Crashing Through Read Free Page A

that he would coach the team, practices and all, and that he would mail them schedules immediately. The parents applauded. When May got up to adjourn the meeting and reached for his cane, some of the mothers said, “Wait a minute—you’re blind?” May said, “Yep.”
    He ran drills like Sharks and Minnows, set up orange cones in a mostly symmetrical field shape, and taught the five-year-olds (Jennifer called them “widgets”) to run together in packets toward the correct goal. They loved his stories about playing soccer in college, like the one where he made the other team use his beeping ball for an entire half, and how he got a bloody nose when the silent ball hit him in the face.
    Many of the players knew May from school. Every year, he’d bring Josh to area classrooms to tell children what it was like to be blind. He loved their questions: Do your kids get away with stuff because you can’t see them?
No, because I have secret techniques to stop them. But they always try.
Were you all bloody after your accident?
Super bloody.
When you met Bill Clinton, how did you know it was really him?
I asked him to talk so I could make sure.
He demonstrated his talking gadgets with the robot voices, set up a maze of chairs to show how he could zigzag around with Josh, and printed each kid’s name in braille on a card they could take home. Carson and Wyndham thought they had the coolest dad in the world. The couple had never taught the boys to be proud of May. As Jennifer told people, “They just are.”
    In the time between working and parenting, May squeezed in the remainder of a full-blown life. Much of this was made possible by his exceptional ability to move through the world. Often, sighted people would observe him walking smoothly through a banquet hall or an airport or an unfamiliar house and insist that May could see. Some would even challenge him on it. He was hard-pressed to explain his skill in simple terms.
    Part of it stemmed from May’s highly refined ability to detect echo. Over the years, he had learned to distinguish tiny differences made by the sounds of voices or footsteps or canes as they bounced off various objects and openings. The information was so subtle that it vanished if May tried to think about it. Many blind people cannot use echolocation—some can’t hear the echoes; others refuse to trust them. Echoes were sewn into May’s instinct.
    Spatial perception and spatial memory were also critically important. As he moved about a place, whether in a friend’s dining room or New York’s Penn Station, May’s brain vacuumed in the relative locations of obstacles, openings, and passageways, then assembled them into mental maps he could recall at will. He attributed this understanding of space—and his ability to memorize and utilize it so fluently—to his lifetime of participation in sports.
    And May was flat-out good with his two primary mobility instruments, the cane and the dog. Few blind people use both, but May saw power in each. The cane was simpler to use and didn’t need feeding, but it bogged down in crowded situations and never picked up overhead obstructions, the enemy of the fast and free. The dog was difficult to take overseas and had to be fed and walked during business trips, but he was able to detect overhead obstructions, could move quickly through crowds, and was nice company. Of the 1.3 million legally blind people in the United States in 1999, the great majority used canes, while only 7,000 used dog guides.
    May’s mobility skills lowered the drawbridge to the world. But it was his approach that took him places. To go where May wanted to go—which was everywhere—one had to be willing to get lost, a terrifying prospect to many blind people. To May, getting lost was the best part. He told people, “I’m very curious. So getting lost doesn’t feel like a bad thing. It’s part of the process of discovering things.” When they asked how he’d gotten so adept at cane