Transcription of Speech by Bill Irwin from the Iris Network Garden Party

Friday, August 20, 2008

 

 

(Bill Irwin is, a professional speaker who lost his vision at age 28 and became the only individual who is blind to have hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, led by faith and his guide dog, Orient.)

 

 

“Good Evening. It’s good to be with you this afternoon.  It is indeed an honor to address a good looking group like you.

 

I’ve been a consumer of Iris Network for several years and I can truthfully say that every person in the network that I’ve come in contact with has been easy to work with, highly competent and that says a lot for Iris Network. For those of you who are supporters of Iris Network, I’m happy to inform you that, on behalf of all the consumers, we appreciate your support and encourage you to continue to do that because your money is going to great use.  MaineAIRS is a good example because it provides reading services to the visually impaired community all over Maine.  And they are doing a wonderful job under the leadership of my friend, Les Myers.  My humble thanks to all of you readers and volunteers that make that possible. 

 

For the next little while we’re going to have a little fun hiking the Appalachian Trail vicariously.  You know that little sprinkle outside that scattered the crowd? I turned to one of the board members and I said “what are they running from?  Nobody here will melt and that’s just a light drizzle.”

 

Before I get started, I would like to introduce my partner here.  His name is Colby.  He’s solid black in color, he stands 23-1/2” at the shoulders.  He’s 7 years old.  He’s a Goldvadore.  He’s a mix between a black lab and a Golden Retreiver. He weighs 76 pounds, he eats twice a day, he goes out four times a day, he’s been neutered, he won’t bite and he loves everyone.  That answers 95% of the questions, but I’ll be delighted to answer your questions if I didn’t answer them already.  After we get done here, I’ll be hanging around the book table that I hope all of you will visit. 

 

In 1968, I was 28 years old and I thought I had the world by the tail.  I was finishing college and I owned my own company and everything was going exactly like it should be going.  I was teaching school and I went to my class, I taught Chemistry and I went to class and loaded a chemical formula on the board and turned around and began to explain it.  And as I turned my head back around to look at what I had written, there was nothing there.  I discovered by testing that suddenly, with no pain and no warning, I had gone totally blind in my left eye. Well, that got my attention. I left school and I went to my partner’s office who was a medical doctor and told the secretary that I needed to see him right away.  As soon as he got finished with the patient he was seeing, he took an ophthalmoscope and looked in my eye and began to cry.  Now I don’t know about you, but when my doctor cries at something he sees on me that kind of concerns me. 

 

To make a long story short, by the end of that day I had seen five professors of ophthalmology at the University of Alabama Medical School.  All of them agreed that I had malignant melanoma and they gave me three months to live.  After two months with no different story, one day my ophthalmologist called and he said: “Guess what?  These pathologists have made a mistake.  You’re not going to die, you don’t have malignant melanoma, but we don’t know what to call the disease you do have.  We figure that you have a 50% chance that it will never involve your right eye so that’s good news.”  So after two months of thinking that I was going to die the prospect of being blind was like a consolation prize.  I told my ophthalmologist that I had to prepare for that other 50%, though it may never happen. And I began to take mobility instructions under a blindfold, I began to learn to read Braille, and I took advantage of all of the services that the service route for the blind had to offer.  I learned how to function independently at home and do pretty well at it. 

 

One day four years later as I picked up a cup of hot coffee that my secretary had just put in front of me, I looked down at the cup, and there was no cup, and there were no hands holding it and I knew at that moment that the 50% had come to fruition. It was a matter of time until I would be a blind person, but I was prepared.  I did pretty well, even though I was very distraught about losing my independence. 

 

So that’s the story about my disease which is now known as core retinitis which, if you know anything about those medical terms, is an auto-immune disease where the immune system identifies the retina as being foreign, and begins to destroy it and there’s no cure for it.  It can be treated and slowed down with laser treatments of which I had 500 between 1972 and 1976.  It was kind of a moot point because much of the retina had been destroyed and I had no useable vision.  I went to Morristown, New Jersey to the Seeing Eye (Clinic) in December of 1978 to get my first dog guide whose name was Jory. And that leads me into my favorite story.

 

Jory and I, before I went to the Seeing Eye (Clinic), I had great reservations about going way up north from North Carolina to New Jersey to spend the month of December sloshing around in the snow and ice.  But after I got there, I realized that that should have been the least of my problems because I learned that one of our trips away from the school was to go into New York City to negotiate moving doors, moving sidewalks, escalators and the like, and it just so happened that the day we were doing that trip was on the 23rd of December, the second busiest shopping day of the entire year. 

