Dear Whitney,

Remember when Mike read that New York Times story out loud to the two of us earlier this month? Yes. That one. The article about Seeing Eye dogs, and how a trip to New York City is part of the training we do:

The school’s training is done in a suburban setting far calmer than Midtown Manhattan, an hour’s drive away. But for its ultimate challenge, and to assess a dog’s focus, trainers take the student-dog pairs into Manhattan as something of a proving ground.

The New York Times story follows two women and their new dogs on that very route you and I took together seven years ago this month, maybe you still remember it? The van ride to the Port Authority, squeezing into a packed elevator, threading through subway turnstiles, avoiding oncoming commuters while climbing a staircase, straining to hear announcements over the noise of passing trains…. Friends who sent me the link to the New York Times story when it was published all asked similar questions. “You did that with Whitney? Weren’t you scared?” Not at that point of the trip. My fear wouldn’t kick in until we got off the subway and headed up to street level.

What you couldn’t know, dear Whitney, was that I’d taken that exact same route with another dog a year earlier, in 2010. That month at the Seeing Eye in 2010 had provided me with the promise of another long partnership with the new dog, a male Yellow Lab named Harper.

But a few months after Harper came home with me to Chicago, a vehicle turned right on red just as my Seeing Eye dog was leading me across an intersection. Harper did exactly what he’d been taught to do. He saved both our lives by pulling us away from the oncoming car–so hard that, when inspecting Harper’s harness afterwards, Mike noticed the metal harness was bent. Harper was a hero, but the trauma left him incapable of continuing his work as a Seeing Eye dog.

That near miss had left me more fearful of traffic than I’d been before, and now, here I was, back in Manhattan, this time with you, another new dog. And our first challenge after getting out of the subway station? Crossing a busy street. Well, not just one busy street. Columbus Circle. A traffic rotary. An entire circle of street crossings.

With sirens, jackhammers and horns blasting around us. Would you hear my commands? Could you keep us safe? Would you get us across, and across, and across?

You stopped at the curb, just as you were trained to do. I listened the best I could to judge the traffic, just as I was trained to do. When I determined the cars had stopped for the light in front of us, I commanded, “Whitney, forward!” You led me across that street safely, and then again at the next one in the circle, and then the next, too. And thousands of busy Chicago streets in our seven years together since then. As that article Mike read to us pointed out, “The dogs receive four months of training at the Seeing Eye, learning to guide around obstacles and obey commands, as well as street-crossing skills, including how to watch for traffic and keep their handlers safe from vehicles that might be turning or running lights.” More from that article:

While not exactly a test, Manhattan’s conditions present the dogs with intense conditions that can help reveal training aspects to work on.

“It’s a training experience that offers more than anywhere else we can take them,” said Dave Johnson, director of instruction and training at the Seeing Eye. “Almost anything can happen in one day in New York — it’s a culmination of sensory overload, even for humans.”

When Mike read this article to us a few weeks ago, I knew I’d be mentioning it in a blog post at some point. Thanksgiving seems an ideal time to do so. I am so thankful to you, Whitney, for working so hard to keep us safe. I am so grateful for the work The Seeing Eye does to make dogs available to those of us who are blind, I appreciate the New York Times for devoting the time and space to such a well-written and well-researched article about how it all works, and I’m thankful to Mike for reading it for us, and doing so, so much more by caring and looking out for us, too. I am one lucky woman, having you and Mike on my side. Happy Thanksgiving!

-Beth

Beth’s on her fourth Seeing Eye dog now, and I’ve marveled at and, really, admired each one of these incredible animals: in order, Dora, Hanni, Harper, and now Whitney.

Not that they’re perfect. Not by a long shot. They’ve each had their particular weaknesses and strengths. Whitney, for example, will stealthily guide Beth in a way that allows Whitney to catch a whiff of the fire hydrant or traffic light pole or an oncoming dog as it passes, all without slowing down or giving Beth so much as a twitch. (I bust Whitney every time we’re walking together and she forgets about the guy who can see. )

The dogs can get confused, and they make mistakes. People see the mistakes sometimes and my protective self is afraid they think less of these dogs than they should. Because, on the whole, the dogs are remarkable.

I’ve wished everyone could see Beth’s dog doing scads of tricky, nuanced things every single day. Like getting in just the right position to make it easy for Beth to put the harness on every time they get ready to go out. Or weaving through crowded sidewalks. Like finding elevator button panels. Like slowing down ever so gently when there’s a heave in the pavement to alert Beth that something irregular is coming up. Slowing down for ice. And on and on.

