Joe Covais

Boot Camp for the Blind

by Julie Pechilis (pechilis@bu.edu)

Last November Joe Covais woke up to a day that had been seven long years in the making. It started as he rolled out of bed in his Burlington, Vermont, apartment to begin getting ready for class. Two lights that he usually left on in the next room were off, he noticed, which probably meant that the power was out. He made his way over to the one on his desk to check. It was a gooseneck lamp with a long stem that he put his hands around and felt up to the top of. Then he took one hand off and waved it in front of the bulb. The bulb was warm.

“Oh man, don’t tell me this, just don’t tell me this,” he thought as he flipped the lamp up, held it right to his eyes, turned it on and off, on and off. No light.

“Maybe the lamp on the stove….” He crossed the room and went through the same procedure with the other lamp. Still nothing. Nothing, that is, except the numbing realization that overnight his last tiny bit of eyesight had disappeared. Years of torturous visual disintegration had come down to this one morning in November, waking up to discover he’d become totally blind.

It was a final shock, but in many ways not unexpected. Covais had been blind in his right eye from diabetic retinopathy since an operation seven years before, and his left eye had been deteriorating rapidly in the last several months. For a long time his sight in the eye had been like looking through “a toilet paper roll with wax paper at the end:” not blurry exactly, but intensely hazy, and lacking all peripheral vision. TV and computer screens, being lit from behind, were the easiest to see; a magnifying glass and closed circuit television had made it possible for him to do the reading required for a B.A. that he was working toward at Johnson State College. But lately the wax paper had been growing thicker and more impenetrable. He’d begun to realize the extent to which walking outdoors, where what light he could see registered mainly as glare, had become an essentially sightless experience.

If basically expected, however, this final development had occurred at the worst possible time, several weeks away from the end of the semester and with two major research papers to complete. The reader whom the state had authorized him to hire several weeks before became indispensable, reading books aloud, tape recording sections he deemed relevant and later typing the papers that he had organized and written wholly in his mind, a huge new skill to master. There were also fresh consultations with his state rehabilitation counselor about what the next step should be. Although he’d been walking with a cane and had made many other adjustments to his limited sight for years, now training in Braille and in the use of a specially adapted computer would be necessary to finish his B.A. and pursue his plans for graduate school. She recommended that he take a semester off and attend a residential rehabilitation program at the Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, Massachusetts.

The news was not exactly welcome to Covais, 40, who after all had been living with severe visual impairment for a number of years now. Was it really necessary to go through so much upheaval at an already unsettled time just for the sake of learning these final few skills? It hardly seemed likely. “I felt like this was my sentence for going blind,” he says.

On the wall of Rabih Dow’s office on the second floor of the Carroll Center hangs a reproduction of the Magritte painting of a pipe with the words: “This is not a pipe” written by the painter in French below it. Dow uses the painting as a tool for advancing the concept that reality is not necessarily synonymous with that which can be seen. “Most of what you see is behind your eyes,” he says, reiterating a principle that is inscribed in various ways throughout the Center…painted onto a piece of construction paper in the woodworking shop, configured by nails hammered part-way into a piece of wood at the reception desk, neatly lettered behind a little frame in the classroom kitchen.

Dow sits at a large desk in a brightly lit corner office, a lean, energetic man with wavy dark hair, brown-tinted aviator glasses and a brilliantly white shirt. His speech is swift, the words slightly clipped by a Lebanese accent. He is an extremely forthright and dedicated advocate and educator – statistics and scenarios tumble out of his mouth with aplomb. There is no corner of the experience of vision loss that he has not acutely discerned or cannot deftly articulate. A former client of the Carroll Center himself, Dow is now director of the residential rehabilitation program which the 62-year-old agency has offered since 1954. It is the most encompassing of the Center’s wide range of programs, involving eight- to sixteen-week stays for upwards of 100 clients a year, 16 or so at a time. The program is intensive, composed of classes in mobility, personal management, record-keeping, Braille, computer skills and more which are taught on a largely one-on-one basis.

According to Dow, coming to the profoundest terms with blindness or visual impairment that has occurred in adulthood – as for most Carroll Center clients—requires nothing less than the total commitment involved in attending such an all-inclusive program, known to some as boot camp for the blind. The program’s structure is designed to help people develop insights and skills, but also to acquaint them with others

who share a similar experience. “Many have never met anyone with a visual impairment before, so this is a priceless opportunity to find someone else who shares that loss and appreciates it,” Dow says. He counts himself among those who had never met another visually impaired person before attending the Carroll Center program.