 

All the way to the Port Authority in the van we heard that it was a record-breaking crowd, 14 million people that day fighting over that little island called Manhattan where, on a normal day, there were only 8 million fighting over that same geography.  So that was a little bit disconcerting to us since all of us were novice dog-guide users.  After we got to the Port Authority it took an inordinate amount of time to get from the middle of the building to the door that led us to embark on our adventure to do our business in New York City. 

 

 

Just as my trainer reached for the door to go out onto 43rd Street, I had, what I believe in polite company, to be a nature call.  I tugged Doug’s jacket and I said “Doug, I need to find a restroom right now.”  He wasn’t pleased with that at all. He said “We’re not going to do that here because it’s not appropriate.” I said: “Let’s you and I discuss that word ‘appropriate’.  Let me explain to you what’s going to happen if we don’t find a restroom.”  He said: “Okay, you win. But you’ve got to follow me back to the elevator because we’ve got to fight the crowd two more times.”  I said: “I’m right behind you.”

 

When we got on the elevator I was so concerned about Jory’s feet and tail that I didn’t notice how crowded that elevator had become. As I finished placing him in the corner, his feet and his tail away from people stepping on him, I suddenly realized that the elevator was packed tightly enough that I could have relaxed every muscle in my body and I wouldn’t have gone anywhere.  And about that time the elevator began to descend. All of a sudden I heard a very strange noise in front of my face that I identified as very female and sounded a little bit like this:  “Hee hee hee hee hee.”  Doug hit me in the ribs with his elbow and whispered: “Pull Jory’s head around. He’s cold-nosing a girl in a mini-skirt.”  I pulled his head all the way over to the left and about that time I heard: “Hee hee hee hee hee.”  Doug said: “Pull him away, he’s doing it again!”  So then I pulled it al the way to where I was standing, the elevator opened and everyone got out. The young lady took a couple of steps forward, turn around and looked at him and exclaimed, “Oh my goodness, it was a dog!” That’s my favorite New York story. If anyone can top that, share it.

 

My most frequently asked question that I get about anything to do with the Appalachian Trail is why in the world would a blind guy even think about doing something insane like hiking the entire Appalachian Trail.  And my answer is, if he were sane, he wouldn’t!   But the truth of the matter is, like you heard earlier in that wonderful introduction from my friend, it was a spiritual journey and my Creator called me to do that to share what had happened in my life with everyone there that I had an opportunity to meet and visit with. 

 

On March 8th, 1990, in the middle of the biggest flood that Georgia had had in over 70 years, I hitched a ride from Augusta where I had a speaking engagement the night before up to where the trail begins about 17 miles from a little town in North Georgia, Springer Mountain.  The driver of the truck had never been in Northern Georgia and had no clue where the Appalachian Trail was.  I didn’t either but we did have instructions to get on a certain woods road that was fairly negotiable by his 4-wheel drive pickup truck and we began wandering around those woods roads looking for a white mailbox with the Appalachian Trail logo on it. Now, we had 30 inches of rain the first 24 hours that I was out there.  In that kind of rain he couldn’t see the hood ornament, let alone the mailbox. 

 

After three hours he slammed on the brakes and said: “Look, friend.  I can’t spend the rest of my life looking for this mailbox.  We spent three hours to no avail and I need to get back to Augusta.  And besides that, if you have been telling me the truth all the way here and God really did send you out here to do this insane thing, surely he’ll help you

find that mailbox.  So please get out of my pickup.”  So with that invitation I got out and I put on Orient’s harness and his backpack and I put on my backpack and grabbed my walking stick, took the leash and the harness and I said: “Orient, forward.”

 

I began to traverse the same road we had been on for three hours.  As I listened to the diminishing sound of that pickup truck leaving me in the wilderness for the first time in my life, 17 miles from the nearest human being, in the custody of the dog who could neither read nor talk, I had this horrible fear that permeated every fiber of my being, and that was, I forgot to ask the man the most critical question of all: “Which way is north?” I had planned to use the sun for direction, and in that pouring down rain there was no sun and I had no clue about which way to go.  To make a long story short, within a couple of hundred yards, all of a sudden, with no prompting from me, Orient very abruptly turned left. I decided to follow him because I certainly didn’t have a better idea.