They’re trained to go right up to every curb at each street crossing and wait for a command from their partner—straight, left, or right. Sometimes, making a right or left means actually backtracking to get around obstacles or to stay on the sidewalk. They pivot on a dime to change direction and lead their partner with them.

When it’s time to cross the street, that call is up to the human. Dogs don’t read the stoplights—they trust that their partner will listen until certain that traffic is moving in their direction of travel. This is a skill people with visual impairments learn formally in orientation and mobility training, using a white cane. In fact, at the Seeing Eye, for example, one isn’t eligible to be matched with a dog without having completed O&M training.

But—as those of you who know the story of Harper know—the dogs are trained to keep an eye out and to disobey their partner if the team is in harm’s way. If, for example, the human just makes a bad call about crossing, the sidewalk has been ripped up for construction, or, as in Harper’s case, a car simply doesn’t stop when it should. It’s called intelligent disobedience, and it’s a pretty difficult thing to ask the dogs to do, when you think about it.

Anyway, about a year and a half ago, our friend John showed me his GoPro Hero camera. It’s a cool little thing that people mount on their heads when they do things like hang-glide, ride a motorcycle, whatever. They’re often mounted on drones, too. They make for some cool video.

It occurred to me that I might be able to mount the Hero on our hero dog to get a dog’s eye view of what it’s like to work with Beth. Sure enough, Hero sells a harness for exactly that purpose.

Beth and I took a couple walks with the camera mounted, but Whitney really didn’t like wearing it. And, there was no way to stabilize the camera—it rocked back and forth as Whitney walked. (John told me there are drones that can be programmed to follow at a set distance, and boy did I want to rationalize buying one, but it was a bridge too far.)

Well, the video we shot back in 2016 has just been sitting on my laptop, and when I bumped into it during a file purge, I popped it open.

And it was a lot better than I remembered.

So, I did some editing and added some explanatory captions. It covers a typical walk Beth and Whitney take around our neighborhood. Fair warning—it’s 14 minutes. I intended to shorten it more, but my intention is to give an idea of how Whitney and Beth work, and that often requires waiting when sighted people wouldn’t have to. So it’s true to that goal.

Otherwise, I hope you’ll give it—or some part of it—a watch. And I hope it gives you some idea of why I love and admire my two gals so much.

Happy New Year!

Happy birthday, Seeing Eye! The oldest guide-dog school in America was incorporated this day in 1929 after co-founder Morris Frank returned from a pioneering guide dog program in Switzerland. He and his Seeing Eye dog Buddy are the pioneers of the guide dog movement in the United States, and I have him and everyone affiliated with the school to thank for Dora, Hanni, Harper and Whitney — the four heroic dogs the school trained especially for me. To celebrate, I’m reblogging a post I wrote five years ago for Bark magazine’s blog. The post is about my first weeks at home in Chicago with Whitney, and it demonstrates how the Seeing Eye’s work doesn’t end when we leave the school with our new dogs!

Consistency is the key.

Beth Welcomes a New Seeing Eye Dog

January 23, 2012

You’d think having a new guide dog memorize routes and anticipate turns at corners would be the goal.

But it’s not.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: I have the route memorized. I know how many streets we have to go forward before we turn left, then how many streets until we turn right again to get to our destination.

Whitney, my new two-year-old Labrador/Golden Retriever cross, guides me through our apartment lobby, we get ourselves situated on the sidewalk in the direction I want us to go, I command, “forward!” and my spunky sprite guides me safely to the curb. When she stops, I stop. That’s how I know we’re at the intersection. That, and the sound of cars. Whitney waits as I listen for traffic, and when I deem it is safe, I command her to lead me right, left or forward.

Whitney has a smart bump. It shows. In our first week home in Chicago she had already started memorizing my route to the pool where I swim laps, the cultural center where I teach memoir-writing classes, and my cubicle at my part-time job in the Willis (formerly known as Sears) Tower.

These routes became so familiar to Whitney that she knew to make the turns without bothering to go all the way to the curb first or waiting for my command. A near-miss in traffic with my last Seeing Eye dog, Harper, left him so afraid of traffic that he had to retire early. Our brush with that car, the months of work to encourage Harper past his fear, and the subsequent decision to retire him from guide work—it all shook me up, too.

Whitney’s decision to keep us away from the edge of the intersections, to just go ahead and make turns on her own, well, it meant I didn’t have to face the rush of traffic in front of us. I felt safe.

