by W. Burns Taylor
In 1965, I entered the Kerrville Rehabilitation Center for the Blind in Kerrville, Texas. For four months I studied braille, independent living skills, and orientation and mobility (O&M) as a prelude to getting married. I was 24 years old at the time and had never been trained to travel with a cane.
I went through the Texas School for the Blind in Austin, Tex., two years of public high school and four years of university classes in Austin without a cane or a dog. During that time, I often walked seven or eight blocks home from high school, learned to travel to the University of Texas on the bus and attended classes with 18,000 students on a campus spread out over 40 acres.
As youngsters at the school for the blind, we were not allowed to use canes; we were never even introduced to the idea of cane travel. The only person in the world we knew who used one was Mr. Allen, our blind superintendent, who was so old he obviously needed a cane. We had heard of Seeing Eye dogs but never saw one until junior high when the new piano teacher brought one to school to help her find her classes. We figured she needed a dog because she was a lady and because she seemed pretty doggone helpless when she tried to move around the main building by herself.
The only O&M strategy I used during all those years was echolocation, a technique I developed at the age of eight which made it possible for me to race bicycles with my friends and neighbors. So my introduction to the straight, somewhat flexible fiberglass cane as a travel aid came pretty late at the Kerrville Rehab Center. For me it was an extra — something that could benefit me mostly because it let other people know I was blind. And I was convinced by that time that this was a significant issue. After all, I had spent four years at a major university, bumping into people who asked angrily, “What the hell’s the matter with you?”, crossing streets on sheer moxie, and learning that the hardest substance known to man was not a diamond at all but rather a fire plug against the shin at 25 degrees Fahrenheit.
My entire college career was a voyage of unstructured discovery. So when they presented me with a cane in Kerrville, I was ready to try something new, something I hoped would extend my territorial imperative to new horizons. I stuck with that old crooked handle fiberglass cane for about 10 years. It came in real handy for vaulting rock walls and snagging the hems of miniskirts in El Paso where I moved after graduation from the University of Texas. I never did get around to using it for a fishing pole, though. But it was admittedly a little awkward in airplane bathrooms and at those cramped little side tables for two in restaurants. Then one day the Sunshine Umbrella Co. of Kansas went out of business and I could no longer find the rubber/metal tips for it anymore. So I retired it to the back closet and bought my first folding cane.
From that time on, I used mostly folding canes because they were more plentiful and much more practical for riding on the backs of motorcycles and for shooting pool. People in bars used to accuse me of carrying my own cue stick with me so often that I decided to take them up on it one night. From then on, I thought folding canes were the hippest thing going.
For the next several years I traveled with those heavy aluminum folding canes except for one brief, unhappy affair with an Arkansas Traveler, a goofy-looking wooden cane with a leather strap on the handle and a spring button for a tip. Some genius reckoned that the spring button would bump against things and just bounce off. A nice idea, but it didn’t always work that way. Sometimes that pesky little spring would catch in the crack of a sidewalk and, with the force of my forward motion, I was impaled on the handle.
So I went back to the collapsible metal canes for the next several years. Until I returned to Los Angeles one day for a visit and stumbled across what I considered to be the “dream cane”: the California graphite cane. It was strong, lightweight and pretty snazzy looking. I called it my “disco cane.” Since it was made of carbon fiber, I could move through airports without even having to surrender it to the security goons at the metal detector. I strutted down the familiar streets of L.A., dodging bus benches, dancing through clusters of poles and gliding smoothly across streets in a choreographed stroll saying, “Man! Somebody should be filming these moves.”
Then one day as I was crossing Hollywood and Vine, some person in a crowd of pedestrians tripped across my wonderful graphite cane and it suddenly snapped at the joint. They were gone before I could say a word. Hit and run! I just stood there helplessly in the middle of that famous intersection with my broken cane dangling limply in the air, about as functional as a piece of rope. Eventually, someone helped me across the rest of the street and I phoned a friend. After I broke a couple more of those canes in violent collisions with speed bumps and buckled sidewalks back in El Paso, I changed the kind of tip I use and things have gotten better since then.
Just the other day, however, I was introduced to the so-called NFB long cane and I was surprised. I liked it. It is lightweight, somewhat flexible and apparently quite strong. I would love to have one for schlepping around my neighborhood — making those round trips to the pharmacy or the dry cleaners and back home. There’s a sturdy, durable feel to it that gives me confidence that it won’t break on me while crossing the street. But I still intend to use my folding canes. They’re just the thing for bars and seances and getting in and out of low-slung sports cars.
And I guess that’s the bottom line of my whole experience with cane travel. There is no perfect cane. There are canes for all seasons: inside canes, outside canes and heavy, metal, dog-whacking canes. I have a personal stable of about six or eight different ones for different occasions. And I’m frankly excited about this new NFB long cane. But I don’t think that’s the one I’d pick for riding on the back of a motorcycle.