SHELF LIFE: Blind Faith

Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See
By Robert Kurson
Random House, 306 pages, $25.95


By Alexander C. Kafka
Reprinted from The Chicago Tribune

How wrapped up in fear we are; how it constrains our plans, our hopes.

That's never clearer than in contrast with someone who has so many obvious things to fear but shakes off those concerns and lives more fully than the rest of us in the human herd -- someone like Mike May, whose astonishing story is memorably told in Robert Kurson's Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See.

May lost his vision at age 3, when, one spring day in 1957, he climbed into the rafters of his family's garage in Silver City, N.M., seeking a vessel for water with which to make mud pies. He walked over to a cement horse trough to wash out the hard powder in the jar. That powder was calcium carbide, and when combined with water it forms explosive gas acetylene. His mother, Ori Jean, heard the explosion, "ran to the backyard and found Mike lying on the ground, drenched in blood and sharded in glass. He was in shock and whimpering," and he almost died.

Instant tragedies offer no exemption from quieter, more gradual ones, like the alcoholism of Mike's dad, Bill, an engineer. That left Ori Jean to raise her five children, including her blind son, increasingly by herself. She was the right woman for the job, though, moving the Mays to Walnut Creek, Calif., so Mike could go to a regular school, and not just allowing but encouraging him to live the active, daring childhood for which he was wired:

"At school . . . Mike took tetherballs to the face and dodgeballs to the groin. He bloodied his nose, cracked toes, and broke fingers. While running to first base in kickball, he stepped on top of the ball, fell backward, and bashed his head on the pavement. He was unconscious for twenty minutes and rushed to the hospital." A week later, he was playing again.

May insisted on being a school crossing guard. He rode a bike three miles in traffic into town, using his extraordinary spatial memory and acutely echo-sensitive hearing. During his bike ride, his mother "stayed home and vacuumed the living room, then vacuumed it again. After three hours Mike walked in the door. 'Hi, Mom,' he said, then went to wash up for dinner. She never asked him about the trip -- she didn't want it to seem like a big deal."

In high school, Mike built an 80-foot tower in the back yard for his ham radio. "By the time he was teetering at forty feet, [his mother] could no longer stand it." She drove off and returned to find Mike "in the garage talking into a microphone, saying, 'This is WB6ABK. Is there anyone out there? Where have I reached?' "

Sometimes his courage crossed way over the line into recklessness -- for instance, the motorcycle ride to and around the high-school track, or the time he borrowed his sister's car for a mercifully short, experimental drive.

He was on wrestling teams in high school and at the University of California at Davis, where he studied electrical engineering. He went on a student exchange to Ghana with his guide dog. Because of the blindness and the dog he was unable to line up a host family and ended up living alone in a mud hut and contracting malaria. After studying international relations at Johns Hopkins University, he was the CIA's first blind employee: a political-risk analyst.

He became a high-tech entrepreneur, and -- of all things -- a ski racer, winning, with his guide, Ron Salviolo, three gold medals at the 1982 Paralympic World Winter Games, then becoming the first blind skier in the Olympics, in 1984 at Sarajevo (though he and Salviolo had to sneak onto the course to achieve that unofficial distinction). When one of May's business ventures went bust, he handled dejection in his usual fashion, taking up a riskier form of racing called speed skiing, where the snug helmets muted his hearing. He and Salviolo worked out a two-way radio system, and May set a blind-skier record of 65 m.p.h. May also fell in love and married, and he and his wife, Jennifer, had two sons.

On a chance encounter with Jennifer's optometrist, May learned of an experimental procedure to restore sight in his one eye, the right; the left had been replaced by a prosthetic in 1977 after an infection from his illness in Ghana.

The medical risks of this new procedure were harrowing. First, transplanted optical stem cells (not the embryonic kind of current heated debate) would produce daughter cells to clear and preserve the cornea. Then a new cornea would be transplanted. The combined surgeries had only 50-50 odds of success, and any improvement could reverse itself at any time. The anti-rejection drug vastly increased the chance of cancer. And May could lose the partial light sensitivity that was so vital to his activities.

For months he didn't even seriously consider the operations. And although he found time for everything, he didn't find time to read the few available case histories of the life-long blind who'd had some vision restored. They tended to become severely depressed, because their new vision confused and tired them as much as it helped and pleased them. They also felt their specialness disappear without ample emotional rewards to compensate.

May had been a charismatic role model, making a point of gently explaining to groups how full his experiences and his senses were without sight. He was an inspiration and an ambassador, and he feared the blind would feel betrayed if he sought sight. He might be betraying his own sense of self too.

Kurson -- a former Sun-Times and Chicago magazine feature writer, now a contributor to Esquire magazine and author of the deep-sea account Shadow Divers -- uses May's difficult decision, in 1999 at age 46, to frame May's story and those of his family and friends. Then Kurson weaves into that narrative a discussion of the medical research and obstacles involved not just in the experimental surgeries but in sight-related brain function. He lays all that out clearly but without condescension and in small sections a nonscientist can digest.

As the book's title suggests, the surgery went miraculously well, but May's visual cortex wasn't up to interpreting what his restored eye could deliver. Movement and color spoke to it; depth and visual cues didn't. For instance, faces were clear but meaningless, gestures weird and distracting, and moguls on beloved ski runs camouflaged. May's new world was in many ways gorgeous but also baffling and exhausting. How he has chosen to handle that is characteristically remarkable, though, and that's one of the things that makes him an equally compelling medical and literary subject.

While May's achievements are extraordinary, the most moving aspects of his story are the magical but also melancholy bits of ordinary life we don't always properly absorb: the thrill of seeing your spouse's body or your son's freckles; the pleasure of catching a ball. Then there are the small, strange revelations that came with May's new vision: the discovery that stop signs are red and that red meat isn't, necessarily; that overhead highway signs won't knock the roof off your minivan; that parking attendants wear neon reflective vests.

May, with a deferred adolescent fervor, always dreamed of seeing women, especially topless women. But when he does finally get to indulge in some belated scoping, he needs help making sense of what he sees, help that his wife sweetly provides, explaining to reporters that she wants her husband to enjoy all things beautiful.

But all things are not beautiful, and May's first sight of homeless people, cracked windows, chipped paint and an obese woman at Costco whom he at first mistakes for a forklift -- well, those are revelations too. Nor does his medical odyssey pre-empt the tribulations of his latest roller-coaster business venture (talking global-positioning-sytem units for the blind). It's one of several factors that, for years, have put serious and repeated strains on the Mays' marriage. Marriage, too, is an adventure, and adventurers both, they crash through together into the unknown.

A motif of Crashing Through is the importance of getting lost. Whether on the elementary-school playground, in Ghana, in his college town, on the ski slope, or undergoing batteries of medical tests, May crashes through physical, mental and emotional boundaries and discovers -- sometimes whimsically, often painfully -- what's out there. The book's epigraph, from Soren Kierkegaard, puts the idea succinctly:

"To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself."

Reading about May repeatedly losing and finding his way, I was overcome with admiration, of course, but also found myself wishing him a little more tranquility now, a bit less striving, a time of taking stock -- at least for a spell, maybe, before he goes on to wow us in some new way.

While May has apparently fended off despair through constant motion and ambition, we can nonetheless feel the weight, as well as the valor, of his experiences. As you read about the man who "dared to see" in so many transcendent ways, don't be surprised if your own vision mists over now and then. As May, of all people, well knows, tears, too, are necessary.