Not Exactly Intuitive, But…

Speedo’s good at traffic checks.

In addition to everyday challenges (trees, parking meters, broken sidewalks, other pedestrians) on our daily walks, we also have to learn to face the challenges of dealing with distracted drivers. Seeing Eye staff members drive vans and quiet cars around while we work our routes to provide us with traffic checks: they intentionally cut in front of us from time to time, simulating real-life challenges we’ll face at home from drivers who text and/or take other chances behind the wheel.

My new black Lab is not only adorable (local pedestrians we meet at corners have told me so!) but so far she has done exactly the right thing at traffic checks — and we’ve had many! If I had to choose one single thing for Speedo to be good at, it’s traffic checks. Back in Chicago, that skill will be key.

So what have we been up to this week? Well, Monday morning was the first solo trip for all 20 of us here with our new Seeing Eye dogs. No rest for the weary: Tuesday we went out once in the morning and once in the afternoon to learn and practice a second brand new route through Morristown, this new one significantly more complicated than the first. Four-way stoplights, uncontrolled intersections, T-intersections. Yesterday morning we did that route solo. Today at breakfast the woman who sits next to me at our dining table let us know she reads the obituaries every morning. “Didn’t see any of our names on it today,” she said. “Guess everyone made it.”

We hardly had a chance to congratulate ourselves on yesterday morning’s solo before embarking on Yesterday afternoon’s bus ride to nearby Morris Plains. Once there, our dogs guided us from the Morris Plains bus stop to the Morristown commuter train station. Then they got us on the train in Morris Plains. Then off the train in Morristown. That’s where we practiced work on train platforms (making sure our dogs didn’t get us too close to the train tracks!). Then the dogs guided us from the train station safely back to our van. This morning? Our dogs led us to town, and I learned a much better way to have Mike maneuver me, my Seeing Eye dog and a shopping cart through a grocery store.

I must have known what I was doing when I gave my new dog the pen name “Speedo.” She stops for cars, yes, but she is so spirited when guiding me that sometimes, when we get to a quiet side street with no cross traffic, she forgets to stop at all. And that requires a correction.

My first time at The Seeing Eye school lo those many years ago taught me that our weeks here are more about training the humans than training the dogs. The dogs we are matched with here have had the bulk of their training by the time we humans show up. We’re here now to review old methods — and learn new ones — to continuereinforcing the things they’ve been trained to do to keep the two of us safe.

Wait. Beth, you said this is your fifth Seeing Eye dog, right? Don’t you already know how to keep them trained?

I do. But I get lazy. And eight years with Whitney have left me a little rusty. I check in with Mike during breaks here, and every phone call includes my recounting some basic technique I’d forgotten since my last time here.

How to hold the harness, for example.

There’s a natural tendency — which can be exacerbated by a dog walking slower as she ages — to want to guide the dog, and to push. But you have to have a somewhat loose hold on the harness while pulling back on it just a bit. Not exactly intuitive, but our dogs count on that sensation of pulling and leading us, that’s how it works!

Uh-oh. There’s the intercom. Time for lunch. “Speedo, forward!”