 

The third afternoon, after continuous rain for over 36 hours, when I thought that it was a hopeless situation, I heard the most wonderful sound of another human voice and I’m about to find out just how lost I really am.  So I shouted from afar to the trail maintainers that were there, I know they thought I was nuts because I screamed: “Where in the world am I?”  Now imagine seeing a blind guy coming down the trail at you with a seeing eye dog and a hundred pound pack on his back and he has no clue where he is.  One of them shouted back with a smile in his voice: “You’re on the Appalachian Trail and you’re headed north.”  Do you think that was a coincidence? Absolutely not.  And for the rest of the 2,167.9 miles this fact was the truth: God led the dog and the dog led me.  That’s the only explanation I could give any reporter for the rest of the trip. 

 

Those same men told me something that day that I heard almost every single day for the next 256 days in a row, and that was: “You’ll never make it.”  And that ellipsis is where I was at the time. I had to process that information.  In order for me to be able to maintain the motivation and drive to continue for 258 days, I had to consider that information useless and just believe that I would go exactly as far as I was supposed to, and that was all I ever thought about.  My goal was to reach the Appalachian Trail before winter.  That was a big goal. I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of entertaining that thought because 2,200 miles is too far to have to walk.  So, I decided that I would think about 10 miles a day.  And that’s what I did, every day.  My goal was to make it 10 miles.  Some days I didn’t make it.  Some days I made 12.  One day I made 23.  In the end I averaged 12.3 miles which is not too shabby even for a blind guy.

 

A reporter in Massachusetts asked me how many times I fell. I said “I don’t have any idea.  I certainly didn’t count them.”  I said: “What do you think?”  He said, “Well, we estimated that you fell 7,000 times.” I said “That sounds pretty good but I think it’s a severe underestimation.”  What I did keep up with was the number of days I didn’t fall at all.  Out of the 258 days there were 7 wonderful, pristine days that my knees didn’t get transformed into hamburger, and that’s what I counted.

 

 

 

We had a lot of fun out there.  It was a mobile community heading north.  We all had train names.  Some of them were very interesting.  Mine was the Orient Express.  The dog’s name was Orient, that made sense and since we were the slowest hikers on the trail, I thought ‘express’ expressed it pretty well.  There was another hiker who had done the trail several years before I did and his name was Jumpstart.  He parachuted onto Springer Mountain.  There was a friend of mine from Virginia who was almost as slow as I was and his name was Cruise Control.  Very apropos.  There was this artist who entertained us with his beautiful artwork all the way from Georgia to Maine named Van Gogh.  And last, but not least, were the Blister Sisters and I think that’s self-explanatory. 

 

One of my favorite stories and the motivation that kept me going a lot of the time was about an Irishman named Paul who was out just doing a section of the trail through the Smokey Mountains.  The day we summated the highest peak on the Appalachian Trail  we had 17” of snow in April, a blizzard. So a bunch of us congregated at the shelter just to the north of the base and it was cold and we were all donned in t-shirts and shorts and weren’t prepared for winter.  We pooled our resources and fixed dinner at 2:00 in the afternoon so we could go to bed at least by 4:00 to stay warm.

 

As we lay there in our sleeping bags in that shelter, someone told a bear story. One-up-manship took place and by the time the last person fell asleep those stories about people and bears were kind of hair-curling, to say the least.  About 2:00 in the morning, all of a sudden we heard this blood-curdling scream coming from the place where the poor old Irish goat was asleep.  The Irish goat was a guy about 70 years old who had very poor personal hygiene habits.  He had this horrible mustache that grew right out of his nostrils all the way down to the bottom of his chin.  In order to eat, he had to part it. When he did, he ended up with a lot of particulate matter and if you said anything to him he would say he was always packing a snack.  Not only that, but when he would cook in his cook pot he didn’t bother to wipe it out with toilet paper or leaves when he got done, he just left it in there and in a few days it began to build up a little cake and after a couple of weeks he would have a cake so big it interfered with the volume of his cook pot. So he would take his pocket knife, chip it out, put a quart of water in, boil it and he had a free meal.

 

We all knew when the Irish goat screamed that a bear had gotten in there and got a hold of him because of his odor and so we rushed to his rescue.  When we got there, there was no bear.  When we got him calmed down enough to find out what happened he told us that he awakened to a mouse sitting on his chin eating a potato slice out of his mustache.  Now, a lot of women are repulsed by that story. But I told myself that story every time the intensity of the pain became so severe that I couldn’t stand it anymore.  Sometimes I had to embellish it even more than I just did. But I did it out loud and I challenge you to find yourself a story if you don’t like that one and when life presents itself to you in a way that is so painful you can’t tolerate it, tell yourself your favorite story out loud and get a good laugh and it will change your whole perspective. 

