Here are short summaries and my responses to chapters in Rod Michalko's book The Two-in-One: Walking with smokie, Walking with Blindness.
In this chapter, Michalko presents his own life history. He focuses on the aspects of his life relating to his growing and eventual blindness. He started as a child with very poor vision that degraded over years to recognizable, but indistinct blobs, and evnetually to simple dark shadows against well lit backgrounds. Michalko also discusses the concept of guidance from different sources and aids, and the concept and theory of blindness, which he develops more in chapter 2.
While reading this chapter, I realized that I had never considered a slow path to blindness, just from birth or suddenly, as from an injury. I must admit that it was somewhat jarring to visualize his descriptions of the experience, particualrly the day when he nearly tripped over a small child while entering a subway station (in chapter 2).
Here, we see the last events that lead Michalko to begin his search for a dog guide (after finding that he neither liked nor was very successful with a white cane). He and Tanya do research and discuss the many aspects and decisions surrounding this event. Michalko also discusses how, with little or no vision, other senses become dominant for awareness of surroundings. He references a conversation he had with a young boy who was born blind (and, thus, had no conception of sight), but thought that his mother could find things he could not reach because she has very long arms.
Again, I had not thought about the difficulty involved in finding a dog guide school in the first place, then of finding a good match with a school, being accepted, and then finding, working and being tested with a potential dog guide.
This chapter presents more of why Michalko uses the term dog guide
and not the more common guide dog
. Michalko finds a good match for a school and is accepted for training. He then spends a month getting tested and acquainted with Smokie to assure that they would work well together. He discusses the freedom and assurance that he feels while holding Smokie's harness, and how his mobility then increases. Michalko goes on to present his month of training at the school with Smokie, the other students, the instructors, and the administration. He talks about many aspects of the training, including the specific activities, concepts involved, and difficulties faced, both with keeping the dogs properly in line and in dealing with the school's administrative problems. Most interestingly of all, I thought, was Michalko's presentation of dogs' training through wolf pack concepts including the order of domincance and submission.
He wants to emphasize that guiding is a function that a dog may perform, and as such is more of an entity and less of a tool as many people seem to perceive. I was inspired by how freeing the harness and support was to him, and can see how a dog guide may be more reliable than a human guide and certainly moreso than a stick. I was surprised to see that guide dogs are provided to qualified applicants free of charge, as I had always thought that there was at least some sort of purchasing involved (like with a hearing aid). I was bothered by the way that the staff meetings, decorations, and meals were organized at this school. It seemed to me (as well as Michalko in part) that there was a large amount of coddling or disregard in many aspects of the school's approach to the blind.
Michalko presents his return home after his month at the school. He becomes somewhat of a local celebrity and is appreached with questions and comments by many people who saw or knew him in a variety of capacities. He had a high degree of success with Smokie there, and found new forms of cooperation and help that they could offer each other (like Smokie's apprehension at the cafe when there might have been a gas leak. He also describes how he and Tanya introduced Smokie to their home and neighborhood by tours and demonstrations (such as the cats' food and belongingness). Michalko then describes how blindness is a sort of home
in which people may live, or in which they may wish to live, but are restricted to the more abundant and dominant home of the sighted world. Next, he describes exactly how he and Smokie interact in their daily routine of guidance. Then Michalko discusses how he and Smokie experience the world as an odd couple
in the estranged familiarity
of their relationship with each other and the world. In the end, he finds that by partnering with Smokie, life becomes much easier and his own independence and range of experience (both in activities and environmental) increase dramatically. At the end of this chapter, Michalko discusses how the ability to be mobile, as a blind person, without having to rely directly on sighted people is a great deal in establishing independence and maintaining self reliance. He also delves into how the dependence/independence issue is not a matter of not relying on anyone or anything, but relying in the right amounts and ways on the right people and things and how Smokie has helped him find this independence in their work and life together.
I was pleased with how the help offered grew more understanding of the two-in-one's
abilities and needs after being around the neighborhood for a few months. I found it interesting how much Michalko discovered about his neighborhood by acquainting Smokie with it. Walking on the sidewalk without sight really would restrict one's experience of the surroundings and landscape. I thought it was cool how Tanya got her own dog and then trained her to guide, relying in part on Smokie's example. I was surprised by how intense the concentration involved in guidance is on both sides, one more thing that I had not given any real thought to before this text. It interested me how Michalko and Tanya's own interactions changed once Smokie was around, with him taking over most of her previous guiding points. This may have been an element of some tension in the household, as the Rod/Smokie dynamic took over some parts of the past Rod/Tanya dynamic, but that Tanya still helped by, for instance, announcing the upcoming obstacles that Smokie saw before arriving at them. While Michalko is discussing estranged familiarity and the related topics, he really dwells on blindness as a separate conception of the world from sightedness, and the differences between congenitally and adventitiously blind people. I feel that he repeated himself with very slight variations or different references for the better part of the last three quarters of the section At home with Smokie.