What people at the Center share is nothing less than “a catastrophic disability, which is considered to be the primary disability by the State,” Dow says. No matter what other disabilities a person may have, as soon as they are determined to be legally blind (20/200 with corrective lenses in their better eye) they are relegated to the purview of their state’s agency for the blind, which then commissions and coordinates all rehabilitation that they need for this and any other disabilities they may have. Only a handful of agencies in the country offer a residential program, so Carroll Center clients come from all over, and especially from those states which offer only vestigial vision-loss rehabilitation services. Eighty percent of the $1,486 weekly fee for their stay is covered by federal funds; the other 20 percent is raised by the Center itself.

The residential program here was founded by the late Father Thomas Carroll, a large photograph of whom hangs in the Center’s common room. The portrait is of a man whose eyes seem to follow you with compassion and gentle exhortation to do your best, no matter where you are standing in the room. This ethos pervades the entire facility. First thing every morning the teaching staff meets to consult and coordinate; throughout the week evaluations, support groups and a special resource seminar round out the curriculum. Every aspect of a client’s experience here is plotted and overseen with conscientiousness and care, very much in the mold developed by Carroll himself. It was his early work with veterans blinded during World War II—who were eligible for residential rehabilitation through the Veteran’s Administration—which led Carroll to pilot a program offering the same comprehensive residential services to civilians. At a time when the blind were often patronized and segregated he was an outspoken advocate for full restoration of independence and reintegration into society. His philosophy of how this would be best accomplished was rigorous but at heart humane, deeply pragmatic but in some ways seemingly quixotic.

Fencing, for instance, was incorporated into the curriculum as a means of honing mobility skills and cultivating self-confidence.

He was also author of a landmark 1961 book entitled “Blindness: What It Is, What It Does and How to Live with It,” in which he lucidly enumerated what he called the “20 Losses” intrinsic to the loss of sight. Every subtlety of the experience is identified: not just loss of career but also loss of the visual perception of the beautiful, not just loss of mobility but also loss of obscurity – “the ability to fit in among one’s fellows without being marked out as strangely different.”

Facilitating full consciousness of the losses and offering a holistic process for moving beyond them to the recognition that “life is changed, not taken away” was the highest goal of a true rehabilitation program, according to Carroll. “But the terms in which we say this must be without the Pollyanna note which still seeks to escape reality,” he wrote. “They must not spring from a mode of thinking which tries to throw the sop of Braille or guide dog, cane or Talking Book, or even the possibility of employment. The ‘death’ of blindness destroys a whole complex pattern of existence. We must be prepared to offer something whole in its place.”

The first rip in Joe Covais’ existence occurred in April of 1990, while driving an orange Ford van from his home in Charleston, Illinois, to Sailor’s Creek, Virginia. The day was sunny, its early-spring loveliness only further enhanced by the prospect of the weekend to come – a Civil War re-enactment in which he would participate as a Union officer, donning an immaculate recreation of the blue uniform and cap worn at the time and participating in some loosely scripted skirmishes with modern-day Confederates.

For Covais, an amateur historian with an artist’s eye for detail and beauty, the pleasure of participating in re-enactments stemmed from the elusive but intensely gratifying goal of getting it all just right. While some, known as “John Waynes,” are drawn by the chance to dress up in some semblance of Civil War-era clothing and carry a big gun, for Covais accuracy was all – from wrapping foods in period labels to the psychological authenticity of occasionally turning and running in mock terror from a line of battle. “I was the only one who ever ran,” he says, dead serious but not without a characteristic wry laugh. He would have made an impressive officer, a man of average height and build by the standards of our day with keen, light blue eyes and a slightly bushy brown moustache. A ready wit and highly principled but generous nature would have made him popular with his men; a certain irreverence of tongue and fieriness of temperament, however, might well have complicated his relations with superior officers.

The Sailor’s Creek re-enactment also offered Covais a chance to sell some of the uniforms that his business, New Columbia, was renowned for. A recently released and critically acclaimed Hollywood Civil War drama, “Glory,” was only the latest production to feature costumes designed and manufactured by the company. The back of his van was thus loaded with all manner of Civil War-era gear, from clothing to musketry to hard tack crackers. It was only as an afterthought that he noticed, while driving along a stretch of highway, that a small black speck seemed to have lodged on the lower half of the windshield. Nothing surprising: dust from the long journey, or maybe the start of a crack in the glass—he’d bought the van second-hand, after all. As the miles wore on, though, Covais found himself trying to pinpoint the location of the speck—and being unable to. When he looked straight ahead it was apparent, but when he tried to look directly at it, it was gone. By the time he’d reached the re-enactment site a sickening realization had taken firm hold: the speck was located in his right eye. Although appalling, the realization was not completely out of the blue. Covais had been diabetic since he was nine years old, and had already become intellectually acquainted with the full range of potential ramifications – blindness included. Nothing could have prepared him, however, for the horror of actually confronting a possible harbinger of this prospect. An otherwise successful re-enactment weekend was severely punctured by the realization; his first stop upon return home was to the eye doctor.