 

I learned an awful lot in my eight months on the Appalachian Trail.  One of the things I learned most was that there’s hope for the universe and the American people.  Because the fellowship, the help that I received, the camaraderie that I enjoyed reinstated me with a better attitude about humanity and our country and I’ll always be grateful for that.  There were numerous people who got involved with what I was doing and I had wonderful assistance every time I needed it all the way from Georgia to Maine.  One thing I learned through the experience was that I have to accept things for the way they are instead of the way I want them to be. 

 

If you think about it, 80% of the time the weather really does suck.  You just had an experience toward that direction but think about it. 20% of the time it’s too hot.  20% of the time it’s too cold, 20% of the time it’s too wet and 20% of the time it’s too dry.  What does that leave? 20% of the time.  And if a person intends to hike the entire Appalachian Trail in one hiking season, he can’t wait on one day out of five to do it.  He’s got to get up and do it, regardless of how he feels.  Emotional reasoning won’t cut it on the Appalachian Trail. 

 

The next thing that I learned was that you have to do it every day, persevere, regardless of the circumstances, what injuries you sustain, or what you really want to do.  The people that made it, and that was about 7% of the ones who declared themselves true hikers, were the ones who treated it just like their job back at home.  There were 1,450 hikers who declared themselves true hikers in 1990.  Less than 100 succeeded.  I became very curious about that because I couldn’t understand why people would invest that block  of time and money and then give it up.  38% quit after the first 40 miles.  And that number decreases as you go, but in the end, 93% quit.  And so the people who quit I saw to interview. I would rent a driver on the weekend and go to that person and try to encourage them not to quit.  My question to each person was: “Why in the world did you make this choice and now you’re giving it up?”  And I got the same person from every person. And that answer was: “Because it’s not fun anymore.”  Then I knew why I didn’t have to quit.  It never was fun in the first place. 

 

Thank you for laughing, because that segways into my next point.  Humor is the panacea. We have it around us everywhere we go, every single day.  Funny experiences. I collect them because that’s my business to tell funny stories to people like you.  I suggest you do the same thing.  Because if you’ve got a funny story to share with yourself you can change your perspective on a day when you want to entertain a pity party and keep on keeping on.

 

My last thing that I learned a lot was that fun is the first important need that every human being puts by the wayside in adversities in life and sickness and disabilities and other physical and emotional things that get the best of them.  Fun’s the first thing to go, and the easiest thing to reinstate. Don’t ever let that happen in your life.

 

On November 21st with 110 witnesses, my whole family, a busload of people from my church in North Carolina, 68 cameramen and correspondents and 4 satellite dishes from all the major networks gathered around in Baxter State Park to see history being made. I was standing 100 yards from the finish line and asked the crowd to go ahead and to let Orient and me hike the last 100 yards alone like we started.  We had been alone for 258 days for the most part with little human interaction and I wanted to have those few moments to reflect.  And as I did, I began to think about physical blindness. And I realized that it’s no big deal.  At worst, it’s an inconvenience.  And at best, it became a blessing because I insisted on it. 

 

I also thought about the destination. For 8-1/2 months I had been not focusing on the day that I would finish because I couldn’t handle it mentally.  By the way, when somebody asks me what is the most difficult encounter you had on the Appalachian Trail, I always say, without any further consideration, without any doubt, the most difficult section of the Appalachian Trail for me was the distance of 4” between my left and right ear. That was it. 

 

Anyway, I thought about the journey, and the journey was a life-changing experience, but the destination was no big deal.  I made it with God’s help and the help of a lot of wonderful people in every one of the 14 states over 300 different mountains that I had to climb. But that journey is indelibly imprinted in my cerebral cortex forever.   I am so glad that I chose to do it slowly enough that, #1, I wouldn’t get killed, and #2, that I took enough time to make it a wonderful experience.  Blindness to me has become my third greatest blessing.  #1 is God, #2 is my family and I’m glad to say that the Iris Network I consider part of my extended family and I’m glad you are here today.  Thank you very much.  I love you all.

 

If there are any questions I would be glad to answer them.  I would also be glad to autograph a book for you.”