Compass Points: How I Lived

A candid, literary memoir by the author of the critically acclaimed author of The Tugman's Passage describes his writing career, the growing blindness that transformed his life, causing an increasing dependence, isolation, and inertia, and the technology that restored his sight and the implications of that miracle in terms of his personal and professional worlds. 25,000 first printing.

In the Country of the Blind

"The blind eat many a fly," says a fifteenth-century proverb—familiar as recently as sixty years ago, when I was small and blind people were still all over, tap-tapping with their white canes and saddled with dark glasses. The cane, if waved peremptorily, with any luck brought traffic to a halt, and its rhythmic tapping could part a stream of pedestrians and function for the blind person like a kind of radar besides. Power and pathos: because dark glasses were not then an emblem of celebrity or of a fashionable alienation, but of the saddest, sharpest handicap. Ostensibly making it harder to see, they signified instead that the person couldn’t see and probably had a face so wooden or profoundly wounded by loneliness that he or she preferred to go incognito. Common problems such as cataracts or glaucoma were not often reversible, whereas today you need to fly to Third World outposts to encounter blindness on such a scale.

This phenomenon of adults who were helpless and pitiable, though in the prime of life, became one of the first moral puzzles children recognized. Old age they knew; jailbirds they knew about; real freaks—like the "waterhead" whom I once visited, painfully imprisoned in an easy chair in a dark cottage, his head bloated to double size—they might also have some vague acquaintance with. But the blind were ordinary folk, innocent of any crime or grotesquerie, of no specific age, who lived in crabby or long-suffering perpetual night. A mean individual I knew used to snicker when he told me how he had snuck into a blind man's house when he was a boy (having watched him leave for his weekly tap-tap trip to the grocery store), and shat into the sink where all his dishes were. And I could hear the desolate groan the blind man must have uttered, coming home, smelling the evidence of what had been done to him and searching for where it was, while he fathomed his impossible position from now on, living alone, as the story spread among the children of the neighborhood.

In the 1950s, however, when I reached my twenties, certain types of people began to adopt dark glasses to convey a different message and as a form of chic. Jazz musicians, for example, could dramatize the underground, persecuted, jokey character of their existence and telegraph the idea that even at night they already knew too much about what was going on to want to see much more. Better for the spirit to be self-absorbed, ironically bemused, optionally blind—a "spade" so savvy that he wore shades. Yet highway troopers, too, wore smoked glasses to mask their emotions and thus look formidably impassive as they delivered news as highly charged as jazz. And many of the newsworthy intellectuals of the era, cafe-based Existentialists on both sides of the Atlantic, likewise affected sunglasses as a means of demonstrating that a great deal of the passing parade was better left unseen. Impelled by the atrocities of two vast wars, and signature books like Nausea and The Stranger, they seemed to advocate disguising your identity to forestall repercussions and limit what you let yourself take in of a corrupt, demoralizing world in which the night was better than the day because of what it screened.

I didn't agree with this, and didn't wear dark glasses. Believing in nature and an overshadowing beneficence even in its offshoot, human nature, I wanted to gorge on every waking sight. I loved the city like the country—the hydrants that fountained during the summer like a splashing brook—and wanted therefore to absorb the cruel along with the good. I knew that Americans had responded to the bloody ruination of the Civil War not in a fashion corresponding to Sartre or the theater of the absurd, but by turning west once again to seek the balm of the wild. And if in doing so they had gradually spoiled it, that eventuality was more through overpopulation than by greed or any other classic wickedness. I saw this because my own solution to a sad spell was also to head outdoors and climb a spruce, find a pond, or hitchhike west, where I achieved an acquaintance with the frontiers that were left. In the city, it was to seek the most crowded places, Coney Island, Union Square, the Lower East Side, Times Square, on the same instinctive principle that life in bulk is good. Embracing the fizz and seethe of a metropolis was safer then, as was hitchhiking, but my tropism to crowds has never changed. Rubbing shoulders with thousands of people, my spirits surge in the same way that I grin at seeing a one-year-old, or will approach someone elderly, optimistic at the prospect of talking with him. A basic faith kicks in. It's automatic, not ideological, though I believe life has meaning. I find diversity a comfort in the wilds and in the city—that there are more species than mine, more personalities than me—and believe in God as embodied in the earth and in metropolises. I believe that life is good.

