Thunder Dog (3 page)

It’s time to leave. I strap on my briefcase and clutch Roselle’s harness. “Forward,” I say, softly.

Forward
is used when setting off with the dog in harness, and it’s one of the very first commands all guide dogs are taught when training begins. You stand with your left foot out alongside the dog first, then synchronize the verbal command “Forward” with the forward hand signal, a short forward motion with the right hand. You wait for the dog to start pulling and when you feel the pull on the harness handle, you take the first step with your right foot.

We move out as one, and Roselle guides me carefully through the debris. She stays calm and focused even with things falling on top of her. David, Roselle, and I walk quickly out of the office and head out into the central corridor. People are running around. There is confusion, smoke, and noise.

Each tower has three stairwells. We head for Stairwell B, in the center. Safety is somewhere down below and 1,463 stairs are the only way out.

Forward.

A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.
JOSH BILLINGS

T
he atmosphere is chaotic as people hurry to escape the burning skyscraper. When we come out of the office door, we take a right. Across the hall from us are more offices. We hustle down the hall, which forms the side of one of the two inner squares of the 78th floor. At the end of the hall, we turn left, walk down another hall, and emerge into the sky lobby.

Roselle walks with confidence, and so do I. Although I’ve had guide dogs since I was fourteen years old, I’m very aware that Roselle and I are a fairly new partnership; we’ve been working together for only twenty-one months.

It takes at least a year to forge a good relationship with a guide dog. It’s like a marriage. Both sides have to get to know each other. I study my dog and my dog studies me, and over time we learn to read each other’s thoughts and feelings. Trust begins to develop, and we become interdependent, much like a surgical team or police partners who put their lives in each other’s hands. I trust Roselle with my life every day. She trusts me to direct her. And today is no different, except the stakes are higher.

I hear a few people milling around the smoky 2,600-square-foot Sky Lobby as David, Roselle, and I pass through. Even if I had ignored my emergency training from numerous drills conducted by the Port Authority and had attempted to take one of the elevators, it would have been a waste of precious minutes because all of the elevators in the North Tower had been rendered inoperative by the crash. Plus, I know that all of the central elevator shafts stretch from bottom to top. The whole center of both World Trade Center towers is hollow, two outer sheaths of steel supporting almost half the building’s total weight. The buildings are lighter, flexible, and more efficient than older New York skyscrapers, such as the Empire State Building.
¹
But those long, hollow elevator shafts also provide a conduit for fire and gases, so there is no way we are even going to try. As we walk quickly by the elevators, David mentions that the dark green marble trim around the elevator doors is cracked and buckling.

The 78th floor is different from most other floors in the World Trade Center because it happens to contain one of the North Tower’s two “sky lobbies,” where people change elevators to get to the upper stories. On a normal workday like this one, twelve large express elevators carry people from the ground floor up to the 78th floor without stopping. The elevators are huge. I used to joke about taking one over as an office. The elevators travel at twenty-two miles per hour, and the ride takes forty-eight seconds; I had timed it. Once you make it to the sky lobby, you switch, taking one of a number of smaller elevators to get to the upper floors. In all, there are ninety-seven passenger elevators and six freight elevators in each of the two towers.

While our smoke-filled sky lobby is relatively intact, it is a different story for the South Tower. In our sister building, the 78th floor elevator lobby would become a place where “life and death intersected most violently.”
²
Just sixteen and a half minutes after the first plane crashed into our tower, United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston would crash directly into the 78th floor of Tower 2 next door. There are an estimated two hundred people in the sky lobby on their way out of the south building, and most of them will not make it out alive. Later,
USA Today
reporters Martha Moore and Dennis Cauchon would write, “A deafening explosion and a searing blast of heat ripped through the lobby. The air turned black with smoke. Flames burst out of elevators. Walls and the ceiling crumbled into a foot of debris on the floor. Shards of glass flew like thrown knives.”
³

This second blast flung people through the air. Survivors, burned and bleeding, woke up to a floor covered with debris, dangling steel beams, and a deluge of water from the fire sprinklers. Just like in our tower, the elevators in Tower 2 were rendered inoperable; in addition, two of the three stairwells were destroyed. Only Stairwell A was open and the few sky lobby survivors used it to escape, joining others on lower floors in descent.

Our sky lobby seems safe for now, although a fire is raging somewhere above us. The copious amounts of thick, black smoke are evidence of a fire fed by ample fuel, with flames burning at temperatures somewhere in the range of 1,300 to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit. We still don’t know what has caused the fire or even the initial impact and explosion, but the adrenaline-charged voices around us speed up my steps. The closest stairwell to us is Stairwell B. It’s right in the center of the lobby, between the local elevators, the smaller ones that access the upper floors. Roselle stops at the door to the stairwell, just as she always does. She positions her body to the left of the door so I can reach out and open it. Six or seven people surround us in a loose group, and taking turns, David, Roselle, and I enter the stairwell. Roselle pauses at the top of the stairs. Through the harness I can feel her look up at me for direction. She is calm, standing quietly. I wonder what she’s thinking.

“Forward,” I say with confidence. But my mind immediately begins to wander.
What are we getting ourselves into? How many people are already in this stairwell trying to leave at the same time? How long is it going to take us to get out
?

My right hand clutches the rail attached to the wall while my left hand grips Roselle’s leather leash and the leather-covered handle on her guide dog harness. She can relax a bit now; her job at this point is to watch the people around us and alert me to any hazards both below and above.

