Crashing Through (7 page)

One morning, May awakened in a tuberculosis hospital run by German nuns about twenty miles from Kumbuli. He heard screaming and crying in the ward, someone dying from TB, a nurse said, and he struggled to figure out where he was. Someone told him he had malaria and had been sick and in and out of consciousness for a week. He would have died, they said, but for the care of Mr. Natural, who had applied special herbs and compresses and used magical forces to keep him alive.

May tried to leave the hospital, but he had lost too much weight and was too weak to stand. An agency representative arrived with good news: a family had volunteered to take him in and help him recover. And he was welcome to go back to work whenever he felt able. May could not imagine continuing. He had nothing left. He said that he needed to go home.

Once he could walk, May boarded a plane and headed back to California. He could not imagine a situation more difficult and challenging than that he’d faced in Africa. He could not imagine a more profound loneliness than the kind he’d slept with every night in Kumbuli. But nothing rivaled the pain he felt from quitting on his journey before he’d seen it through, and as the flight attendant offered him a hot meal and a refill on his drink he told himself he’d do anything to never feel that way again.

After Ghana, there was no going to law school; there could be no adventure in learning contracts. May wanted to work for the State Department, maybe live in a foreign country. The fastest track was a master’s in international relations. He was admitted to Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, one of the nation’s premier programs. He would start the two-year course of study in the fall of 1977.

May recharged his batteries before graduate school by working at Enchanted Hills and doing odd jobs at the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. It was in the Lighthouse hallway that he met a thirty-five-year-old blind man named Jerry Kuns, a force in the Bay Area blindness community. They discovered a mutual fascination with how a blind person might use the subtle visual communication skills—a slightly raised eyebrow, a vague nod, a smile with the eyes—that seemed the exclusive province of the sighted. They agreed that much more could be taught to the blind than the standard “look up and toward the person you’re talking to.” They believed the blind could learn to flirt and gesture. They promised to pursue those lines further—hopefully together—sometime down the road.

In the fall of 1977, doctors removed May’s left eye, which had become infected during his illness in Ghana, and replaced it with a prosthetic. After that, May loaded up his sister Theri’s Volkswagen van and made the sixty-five-hour drive with her to Washington, D.C., to study the world.

Johns Hopkins was a revelation. The professors and the course work were riveting, the students (all of whom had international experience) interesting, the city electric. Early during the first year, the CIA came to Johns Hopkins for on-campus interviews. The students joked and jeered.

“I’m going to sign up,” May said.

“Would you really work for them?” his friends asked.

“I don’t know,” May said. “It’s not politically correct. They’re mysterious. People think they create unrest. I kind of have to check it out.”

It took just two interviews before the agency offered him a position as a political risk analyst—thirty hours a week while in school, full-time afterward if it worked out. His job, in the Africa division, would be to analyze information about assigned countries from both covert and overt sources, then make a report should anyone, including the president, desire to know. The security clearance took two months. When he accepted the job he became the CIA’s first blind employee.

He loved the work, his boss, and the agency’s aura. He began to think about becoming a secret agent. Near graduation, after his second year at Johns Hopkins, May looked into working full-time for the CIA. He inquired about becoming a spy. A higher-up in the agency leveled with him.

“A prerequisite for being a spy is being inconspicuous,” the man said.

“So?” May asked.

“So, you’re anything but. There’s no way you can ride a bus into a village and mingle with people as though you’re an aid worker or newspaper reporter.”

“But a blind guy with a dog might be the last person they’d suspect as a secret agent,” May argued.

“Maybe in a city. But there are times you have to go out to the hinterlands, gathering information from locals who aren’t supposed to be talking, and if these people feel at all uncomfortable about this strange person in their environment they won’t get close to you.”

And that was the end of May’s career in the CIA. He had worked there for nearly two years. They agreed to leave the door open.

After graduation May returned to California, where he began applying for jobs at banks, one of the primary routes for a holder of a prestigious international relations degree. He knew the job wouldn’t speak to his soul, but he needed an income and was willing to give it a chance. The banks were less inclined to experiment. They seemed impressed by him in interviews but didn’t call back—he never received so much as a rejection letter. When he called to follow up, they’d say they were still thinking about it, code for “We can’t take a chance on a blind guy.” He interviewed for a year and received no offers. He took a job selling Time-Life books by phone and played guitar on San Francisco’s streets. He thought, “This is not what I should be doing with this degree.”

In 1980, he auditioned for and won the lead role in an Oakland community theater’s production of
Butterflies Are Free,
about a blind man moving away from home and his overprotective mother. He had no acting experience but figured it would be interesting. He had no idea.

On the first day of rehearsal the director stopped him mid-dialogue.

“Mike, you have to look perplexed when you say that,” she said.

“How do I do that?”

“Feel perplexed.”

He tried to feel perplexed, but the director said his face wasn’t changing. This was the essence of the subtle visual communication he and his friend Kuns had been so interested in learning.

“I want to really learn to do this,” he said.

The director told him to feel the expression on her face. He moved his hands over her features and tried to bend his own to match. She pushed and tugged on his face, crinkling his forehead and lifting an eyebrow.

“That’s it!” she said. “Now you’re perplexed! Remember that!”

Soon May was practicing his visual communication skills and expressions on attractive women he encountered.

“It works,” he told Kuns.

The play ran for six weeks. A reviewer from KCBS radio in San Francisco said that May’s rush to the end of the stage during his temper-tantrum scene made him fear that the actor would plunge into the crowd, much like Marlene Dietrich had during her famous fall from the stage in 1975.