Until Whitney started crossing intersections diagonally, that is. Dang that smart bump! The girl is so clever that when she knew we’d be turning right or left once we crossed the street, she figured hey, why not save time? We’ll just go kitty-corner. Whitney had also taken to veering right and left long before our approach to any and all intersections, leaving us discombobulated as she anticipated a turn.

And if there is one place you especially don’t want to feel discombobulated with a Seeing Eye dog, it’s the approach to an intersection.

As it so often goes with dog training, the problem was consistency. I expected Whitney to take me right to the edge of a curb if I wanted to keep going straight (or if we were on our way somewhere new and I needed to know we were at an intersection). But on a familiar route? I’d let her decide for herself.

The Seeing Eye to the rescue! A trainer flew to Chicago to give me tips on which commands to use to drive Whitney all the way to the edge of the curb—the way she’d been taught at The Seeing Eye school. He showed me how to use the leash to encourage her to the edge. “Heap on the praise when you get there,” he urged. “Then stay right there a little while before giving her the command. Make sure she knows that you want her to stop right there and wait for your command at every single intersection.”

And you know what? It’s working. It’s comforting to know exactly where we are before we cross a street. Since The Seeing Eye tune-up, we don’t veer right and left before intersections anymore. Whitney knows what I expect of her, and she’s determined to get us to the curb.

Things are much clearer when I’m in charge. Whitney seems to appreciate the consistency, too. The more we work together, the more we trust each other. And best of all? She doesn’t cross intersections diagonally anymore!

December 21 is our great-niece Floey’s tenth birthday, and I’m giving her the gift of a lifetime: on Monday she’ll come along to watch an ocularist polish her Great Aunt Beth’s fake eye.

Eye surgeons did all they could to restore my vision when retinopathy set in thirty years ago. One of my eyes is still intact, but the other one shrunk so much from all the surgeries that I can’t hold that eyelid open.

I wear a prosthesis in that eye, every once in a while it needs a polish, and Floey is the lucky girl who gets to come along with me Monday and see how its done.

The best way I could think of to prepare Floey for what she’s in for on her birthday was to send her the link to a guest post our friend Charlie Gullett wrote four years ago when he accompanied me on a visit to the ocularist. I reread his post before sending it Floey’s way. It was so good that I thought it worth publishing here again. With any luck we can get Floey to write a guest post with her impressions once her birthday is over, but for now…here’s Charlie.

That’s a whole lotta eyeballs right there. (By Chuck Gullett.)

A trip to the ocularist

Between Harper’s retirement and Whitney’s training, I had the great opportunity to accompany Beth as her “Seeing Eye Chuck” for a visit to the ocularist. The ocularist, as I learned, is the place to go when you need a new glass eye or just a little glass eye maintenance. The ocularist’s office, on the 16th floor of the Garland Building in Chicago, has a spectacular view of Lake Michigan, Millennium Park and Navy Pier. Ironically, the hundreds of eyes in the office are all neatly arranged in drawers and never able to enjoy the view.

On this visit, Beth was going in for a routine cleaning. As an observer, the process is fairly straightforward…

1) Remove glass eye with a device that looks like a miniature Nerf suction cup dart.

2) Try not to make an immature sucking sound as the eye is being removed.

3) Sit back and chat until the eye returns from the onsite laboratory, which I pictured to be somewhat like Grandpa’s lab from the “Munsters.”

When the ocularist returned with the beautifully polished eye, I asked a few questions and Beth talked him into showing me the lab and explaining the cleaning process. What I got was an enthusiastic lesson in the history, making and care of the good ol’ ocular prosthesis, or what we commonly refer to as a glass eye. First off, the eye is not even made of glass. Modern glass eyes are actually made of acrylic, which is extremely durable and more cost effective to manufacture.

The guys in the lab area told me about the heroic GI’s returning from WWII having a large demand for glass eyes. The glass eyes would tend to break by accident or “accidentally” around the time a GI wanted to visit the big city. A shortage in high quality imported glass and the cost of replacement eyes prompted the government to find a better material to make artificial eyes. Now, we have the modern version in durable acrylic.

