Palisade Pals

One interesting thing in looking back on this experience, even now, twenty-three years later, is I never felt like my life had been ruined. Once I realized I wasn’t dead, I thought that maybe I would get some sight back. For the first eight months I experienced episodes of extreme discomfort inside my injured eye, and there were a few moments where I could see a much-distorted view of my surroundings. I didn’t expect that I’d ever be able to drive a car again, but I thought I might be able to see the sun.

One day I asked my mother why the side of her brown refrigerator appeared white, and why the tablecloth was white with big grey circles on it. It turned out that beside the refrigerator was a large rotisserie oven covered with a white cloth. The tablecloth was white with large horn-of-plenty images. After Mom described what I was seeing, it made sense. It also showed me just how bad any vision I might get back would be.

Of course, the doctor thought I was nuts.
As time when by, those moments of vision developed a dark ring around the outside. Each time it happened, the ring grew wider and wider, closing in on the center of my vision until there was no sight at all.

The last thing I ever saw was in January 1982. I was having a mobility lesson from Floyd in Salt Lake City. Standing on a street corner, I felt the familiar pain in my eye, which always came before a thirty-second window of sight. I saw movement as a car came around the corner and drove by in front of me.

“That’s an orange car,” I said.
“Close,” Floyd answered. “It’s red. You’d better cut this out, Bill. All this time we’ve spent in cane mobility, and then you’re going to get your sight back.”
But I didn’t.

I discussed this phenomenon with a retina specialist a year later. He believed that what happened was that the retina was detaching, and as the eye healed the nerves were dying. There was no telling what was really going on because they could not see into the back of my eye with the iris and other tissue in the way. The general consensus was that they could not fix it, there was no infection and everything was healing fine. “Let’s leave well enough alone,” they said. I whole-heartedly agreed.

By then I realized there were other things in life more important than sight. When you come as close to getting killed as I had, eventually you understand that blindness isn’t so bad. Yes, you have to accept being treated as a second-class citizen, and find a whole new way of dealing with friends who didn’t know what to do with you any more.

But you also have to deal with a new kind of fear you’d never imagined.

Floyd Hasinger from the Blind Center gave me six mobility lessons. In spite of the lessons, I still managed to get lost sometimes.

I got off the bus west of 7th South in Salt Lake City. All of a sudden, instead of being on the edge of the road, there was no edge of the road. There was no curb, just asphalt. My brain reared up, demanding to know, “Which direction am I going?”

I was fighting panic. I retraced my steps, trying to get back to 7th and 7th. I turned. When you’re blind and you turn, you hope you’re turning 180 degrees.

Guess, sidetrack, curb, corner. I could hear traffic on 7th East. Fortunately, I came across two guys on bicycles. I asked, “Can you help me?”
They said, “Well, just follow us, we’ll show you the way.”
So away we went.

I got lost in Manti walking down 5th South, on 2nd East where that pink house with the big tree and the metal shed is. I walked on the south side of street. Every intersection is an asphalt jungle. There’s no direction from grass or curbs or anything. If you swing your cane wider right, you’ll turn right.

So I’m walking on the asphalt, and then it’s like someone stuck a house in the middle of the road. I actually hit the shed. I turned to listen and try to get my bearings. It was the oddest sensation, because it seemed to me that the creek was running uphill.
Then I heard a familiar voice as Richard Peacock asked, “Are you lost?”
“Which way is west?”
“Turn to your left.” I turned toward the sound of Richard’s voice and was re-oriented.

Then I went off to school in September.

One of the things contributing most heavily to any successes I have enjoyed these past twenty-three years is the close and continued support of my family. My mom and step-dad, Lois & Pinky Kribs, went the extra mile in my behalf.

That first year we lived in Manti, we purchased a home on a lease agreement. We were nearing the deadline for exercising our option just about the time I finished my orientation at the Blind Center. We could make all the payments required to purchase the property, but under the circumstances the banks were very leery. I remember my step dad’s comment. “You won’t lose the home. We can get the money.” It didn’t matter what had to happen, he was going to make sure we kept the house.

The week I came home from the hospital, I stayed at my parent’s house during the day while Cindy worked. I remember lying down on the couch and listening to the morning news. My 88-year-old grandmother, Martha Tooth, who was born in 1893 and died in July of 1988 when she was 89 years old, came over and covered me up with a blanket. I just said, “Thank you Grandma.” I really was fine and didn’t need a blanket, but I remember that as a very touching gesture from someone I loved very much.

Mom really enjoyed driving my children, Jennifer and Wil, around to their school activities. I think it took her back to another time in another city when her own children were young.

Pinky and Mom followed the kids all through school. They traveled clear to Wyoming with us for Wil’s wrestling meet. Out of a special account they’d set up for their grandchildren, they gave Jennifer enough money to finance a trip to Washington DC with her senior class.

My mother was a secretary for the National Forestry Service for many years. She was very meticulous in her office technique and a very good teacher. She trained every one of the people who came to work for me and was able to follow up on their performance afterwards. She intimidated some of the girls, but most of them became very good friends and some even became surrogate daughters. One of her favorite sayings was “It’s too bad we didn’t start an insurance agency together fifteen years ago. We could have had a pretty good mother and son business.”

I never did figure out quite what she meant, because I believed that was what we were doing.

Cindy should get a commission as my manager.

I started playing gigs at the Wisteria about a week later. I knew a total of ten songs. I played those ten songs, then sat down for a minute, then I got up and played those ten songs again.

Robert Falls came in, and he liked the way I played and sang John Denver and Gordon Lightfoot. Eventually, he worked with me.

I played the Wisteria for a couple of months, then we went to dinner in Richfield at the “Down Under.” Bob McCall was the featured performer, singing and playing his guitar. After one of his sets, he and I struck up a conversation, and I told him that I had been playing guitar lately. He handed me the guitar and said, “Play a couple of numbers for us.” Once he heard what I could do, he asked me to come back and play with him some more.

I never thought I was the next Willy Nelson or Kris Kristofferson. I’m willing to say that I’m probably better at performing than 90% of the people who play. But it’s only the top 2% who make it big. I had fun and made a little money but I’m not good enough, and I don’t have the drive to do what it takes to become a recording artist.

When I was re-learning and performing, I’d sometimes play eight hours a day. Now I tell myself I’m too busy, but I still go in the basement and play my guitar every now and then.

The guitar was the means to an end. It saved my sanity that first summer I was blind, then it became a vehicle I could use. I’m a better singer than I am a guitar player, so I can go up on stage and sing some songs and get some people to applaud and 90% of an audience enjoys what I do.

Playing guitar and singing was not only a creative outlet that made some extra money, starting at about $45, then going up to sixty bucks, and eventually expanding to $100 per week, but it also led into my next career. When I started an insurance business in 1982, that’s the money I used to pay my secretaries.