Forty-eight hours later he was in surgery at a hospital in Champagne-Urbana at the ardent behest of every doctor who examined him. The purpose of the surgery, a vitrectomy, was to arrest the development of a hole in Covais’ right retina caused by the havoc diabetes plays with the small blood vessels of the eyes. Although not without risk, it was hoped that the procedure would preserve at least a window of vision in the eye on a potentially permanent basis. Covais never saw out of his right eye again.

In store for his left, determined by the doctors to be at an earlier stage of the exact same kind of damage, was a series of out-patient laser surgeries. Six weeks and $28,000 later Covais’ vision in his left eye was down to 20 percent.

“And my vision had been fine, except for this little spot,” he says. “Sometimes I think now, ‘What if I hadn’t had these surgeries?’ Alright, I’d have probably gone blind anyway, but I could have gone blind for free, right?”

The ensuing years found him laboring under a cloud of complications that had arisen from that initial tiny speck, not the least of which was the continued deterioration of the vision in his left eye. As a self-employed and “classically uninsurable” diabetic, Covais found himself buried in hospital bills which put a tremendous strain on his business. The result was a scramble for loans and the first of many years of deferred and ultimately unpaid tax bills.

In 1991, he and his wife of three years decided to fulfill a long-term goal of moving to antique-rich rural New England. The plan was to leave the daily operation of New Columbia in the hands of a capable and trusted shop manager in Illinois while Covais managed the business aspects of the operation from out of state. They found a home in Brandon, Vermont, to which his wife moved first, having secured a good-paying job in the area. Covais was to follow six months later, after attending to final business details and packing the last of their belongings.

One night as he was packing came a landmark in his vision loss: the realization that he was packing with his eyes closed, so useless had his eyesight become for the task. Deeply jarred, he called his wife in Vermont and told her what had occurred.

“Uh huh, you know we got snow here tonight?” he recalls was her response. He adds, “And I didn’t say anything, I just thought, ‘You really don’t want to talk about this, do you?’ ” Eighteen months later they were divorced, owing in part, he says, to the strain that his vision loss had placed on the relationship. He moved to Middlebury, Vermont, continuing the business-related aspects of New Columbia – check signing, advertisement designing, client relations—all the while slowly selling off every piece of a cherished antique and photography collection in an effort to make payments on a loan. Two-and-a-half years later, in 1994, the bank shut his business down.

“If I’d fully appreciated what was happening and how much my life would be undermined by losing my sight, I would have made an effort to sell my business and I probably could have,” he says. “By the time I was forced to the realization that I wouldn’t be able to continue doing this, the business had become so anemic that it wasn’t really saleable any more.”

Something he had been able to do while the business was struggling, however, served to help keep pulling him forward through its failure and through an ultimate declaration of bankruptcy in January, 1995. In New Columbia’s final months, Covais had gone to see a career counselor. The results of tests that the counselor administered were telling, he says. In comparison to 100,000 happily employed people, he learned, his interests and profile were the least similar to those of businessmen, startling in light of the 20 years he had put into his own, but in some ways no surprise. Whereas New Columbia had started as a one-man operation with Covais fully engaged in antique costume design and creation, its growth had led him more and more into purely business-related details which left him feeling less and less pleasure in his daily role.

Among the vocations that he showed the strongest alignment with was one that made intriguing sense, Covais says, considering the enjoyment he gets out of “sitting around in diners and drinking coffee, listening to people complain about their husbands or wives or what they’re going to do on their project.” The vocation: psychology.

In the fall of 1995, having filed with the government for disability, Covais started working toward a bachelor’s degree in psychology. He was a little over a semester away from receiving the degree when he woke up last November to his first completely sightless day. There are aspects, he says, in which the final loss was a relief, an end to the brutal experience of watching his eyesight slowly disappear.

“In some ways it’s better to be completely blind than to have this severely truncated vision that’s constantly deteriorating and that you’re constantly adjusting to and constantly being disappointed by,” he says.

“You find this level of sight and you know that, ‘OK, I can’t drive anymore or I can’t read a newspaper anymore, but I can still watch movies and I can still walk around easily and I can still see what color clothes I’m wearing.’ So you think to yourself, ‘Well, that’s not so bad. If this is what the rest of my life is going to be like, this is not so bad.’

