How I Learned to Walk with a White Cane

Sometimes freedom tastes like concrete

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One day when I was a kid, I was walking around one of the Orlando theme parks with my family. I don’t remember which. I was legally blind at the time but mostly had enough vision to get around, so I wasn’t using a white cane. It was crowded, but I was doing alright following my dad’s back through the throng with my mom and siblings somewhere behind to snag me if I lost track of him.

I was holding what could only be described as a bucket of Sprite. Cups in a size that only exists in theme parks and 7-Elevens because no one else has the sheer audacity to sell them. Worse, the cup was flimsy, and I was dangerously close to a lot of passersby. I had to be less than 10 at the time, so I hold my parents responsible for the exceedingly predictable accident that followed.

Laser-focused on my dad, I missed an older kid who was walking right at me without looking. We collided with the drink directly between us. The cup’s floppy sides immediately gave way, unleashing a tidal wave of Sprite.

The deluge only got the other kid. I don’t know how that was possible. I must have instinctively tilted it toward him. He yelled. Having no idea how to respond and not wanting to lose my dad, I just dropped the cup and kept moving.

As I passed the kid’s mom, she said, “Gosh, couldn’t you see him?”

“No,” I responded flatly and walked away.

Her question was reasonable. She had no way to know I didn’t see well. My response was not so reasonable, even if accurate.

It felt great, though. Very cathartic. I had almost the exact same interaction many more times over the cane-less, low-vision years before I started going completely blind. It got to the point where I would accidentally run into someone and hold my breath, hoping they would ask if I was blind just so I could blurt out, “A little, yeah!”

But as I lost vision, I ran into people more frequently. If I had to narrow down my decision to start using a cane to a single moment, it was the time in the first couple of weeks of college when I was walking on campus and got a hard bump on my shoulder. I stopped and turned, wanting to hear the question. But I heard nothing. The person wasn’t talking, but I heard no noises from them at all. No footsteps, no movement.

“Hello?”

Still nothing. Either I was unknowingly in a silent standoff with a stranger, or… I reached out my hand.

Yep, telephone pole. I bumped into a telephone pole. I had been eagerly anticipating making a snarky comment to a telephone pole. I looked around, hoping no one had seen, and went on my way, acting casual.

My mom called up a nonprofit that has provided training and services to blind people for over a century. At the time, it was called The Lighthouse. I had periodically worked with them since kindergarten, and they had always been helpful, despite the fact that there is maybe nothing in the world more useless to blind people than a lighthouse.

The instructor met me on campus. We introduced ourselves, and she pulled something short and clattery-sounding out of her bag. She handed it over and then explained my new white cane could break down into four smaller pieces and fold up for storage purposes.

“That’s a relief,” I said. “I didn’t think this bundle of sticks was going to help me very much.”

I heard no laughter. She kept talking and didn’t sound like she was smiling. No audible amusement of any kind.

“She seems fun,” I thought.

She showed me the basics of how to walk with a white cane, something that is now second nature, more or less like walking itself. Hand straight out in front, in the middle of your body. Grip like a flashlight, but point your index finger down the flat side of the handle. When you step with your left foot, sweep right, and vice versa.

When I tried the cane for the first time, she said my sweep was too wide. I shouldn’t go any farther than slightly past my shoulders. Being more compact would ensure I covered the width of my body without taking up too much space. She sounded quite serious about this. So, given how the previous attempt at levity went, I decided not to ask if I could ensure my total safety by waving the cane up and down and spinning in complete circles. My mom later told me I had made the same suggestion to the person who first tried to get me to use a cane in kindergarten. This shows growth. I had learned when to keep my thoughts to myself. The quality of the thoughts was unchanged, but the restraint was there (incidentally, there is a clear path over the years from this idea to the RhinoTech Premium Rhino Cane).

We roamed around campus until I got comfortable with the cane. Then it was time for stairs. Going down is easy: hold the cane at an angle such that it doesn’t bounce off the individual steps, but it will hit the ground at the bottom so you feel where the last step is. Going up, you hold the cane out in a way where it taps each individual stair. Then when you don’t feel a tap, use the cane as normal to see if you’re at the top or just on a landing.