After the play closed May finally found a bank job. A college friend, Rich Boulger, connected him with the Bank of California, where the boss promised to do what it took to support him. The regular paycheck broadened his world, but the work, in the end, did not. He had begun to think of himself as a kind of pioneer, someone who wanted to lead into the wilderness rather than follow by rote. The bank was fine for the moment, but when he sifted through his papers and made his phone calls, there were no wildernesses in sight.

As the winter of 1980 approached, May’s friend Rob Reis called and proposed an absurdity.

“Let’s go skiing.”

“You mean cross-country skiing, right?”

“Nope.”

Reis knew of a downhill skiing program for the blind at California’s Kirkwood Mountain Resort, near Lake Tahoe. It had been launched by Ron Salviolo, a man May had met a few years earlier at Enchanted Hills, where Salviolo had worked as an expert in deaf-blind counseling and had amazed May with his ability to find just the thing that made a kid great.

At the resort, Salviolo, a long-haired hippie type from New York, got May going by towing him down the bunny hill with a bamboo pole. By the end of the day May was on his own and guided only by Salviolo’s voice commands: “Turn left…easy right…go, go, go…slow down aaannnndddd…stop!” The freedom was a revelation to May—he was winging through open space faster than he could run, faster than he’d dreamed of running, whooshing through without a cane or a dog, free to turn and fly without the undertone of obstacles that had forever been bound to his awareness.

Soon he was tackling Kirkwood’s toughest runs and skiing at speeds that spooked some pros. In 1981, he and Salviolo entered the national downhill competition for disabled skiers. May’s category was B1, totally blind male. The winner would qualify for the World Winter Games (later to be known as the Paralympics). Most competitors had been skiing for years, not months. May and Salviolo smoked the competition. They were going to Switzerland.

The United States team landed in Geneva in March, where they boarded a bus for the various resorts that would host the 1982 World Winter Games. The team was assigned a twenty-seven-year-old Swiss translator named Fiona, whose smiling accent—a heady mix of Swiss, French, Scottish, and American—transfixed May from “
Bonjour.
” The amputees whispered about her beauty. May was captivated by her descriptions of the passing countryside. She did not say, for example, that railroad tracks went up a hillside; she said that the tracks were like two black snakes playing tag on their way to a mountaintop school. Flowers were not orange but “sunburst.” The world outside the bus excited her and she couldn’t wait to describe it all. Fiona painted pictures in May’s mind, and he knew he had to know her.

The skiing competition began the next day. May and Salviolo stood in wonder as team after team skied with the guide safely stationed yards behind the blind skier.

“Let’s do it our way,” May said.

They began their run, Salviolo in front, the tips of May’s skis just eighteen inches behind, a strategy that made for unprecedented speeds but wildly increased the risk of catastrophic entanglement. They registered fifty-four miles per hour on course radar guns—unthinkable in the sport.

“He can kill himself!” cried the competitors. “He will crash! It is crazy!”

They won three gold medals. On the hill, Salviolo told people that May had been crashing through his entire life.

The team was scheduled to return to the States a few days later. May used the time to put himself near Fiona whenever possible. In a souvenir store, he bought a small model of a Swiss chalet; he often learned about great sites like the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty by touching their gift-shop replicas. Fiona described the ski village to him as he ran his fingers along the model. She made it move for him.

Many men clamored for Fiona’s attention, but she was drawn to May. She was intrigued by his capabilities and impressed by his intensity, but it was his kindness that touched her. She saw him mentor younger blind teammates without lecturing, encourage them in even tones but with an unwavering faith in their hearts. She saw him put his arm around a twelve-year-old girl near tears from a tyrannical father and say, “You ski beautifully. We believe in you.” When he played his guitar people looked like they believed in things, and she found herself believing in him.

Near the end of the trip, May and Fiona went for an evening walk, up icy stairs and over cobbled pathways around the village. They walked long past midnight, until they seemed the only two moving things around. Earlier that day, she had pushed his hand from her knee, but now when he reached to hold her hand she took it and held it against her cheek. She began to describe her love for the antiquity of old Europe and again May was transported. When she took him to an ancient house and described how it sat on the street like an elderly widower in the park, he believed he knew what that house looked like, and he marveled at the things a person could know visually so long as his heart was right.

On their final night in Switzerland, the American athletes gathered at a hotel to celebrate. Spirits flowed and everyone danced—in wheelchairs, on prosthetics, holding dog guides. May snuck away to the lobby and booked a room. He and Fiona finished their celebration in private.

The next morning, the American team bus was loaded and running, but a head count showed one person missing. A taxi screeched to a halt behind the bus, and May and Fiona got out. The athletes erupted into cheers. Fiona turned red. May kissed her good-bye and boarded the bus, and in a moment the Americans were gone. He could hear the countryside pass by his window, but now there was no one there to describe it. In half a day he would be home, where his girlfriend Cathy awaited. As the bus approached the Geneva airport, May leaned over to Salviolo.

“Ron,” he said, “I’m staying.”

May caught the next bus back to the hills. Fiona and her parents invited him to stay at their home. The couple spent a week in Switzerland, then toured France and England before May had to return to the States to begin interviewing for work. They promised to keep seeing each other, but worried about how it could proceed. Fiona said she could never leave her beloved Europe. May, who needed to establish a career and who had family in California, wondered if he could permanently live abroad. They took a final walk and he listened to her watch the world, and within hours he was on his way home.

May returned to much fanfare in California, where the media had caught wind of his Swiss heroics. He gave radio and television interviews in which he described the downhill style he and Salviolo had pioneered. He took a job at ESL Incorporated, a high-tech firm, where he and his friend Reis planned to start a division that would sell satellite imagery to the government and to multinational corporations. And he ended his relationship with Cathy; he could think of no other woman now that he’d known Fiona. He thought constantly of her, but she continued to say she never could move to the States. He began the terrible process of considering the idea that he and Fiona might never be together.