“But then, six months down the road you find that you go to a video store, and even with a hand-held magnifier it’s no longer possible to read the boxes. Or you go to the grocery store and you can’t read the packages. And you realize that, ‘You know, six months ago I could do this, and it’s not just that I’m having a bad sight day.’ So it’s kind of a relief in a way. I know this is as bad as it’s going to get.”

It was with this sense of paradoxical unburdening that Covais packed his bags last January for a stint at the Carroll Center for the Blind.

The Carroll Center is unusual by any standards, not the least of them architectural. Housed in three Tudor-style buildings on five acres of a former estate, the Center consists of a main classroom and administrative building, a computer center and a dormitory. The main building, which was once a carriage house, has been imaginatively renovated, featuring modern spaciousness and natural lighting in combination with a certain charm and character from its earlier incarnation. The common room, for instance, is cobbled with bricks from the days when it was an entrance for the horses and carriages; the “classrooms” are actually former stalls, each containing a table and chairs and demarcated by the original partitions and posts. Signs with the former occupants’ names – Duke, Ginger, Frolic – hang from the rafters above each stall.

The reception area, located between the common room and the classrooms, is at the bottom of an open-air core which extends up to the third floor ceiling. Offices line the square periphery of the top two floors; to walk out of an office is to stand in a corridor facing a waist-high wall from which all the other levels are visible. From this layout comes the nickname “fishbowl” for the large, cushioned seating area on the ground floor across from the reception desk which serves as a common meeting point, and is the most tangible heart of the Center. Everyone with any reason to be on the premises will pass through the fishbowl a number of times a day, some with dogs or canes and some without, some who’ve been here eight weeks and some only two days, some to learn and some to teach, some to acquire personal management skills and others who are in the job preparation program.

The fishbowl is also the nexus for incidents of delicate amazement which occur on a daily basis throughout the facility. For George, a 19-year-old who was born blind and who suffered a brain-damaging fall several years ago, the fishbowl is a place to “hang out,” his favorite activity and something that people at the Carroll Center are more willing to engage in with him than many whom he’s met in other settings. For Ray, who never used a cane before coming to the Center, the fishbowl is an area to practice negotiating with new mobility and rapidly increasing confidence and skill. From it he will make his first forays into some of Newton’s busiest commercial areas. Donna will learn in a classroom adjoining the fishbowl that her formerly cherished activity of letter writing is hardly a thing of the past – that readily available plastic templates can help her communicate once again with the special sincerity that she finds written correspondence promotes. Her face will register the most exquisite delight as she hears the news.

And upstairs in the kitchen, Jerrell, an easily distracted, formerly homeless young man who retains peripheral vision alone will concentrate all his powers as a born chef into the creation of an elegantly seasoned egg-and-sausage meal.

There are, however, more traumatic aspects of attending the Carroll Center program as well. Learning to cross the street, for instance, can be a terrifying experience inciting tears and attacks on the instructor, according to Dow. “The emotional aspect of being here is quite strong, 24 hours a day,” he says. “By default instructors must push people to their limits, so they will learn.”

And being at the Center is no antidote to the huge range of personal issues that each person’s blindness or visual impairment has thrust upon them. “Finally you really know there’s no place to run,” says Dow. “From home you can say ‘I’ll go to rehab,’ but once you’re here you have to face the fact that this is all the vision you have.” Every effort is made to help people work through these issues, including support groups, the availability of weekly psychologist’s appointments and the attentiveness of teachers and administrators to stressed tones of voice.

Still it is the case that, while no one has actually committed suicide at the Center, attempts have been made, and one as recently as this past spring. The consequences of such an act thunder out into the lives of everyone associated with the Center, but especially those of other residents. No one resident attempts suicide from motivations that are not intimately familiar to every other. “Everybody’s fighting the same battle,” says Dow, and one person’s self-destructive impulse inevitably stirs up similar thoughts in others. It is because of this that applicants are required to go through a screening process before they are eligible to attend the residential rehabilitation program. To want to attend the program is not in and of itself sufficient grounds for doing so; candidates must show signs of having gone through the initial stages of accepting their vision status, a process which generally takes about a year, according to Dow.

“We want people to have gone through acknowledgement of their loss, and to have come to terms with it,” he says. “By the time people say, ‘OK, I’m blind, now what?’ they are at the ideal point to come here.”