This immediately solved two problems that developed as I lost sight. First, at the top of staircases, not knowing I was done climbing, I would often do a pointless high-step, and, losing a little balance, stomp my foot back down hard. Second, at the bottom, I would drop my body weight, expecting to descend another step. Then I had to strain to stop myself from sitting on the ground. In both scenarios, I’m sure you can imagine, I felt super cool and sexy.

The lesson ended after we covered crossing the street. This part was unnecessary. In my 18 years of getting around without the cane, I had only been hit by one car, and that was before anyone explained to me how to cross busy streets with low vision.

Here’s what happened: my dad dropped me off to wait for a haircut at the barbershop while he went to a store a few blocks away. But the haircut line was long, and I got tired of waiting. I decided to go find my dad. I was 11 and had been crossing residential streets alone for years. Sure, I was downtown, but how hard could it—BAM! One ambulance ride and several stitches later, I had a Lighthouse appointment to improve my street-crossing skills.

At the end of the first cane lesson, the instructor told me to explore on my own for a month or so, and she would come back to see how things were going. Those first couple of weeks were awkward, but I learned a lot. Like the average person’s reaction time. I had enough vision, at least in daylight, to watch the blurry figures of people coming toward me freeze in a panic about what to do, sometimes failing to make a decision until I was within a couple of yards and literally leaping out of the way. I could have moved, but what fun would that have been? I was visibly disabled for the first time in my life. It was quite an adjustment. I wasn’t going to deprive myself of fun.

The most incredible thing was watching entire crowds of people separate to make a path as they spotted me. My cane was the sidewalk equivalent of an ambulance siren, or Moses’ staff.

I got stabbed in the stomach a lot. The cane tip got caught on curbs, posts, rocks, cracks in the sidewalk, and a million other things. I often couldn’t stop my forward motion in time to avoid the handle jabbing me hard in the gut. I got one or two bruises.

The second lesson came, and the instructor showed me a way to flare my elbow out a bit so the cane would naturally move off to my side when this happened. It worked immediately.

“Wow,” I thought, “that should probably be in the first lesson.”

I found more ways to avoid this problem as I got further into the world of white cane design and usage. I eventually settled on a longer, lighter-weight cane with a rolling tip for constant contact with the ground and the ability to jump small cracks and dips. Nowadays, I’m rarely impaled.

There are many types of canes. Different materials of varying weights and sturdiness. Different tips you can swap out. Some for rolling, some for tapping the cane back and forth. Some made specifically for off-roading. There are rubber handles, foam handles, wood handles. There’s even a “no-jab” cane with suspension built into the handle. You can customize the color (I have a black cane for fancy occasions).

I never fully took anyone down with the cane, at least not while I had vision. As things deteriorated, that changed. But I can still count on two hands the number of sighted people who actually ate it, and I’m about six months away from the 20-year anniversary of getting that first white cane. Not bad, huh? Plus, of the people who went down, all but two were coming straight at me and, I assume, weren’t watching where they were going. So I’m not concerned about them. The other two I tripped from behind. I feel bad about those. One of them had just recently had a stroke, so his balance was already off. I know this because I see him on a regular basis. He works near my building. I apologized, and we’re on perfectly good terms. But he absolutely LOVES bringing it up. He recently told the story to my 3-year-old. I’m not living that one down.

I once heard an older man who had recently gone blind describe the white cane as a “tool of freedom.” The phrase stuck with me. It’s common for people becoming disabled—or in my case, becoming more disabled—to put off learning to use adaptive tools. Doing so acknowledges the need for the tool, which is the hard part. Denial can be gentler than freedom. Sure, you might dump a soda on the occasional child or get in a couple of arguments with posts, but at least you can put off feeling genuinely disabled a while longer.

Friends, this is lying to yourself, and I’m here to tell you the truth will set you free.

It might also slam a few pedestrians into the sidewalk. But we all have to pay a price for freedom.

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