Now another lap of more than 1,500 miles to our next stop, Majuro atoll, in the Marshall Islands. We flew endlessly, all of us losing track of space and time, and dozing fitfully in the void. I was woken briefly, terrifyingly, by an air pocket which dropped us suddenly, without warning; then I dozed once more, flying on and on, till I was woken again by altering air pressure. Looking out the window, I could see far below us the narrow, flat atoll of Majuro, rising scarcely ten feet above the waves; scores of islands surrounded the lagoon. Some of the islands looked vacant and inviting, with coconut palms fringing the ocean – the classic desert-island look; the airport was on one of the smaller islands.