“Now what?” was certainly the uppermost thought in Joe Covais’ mind during his first days at the Center, although not exactly with the same inflection. For Covais many of the most basic logistics of life at the Center were proving to be a real trial, including the relatively constant company of others, sharing a common dormitory bathroom with five men and, most of all, the 6:30 a.m. wake-up call. Sheer fatigue, especially during the morning classes, was taking a real toll on his patience and outlook.

There was also aggravation with some of the classes he’d been assigned. While he was pleased to be learning Braille and computer skills, other classes struck Covais as being the waste of time that he had anticipated. “My feeling in those first couple of weeks was, ‘Well, you know, I don’t need somebody to teach me how to tie my shoes or how to fry an egg.’ Even mobility…I was a pretty good cane traveler in Burlington and I felt like this was a lot of bother to put up with just to learn how to read Braille.” As the mid-point of his two-week trial period neared, Covais found a resolve to leave the Center intensifying in his mind. Plans for learning Braille through a correspondence course and for learning how to use an adapted computer with the help of state of Vermont rehabilitation services began to have an irresistible appeal.

While half of his mind was making plans to leave, however, the other half was getting different ideas. Gradually he was discovering several quiet areas where he could spend some time alone. In addition, the experience of associating with other residents was starting to take, he says, “even if some of them got on my nerves sometimes, even that was stimulating.” And conversations with the instructors, he noticed, were a source of unqualified enjoyment: “I was having more conversations with interesting, educated people than I had ever had before.” By the time his two-week evaluation was at hand, the pleasure of his interactions with others swayed him to commit to a program that would last until the beginning of April.

Over the course of the ensuing weeks, Covais found himself making strong progress in Braille, more than would have been possible through a correspondence course. “It was a wonderful feeling to be able to pull information off a sheet of paper again,” he says. Instruction in some of his other classes was beginning to seem useful as well. Mobility lessons in how to use public transportation led to a solo trek via the T down to the Boston Common frieze dedicated to Robert G. Shaw, the Civil War colonel whose regiment of black soldiers was the subject of the movie “Glory” that Covais had created 150 uniforms and been a historical advisor for. And special magnetic labeling strips that he became acquainted with in a personal management class promised respite from his previous strategy of pulling a can out of the cupboard, dumping the contents into a saucepan and hoping he liked whatever turned out to be heating up for dinner.

His pleasure in the company of others also continued to grow. Mealtimes almost always found him either engaged in earnest one-on-one conversations as an attentive listener and incisive respondent or at the center of an uproarious group, cracking jokes and doing affectionate imitations of people who’d already left. Many of the other residents came to call him “Hoz,” a nickname he had been given by workers at New Columbia and that he’d felt close enough to share with friends at the Center. By the end he didn’t want to leave.

Graduation Day at the Carroll Center is any Friday that a client has completed the program. Sometimes there are several graduates and the event occurs in the common room. On this day, however, there is only one, so the dining room is the location of the ceremony. It is a dark-wood paneled room off the reception area with two windows for communicating with the cooks and a salad bar. About 25 people, instructors and clients, file into the room, take places along the wall or at one of three long tables. Ray sits in a corner with his guitar, as the occasion has inspired him to make his debut musical performance. Covais is seated at a table, wearing an olive green wool jacket and his trademark small, dark, wire-rimmed glasses. Donna is standing nearby. “There’s a seat next to me here, Donna,” he tells her, but she appears too emotion-filled to accept it, continues standing and lets him take a bite of her apple instead.

The ceremony begins with Jackie Hamilton, the nurse, handing Covais a diploma and saying, “Though we had a rocky beginning, we ended up the best of friends.” There is applause and then Ray sings the Beatles’ “I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends” which many in the group join along with. At the end Covais is asked to say some words. He stands and starts talking.

“I really feel bad about leaving,” he says. “I’m sad about you leaving, too, Hoz,” George pipes up. Covais continues: “For folks who’ve just gone blind recently, you feel like you’ve gotten bumped out of life. You don’t know where you fit in anymore. You stay home, listen to the radio and feel like you sort of lost yourself. Instead of being yourself you’ve become this blind person.” He pauses for a moment, takes a deep breath before continuing.

“Here, being a blind person isn’t a distinction anymore,” he says. “Now what used to set you apart is what you have in common. What sets you apart now is the parts of yourself that really are unique and weren’t lost. It’s a place to find yourself again, to develop the tools and skills you need to get back into your old life or to find something new to do….” He stops, unable to continue, to the struck silence of a roomful of people who are overcome by the poignancy of what they’ve just heard. Slowly they file up to say good-bye and proffer hugs. One of the last is Jerrell, who Covais has urged to attend culinary school.

“Take care of yourself,” Jerrell says, “you’re one of my best friends here.”