Dogs usually do not worry too much about what might be located above their heads. Because of their strong sense of smell, they tend to travel nose to the ground, decoding the world through scents both fresh and stale. Guide dog training is designed to prompt dogs to look up and watch for anything that might hit a blind person in the upper body, including tree branches, scaffolding, mailboxes, signs, and protrusions from vehicles and buildings.

But dogs, just like people, tend to lapse into old habits and instincts, so when my guide dog occasionally runs me into a bush or a mailbox, I pause, loop back around, and politely ask her to try it again. The dog usually guides perfectly the second time around and understands when we do a repeat that she needs to pay attention to something missed the first time.

I did have one guide dog, a golden retriever named Holland, who was a bit of a goof. He once ran me into the same mailbox several times. I was walking down a sidewalk with my parents and a mailbox jutted out over the sidewalk. Holland walked under the mailbox and my hand crashed into it. We turned around and did it again. Then again. By the fourth time, I knew Holland was running me into it deliberately. Maybe he was having an off day. That last time, just as I was about to hit the mailbox again, I dropped the harness and jerked the leash, pulling him over toward me. He banged his head on the mailbox. I could almost feel him thinking,
This isn’t working anymore
. The next time around, he nudged me over to the right so he could clear the mailbox. Problem solved.

Roselle had never done anything like that, though. As much as she likes to have fun, the harness creates a transformation. Her brow furrows a bit as her face takes on a look of intense concentration. She stands up straighter, tail erect, and her muscles tense as her movements become controlled and purposeful. Her senses go on high alert, and if she had antennae, they would be up. Roselle is ready to go wherever I command her to go. She is ready to work.

My life with dogs began long before I received my first guide dog. We always had dogs at my house growing up. Skeets was my aunt and uncle’s collie in Chicago. Since they lived right next door to us in the same apartment building it seemed as though we shared him. In Palmdale we had Tramp and Soxie, then Lady, and then Rudy, a dachshund. And finally, we got a feisty miniature dachshund named Pee Wee. Then I met a different kind of dog.

My dad was reading the newspaper one Sunday afternoon. “There’s a new teacher out at Edwards Air Force Base. She’s blind,” he said. Dad worked out on the base as an electrical engineer. “Her name is Sharon Gold, and she’s been hired as a schoolteacher for children of military personnel on base.” The article went on to mention her guide dog. My parents were intrigued. We had never been around a blind person with a guide dog before, and they decided to invite her over to dinner. So one Sunday afternoon, Sharon came over with her German shepherd, Nola. Sharon came in, greeted us, then unharnessed Nola and set her free in the backyard to play with me. “She likes to run, Michael.”

Boy, did she. Nola was a typical German shepherd—large, intense, and energetic. We hit it off and in a few minutes we were running around the backyard together. At one point I grabbed onto her collar to try out the guide dog thing, and she dragged me across the grass. I think I did a few face plants. With her harness off, and because she could tell I had no idea what I was doing or how to use the guide dog commands, Nola was deep in dog play mode. Clearly, I had a lot to learn.

I loved Nola just because she was a big, friendly dog. And I loved Sharon because she was smart, eager to help, and blind like me. I was also curious about Sharon’s relationship with Nola and how the relationship between the two worked. I wanted to be around her and Nola more, so my parents became good friends with Sharon, and she began to come over regularly for meals. Sharon saw my interest in Nola and soon began encouraging my parents to explore the idea of getting a guide dog for me. My parents were open to the idea because one day soon I would be heading off to Palmdale High School, a larger, more complex campus than I was used to. At the elementary school, the campus had been laid out in simple wings, and it was easy for me to navigate the covered walkways once I learned how to “hear” the support columns. But high school was a different story, more crowded and with a much larger, more complicated campus.

Looking back, I should have started by learning to travel with a cane first. But people sometimes have complicated feelings about the white cane, seeing it as a sign of weakness and disability or a barrier to fitting into the community. I’m not sure if my parents felt that way or not, but I never had a cane until I ordered one for myself years later.

Meeting Sharon was life changing. She was the first blind person I ever got to know well. Besides meeting a guide dog and handler for the first time, I learned three other important things. First, Sharon was out in the community, teaching, not stuck at home feeling sorry for herself and letting others take care of her. She had a job, and she was good at it.
If she can do it, then I can do it
. Second, I realized there was life beyond the dusty streets of Palmdale. I knew I wanted to be a part of it. And last, I realized there were many other blind people in the world besides me. Of course I had known I wasn’t the only blind person, but sometimes I felt very alone. Growing up I didn’t have any other blind friends. I’m not sure if that was good or bad. Looking back, there were probably pluses and minuses to growing up outside the blind community because I didn’t really think of myself as blind. Perhaps mainstreaming forced me to find new and innovative ways of doing things in order to succeed. But at the same time, I didn’t have the support and friendship of others like me who were wiser and more experienced than I was.

I found out I was getting a guide dog one day while I was outside jumping rope in my eighth grade physical education class. Usually I didn’t get to participate much in PE, but I happened to be excellent at jumping rope.

A man walked up to me. “Hello, Michael. I am Larry Reese from Guide Dogs for the Blind.” I was so shocked, I let the rope drop. Mr. Reese had driven down to Palmdale from the Guide Dogs campus in San Rafael, which was just north of San Francisco on the Marin Peninsula. It was about an eight-hour drive in those days.