So, night or day, in Alaska or Africa, Bombay, Rome, Istan-bul, New York, I never wore dark glasses. I can remember dazzling long wonderful days out in a boat in alligator refuges in Georgia—bird sanctuaries in Texas or Louisiana—scouting with wildlife experts who had some protection for their eyes. But I wanted to see everything just as it really was, in the full spectrum of colors, as a bird or reptile would. In the desert looking for a mountain lion I was the same, and in Greenwich Village, at Andy Warhol parties, I'd no more shade my eyes from the blitz of strobe lights than put in earplugs. I wrote for the purpose of being read in fifty years, and how could you describe a world whose colors you hadn't honestly seen?

But nature played a trick on me. Sunlight kindles cataracts (which I didn't know), and in my fifties I got them bad, compounded by bad retinas. At about the same juncture a bunch of my writer friends died before their time of lung cancer, emphysema, throat ailments, and the like—Edward Abbey, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Frederick Exley, Richard Yates, and several lesser-known good souls—at least partly because they had ascribed to the equally romantic notion that writers ought to smoke, drink, fuck, carouse, get pie-eyed (whereas I only thought they should fuck). Not all of this chemical imbibery stemmed from the Gallic-Kafka-Beckett idea that life was shitty, which had been in vogue.

Nor was it simply macho, though the Hemingway-Mailer axis of behavior was as influential as the Europeans' despair. The hard-living ethos had its best argument in the idea that the mind, like a pinball machine, may need a bit of slamming to light up. Smoking like a chimney, drinking like a fish, or using pot or stronger dope might rev the mind, dramatize the vertiginous character of life, and wipe out humdrum thoughts for a while.
I didn't disagree with the proposition of slamming one's sensibility around. That's why I sometimes walked across the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn, and had driven or hitchhiked across the country eight times. Strangers and the play of expressions across their faces, by the thousand in a single day, were what the city boiled down to for me—Hausa, Chinese, Irish, Navajo, Polish, Puerto Rican—just as it's the scores of species in the woods that make the country as rich as it is: Blackburnian warblers and moc-casin flowers, oyster mushrooms and oak worm moths, bigtooth aspen, squirrel corn, and hophornbeam. The city had its music and movies, at the Five Spot and the Thalia, and the emotions of a jam-packed tempo so much faster. Though the city hasn't worn quite as well for me in fifty years of loving it (I love it more at a distance now), from my twenties to mid-thirties I chose to spend the height of the spring and summer in the midst of New York as often as out in the country. Human nature, if cosmopoli-tan enough, with bodegas and storefront churches, and kielbasa eateries and elderly people sitting in folding chairs on the sidewalk, and numerous infants, was nature to me. I walked by the Hudson River almost daily, when the past night's paroxysm of violence or vomit had abated and the commerce of the day lent the city its terrific thrum: not just the million people, but the million trucks. I had a Bella motor scooter that I'd ride the length and breadth of Manhattan on; or I’d go to a Yankee game and walk all the way home from the Bronx to the East Village, one hundred eighty blocks, as the daylight darkened. Or nose along the classic portal side streets—Elizabeth and Forsyth and Mott and Eldridge and Orchard—off Canal and Delancey, where people were still beginning new American lives. Or amble under the financial towers at Nassau, Whitehall, Pine, and Wall Streets, with that wonderful lift that the beige and creamy and graystone downtown and midtown buildings can give you at midday, when they're so full of sunlight and strivers that optimism is lent to anybody striding through. High buildings: high hopes. Their enhancing identity was catching.
Mute because of a bad stutter, I'd wandered Boston's night neighborhoods with hungry yearning throughout my college years, supposing that just to stare at a single mysterious light in a lonely house with enough longing might cause the woman inside, whoever she was, to sense my presence and slip to the front door and summon me in. In a sensible world, a just and passionate world, it shouldn't be necessary to be able to talk to find a lover. After all, bad guys tend to be the best talkers of all. But I wasn't bold, I was shy, and such adventures didn't happen to me. I was a walker, a witness, but didn't close. For example, I remember a waitress in a cafe near the old North Station, where the trains from Maine arrived, who left me an extra dessert one time, but I couldn't bring myself to use this as an entree to better things. I'd just walk for five, six, or a dozen miles, feasting my eyes on the lights of the oil refinery in Everett and the half-darkened State Street mini-skyscrapers and the harbor from Commercial Street, where the glistening water, like all ocean water, seethed. Boston's sourball sweetness, with its softer darkness, orangey streetlights, miniature but meta-ethnic neighborhoods—Italians back-to-back with Irish, blacks with Portuguese and Chinese, North End, South End, West End, the weekend street markets at Faneuil Hall, yet Skid Row nearby, Charlestown, East Boston, Roxbury, Somerville, Cambridge, Back Bay—five years of walking in Boston helped prepare me to reassume my native New Yorker status after my teenage years in suburban Connecticut.