So, what’s your guess? (By Chuck Gullett)

To give you an idea of how durable the eyes are, Beth has had the same peeper for 25 years and the last time she had it polished was 4 years ago. Each eye is hand crafted for its owner and is a true piece of art. I looked through the drawers of sample eyes and the level of detail is really stunning. The blood vessels are recreated with silk threads while the pupil and iris take laborious hours to hand paint so they look realistic. The ocularist had notes from Beth’s last two visits where they recommended that she get fitted for a new eye, but Beth just smiled and said, “Yeah, I kinda like this one.” I like that one, too. I had no idea that Beth even had a glass eye. One eye is real and one is not. You can try to guess which is which, but good luck.

Anyway, I also learned that the cleaning/ polishing process is much like polishing jewelry. There is a buffing wheel and several different compounds to remove build-up and leave a nice smooth surface. The ocularist works the eye until it is just right, then rinses it off and you are ready to go. I associate the feeling of a freshly polished glass eye like the smoothness your teeth have after a visit to the dentist.

All in all, it was a great afternoon. I got to spend some quality time with a friend, feed my odd curiosity with something out of the ordinary and learn something new. Anytime Whitney needs a day off, I’ll be happy to help out.

A guide dog who saved his blind companion from getting hit by a bus has been getting a lot of attention in the media. And well he should! A story in yesterday’s USA Today reports that the driver of a school bus in Brewster, N.Y. told police he didn’t see Audrey Stone and her guide dog Figo crossing the road as they made their way home. After the accident, Audrey was rushed by ambulance to a hospital while the Brewster Fire Department rushed her heroic guide dog to a vet. Both were hurt, but sources say both are recovering well:

Stone, 62, suffered a fractured right elbow, three broken ribs, a fractured ankle and a cut to her head in the accident, said Brewster Police Chief John Del Gardo. Figo’s leg was cut down to the bone, said Paul Schwartz, who manages the Extra Mart gas station at the intersection and ran to the scene.

The lead to the story in USA Today claimed that Golden Retriever Figo’s “protective instincts kicked in” to save his human companion, and while that may be true, it’s only a part of it.

Guide dog schools spend months teaching dogs to pull their blind companions back should oncoming vehicles come too close, and when we humans arrive at the schools to train with our new dogs, we practice over and over and over how to react to the dogs should something like that happen.

Harper is very happy in his well-earned retirement, living with our friends Chris and Larry, and hanging out with a Collie named Beau.

I have received all four of my dogs from the Seeing Eye school. With each one I’ve stayed there in Morristown, N.J. three weeks to learn how to work with that new dog before flying back home to Chicago. After the first week of training, Seeing Eye staff start heading out in vehicles to intentionally cut in front of us, simulating the very real behavior of drivers like that bus driver in New York. All four of my dogs routinely refused to step into the street if they saw a vehicle barreling toward us, and if a car cut in front of us in the intersection, these dogs knew to pull me back from harm’s way. Otherwise they would never have been placed with a blind person as a Seeing Eye dog. All four of my dogs have saved us from multiple near misses, but the near-miss I had with my third dog Harper was too close for comfort. I’ve told this story to you blog followers before, but that article in USA Today spooked me a little, and I felt a need to repeat it.

Harper and I were at a busy Chicago intersection in 2012, and hearing cars going straight at our parallel, I commanded, “Harper, forward!” We’d taken a few steps into the intersection when a woman in a van turned the corner right in front of us.

Harper pulled us back with such force that I fell backward, cracking the back of my head on the concrete. The woman driving the van said later that she hadn’t seen us. Harper saved our lives.

My husband Mike inspected the harness later and discovered it was bent. I Suspect Harper was clipped by the car. After a near-miss like this, guide dogs will do one of three things:

1. Brush it off as to say, Hey, we almost got hit!” and just keep working
2. Need a little retraining before they get their confidence back
3. Never feel confident again and have to retire

Harper started showing fear around traffic after the near-miss. Three Seeing Eye trainers came one after another to help retrain him, but nothing worked. Harper trembled around traffic, his head down, his tail between his legs. City life had become too much for him.

The Seeing Eye staff members who’d come to visit us met in Morristown afterward to discuss Harper’s future. Could they bring him back to the Seeing Eye for retraining? Place him with some other blind person, one who lived in a calmer environment?

The head of training phoned me after their meeting. Harper would not be retrained, he said. I could go ahead and find friends to adopt him. I was crushed. So much time, energy and money had gone into training Harper. I’d hoped he could be placed with someone else so that all that effort wouldn’t have to go to waste.

Hearing the disappointment in my voice, the trainer on the other end of the phone assured me that the Seeing Eye’s hard work — and Harper’s training — had not been wasted at all. “Harper took a bullet for you,” he said. “And for that, he’s earned an early retirement.”