This chapter brought to my attention a point of personal annoyance with Michalko's writing style, or, more specifically, his grammatical conventions: he uses many words in ways out of their original context and meaning, and so puts them in quotes, actually a good practice in itself, but then he mostly continues to quote them through the text, even after their meanings have been explained. Also, he is inconsistent about doing this, as sometimes he will use a previously quoted word or phrase and put it in quotes and sometimes without quotes. I nit-pick here, but even if he did not use my preferred convention, he could be consistent about it. Sound examples of this may be found on pages 80 through 83 of the text.
In this chapter, we see what some of the populace at large think of Michalko and Smokie (with more focus on Smokie). People regard Smokie as a smart dog
in a variety of ways simply by his role as a guide and let Michalko know this with some regularity, such as when strangers passed him waiting on the street or subway and commented on Smokie's intelligence and sound training after just seeing him sitting with his guide harness on. He goes on to examine people's views of dogs, their breeds, and the qualities associated with some breeds that make them acceptable in society or well-suited to guide work. He makes note of an admonition from one trainer and a fact that people must rememeber: dogs are dogs and they must be allowed to behave as such sometimes or else they will not be complete. On a related note, Paul Shepard presents a very good treatise of embracing natural impulses in humans in order to live complete and satisfying lives in his book The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. Michalko then discusses theories of matching dogs with people for the dog guide teams. He says that they must match in physical ability and tendencies, but also in personality, with compatible types together, and with the human being at least somewhat more dominant thatn the dog (as was the root of some of Smokie's compatibility problems with past applicants).
Michalko's views of humanity and nature become more apparent in this chapter as he talks about his Smokie's public images. As Smokie's trained behavior becomes more apparent, he comes closer to human society from his nature. This illustrates Michalko's view that humanity and thereby society are separate from nature in a waythat presupposes human dominance and superiority. This is just an interesting note for one who has grown so close to a natural
being in Smokie, as his assimilation into human societal norms has become greater via training. He actually comments on the humanity-nature dichotomy on page 133, saying
language usedoes not distinguish humanity from nature. Instead,language is usedto make that distinction.
So Michalko sees humanity's split from nature not so much as a fact as his views suggest, but as a human construction coming from some particular abilities that we possess, namely reflection and language.
Michalko discusses several types of intereactions that he and Smokie have with people, both well and poorly acquainted with dog guide teams. These interactions, he says, provide a window into how different people view blindness and feel that blind people should be treated, not to mention what they feel dog guides can and cannot do and what is appropriate behavior around them. They ranged from one person who thought Michalko was unable to move around properly in a subway station with Smokie and nearly dragged him in a different direction than their exit was (as Smokie knew), to a guy who thought Smokie both knew the difference between a red and a green traffic light (even though dogs are color blind) and could then find street numbers for where Michalko wanted to go. There is also the range of people's treatment of Smokie while he is one the job. Beyond the perpetual oh, he's so smart
's, there are some people who, as they should, leave Smokie alone while he is working, but others who treat him as any other dog, like the person who came up and started firmly petting him, telling Michalko that these dogs
need lots of attention. Maybe this was a reference to Labradors, because this person had a very wrong perception of guides if it wasn't.
This chapter also includes the perceptions of blind people as strictly helpless and in need of charity. For example, there was the time when Michalko was waiting for a friend and someone handed him a dollar passing by, as if he had been begging. Then, as icing on the cake, when Michalko wanted to give the dollar to a person truly in need, he had to convince the man that he actually was stable enough to be giving the dollar away.
My favorite part of this chapter was when Michalko was screwing with people, like the guy with the street numbers or the lady on the subway who tried to offer directions to him. I did find it disturbing when he was forcefully directed in the subway station as the person (apparently) tried to direct him to an exit. This scene just felt shady to me, particularly since the person simply disappeared afterward. I found it interesting when the people at the barber shop were talking about the blind woman and her guide who were there earlier in the week, but did not work well together. Their assumptions that the team's failings were strictly the fault of the woman, did not account for what they had said about some dogs not being well-suited to guide work, or that maybe that team just did not work well together, which is probably the main reason that any team fails.
In this final chapter of his book, Michalko reviews the points that he has made up to this point. He touches on conceptions of blindness, of nature, of humanity, and of society, particularly the interactions between various pairings of these concepts. He then describes in detail the differences between his concepts of living in blindness
and living with blindness.
Finally, he discusses how he and Smokie exemplify the idea of the two-in-one
by being together in their aloneness, neither one a full (read normal) member of his species, but that their closeness trumps their removals in fulfillment. Thus, Michalko has been improved, perhaps even transformed by his experiences with Smokie.
By this point in the book, I feel that Michalko has made his points and is simply trying to summarize his path to his realizations about his relationship with Smokie. He does not, however, leave it at summary. He goes into details which he has thoroughly discussed before and repeats some things over and over again. I am probably just burned out from reading social critique and his style of endlessly putting words in quotes, but I feel that most of this chapter was unnecessary.