Then during my two years in the draftee army, mostly stationed as a lab technician at a hospital in Pennsylvania, I had hiked roundabout Philadelphia. After being discharged in 1957, I lived in and explored the hills of San Francisco, the prettiest of local cities. And after marrying, for two and a half years in the early 1960s I'd walked extensively in Paris, London, and Rome, plus wilder environs in Sicily and Spain, with my first wife, Amy. As a writer too, I was visual. My first novel had been set in a circus; the second was about the cruel, graceful art of boxing.

But then, as a family man, I began to forsake the city for wilderness areas during the next quarter-century, in pursuit of ideas for books that excited me. I continued to live in New York, as Audubon, Frederic Remington, Albert Bierstadt, and so many other artists who have made wild places their subject matter have done. (You generally accomplish more in the city because of that inexorable thrum.) It was where my wife's career and lovely daughter's school were. But I did spend three or four months a year drinking from a spring, bathing in a pond, heating with wood, lighting with kerosene, in northern Vermont, and this kept me reasonably honest when I went foraging for stories—my husky in the car—to the Far West and Deep South. When we stopped for gas the dog would jump out the side window to pee and jump right back in.

"Better than havin' a pistol," one hillsman said, when we were halfway through Tennessee. "A pistol can snap, but a dog like that’ll go right attum."

When an old-timer who lived by a lake would tell me he moved his difficult bowels every morning by wading hip deep, I knew what he meant. If he loved the frogs' songs as much as the birds', "Same here," I could say. They were, what, three hundred million years old? I had learned to shoot in the army, so I was up to the tin-can contests we sometimes had; or scrambling up a mountainside to an old mine hole. I knew dogs, and therefore wolves; goats, and therefore deer; parrots, and therefore ravens and crows; big exotic wildlife, and therefore little homebody wildlife as well. I knew what I wanted—pristine lore—and that is half the battle.
In 1968, on the untrammeled Omineca River in north-central British Columbia, for example, I met up with a paradigmatic first white family who had settled at the head of a gold rush trail near the last Sekani Indian family to leave this traditional homeland of theirs for a reservation to the south. The Sekanis weren't able to understand why the Canadian homesteaders were taking exclusive possession of the river bench that for generations had been their own special home. But it was an unequal dispute because the Indians had become squatters from the law's standpoint, living on moldy rice and not much else, and able to hold on at all only by doing the washing, shoveling, nail-pounding, road-clearing, firewood-hauling, and garden-digging for the whites. Yet the white family—hard-drivers, intolerant, with the berserk but self-thwarting energy of people who had failed elsewhere and fetched up here—still wanted them out. Whether it was in order to salve their consciences by forgetting that the Sekani tribe had ever existed or because they didn't like dark-skinned folk, they kept up a constant sneering refrain about "dirty, filthy, smelly" Indians in the windowless log hovel down on the gravel-bar beach. They’d built their house a hundred feet higher and a hundred yards back, with the result that the three white kids snuck out at all hours, concealed themselves on top of the embankment, and threw stones down on the Indians' roof, or at their children if they were playing in the dooryard. The savagery of the prank lay of course in the fact that the Sekanis must only grin and bear it. They could neither complain nor retaliate. To throw stones back or even go and protest to the parents would hasten their eviction from what was now a piece of "private property." They were the "niggers of the North," their presence a constant temptation and amusement to the under-entertained white children, and an irritant to the gunsmith/marksman father who wanted to be master of all he surveyed, not to mention his hard-pressed spouse, who hardly needed to imagine spurious dangers—there " were enough real ones, like grizzlies—but did so anyway, and who wanted some neighbors, but not these neighbors, "hanging from the trees.The pressure was such the Sekanis were succumbing. That's how the West was won.
The nearest store, ten miles away, was a log cabin with staples like rice, beans, sugar, flour, salt, and tea that a lone placer miner panning for gold in a mountain creek and living off the land as much as he could, would need. I stayed upstairs for a night or two here and wandered the footpaths to visit several of these mild guys, bachelors who’d been living around for at least a decade and had no need of visitors, but were not rude to me. When they went out for a long walk, the old hope of blundering upon a strike would well up again inside them, but otherwise it was like wage labor. So many hours with a shovel and a pan meant so many grains of gold. Each piece of the creek could be counted on for a certain payback. Then I returned to Manson Creek and Fort Saint James and Vanderhoof and Prince Geor...