Free Crashing Through by Robert Kurson Page B

there. It was this stumbling that gave May a sense of the world’s potential—it was all so big and fascinating if one was willing to get lost. When friends asked if he wasn’t scared to lose his way, he confessed that sometimes he was, but he felt it was worth it, that some of the best things seemed to happen when you didn’t know for sure where you’d end up. When they asked how it felt to finally find his way, he told them that getting unlost felt like a kind of seeing.
    By junior year May was carrying a B-plus average, but something still didn’t feel right about electrical engineering. When he dipped his toe into an international relations seminar he was hooked. Engineering was formulaic and defined—circuits go together in a certain order—but there was mystery in cultures. He went to the registrar’s office and changed his major to political science. He was going somewhere else.
             
    In the summer of 1974, between his junior and senior years in college, May applied for a job as a counselor at Enchanted Hills, the camp he had adored as a boy. For years, the place had employed only sighted field staff after a blind counselor had lost track of a camper. May petitioned the director and made his case. The camp remembered his spirit and made an exception.
    He connected with his campers. He told them that years before, he hadn’t been allowed to pursue his camp dream—to hike by trail miles away from Enchanted Hills, then return as the crow flies, through water and rugged terrain and who knows what strange creatures.
    “Let’s do that first,” he said.
    They skirted poison oak and rattlesnakes and walked into branches. They fell. It was tough going but they made it. May loved the breathiness in the campers’ voices when they threw off their backpacks and said, “That was cool.”
    Near the end of the summer, May had a discussion with some older campers. They admired him and asked how he managed to seem so confident when so much of a blind person’s life could be scary. He wanted to give a pithy answer, one worthy of these teenagers about to go out in the world, but he struggled—he had never analyzed the parts that defined him. So he told the campers about his life, his mom, how he never felt right unless he tried, and as he spoke he realized that all his stories said the same things:

    • Have adventures
    • Speak to your curiosity
    • Be willing to fall down or to get lost
    • There’s always a way

    “I think if you can do those things you will find your way in the world,” May told them. “I think if you can remember to do those things you will always be okay.”
             
    In his senior year, May made the move of college men’s dreams—into a coed dorm. Women streamed in and out of the five-story building at all hours. He could hardly sleep for the thought of Coco, the junior redhead who slept next door. One of the residents, a freshman named Marcy, became his girlfriend. He still cared for Nancy, his first love from Santa Cruz, but distance had faded their relationship.
    Like Nancy and some women he’d known in between, Marcy was a looker. That was important to May, partly because the idea of beautiful women thrilled him, partly because he didn’t want anyone to think he didn’t know better. Many women found May handsome. He was six foot two and 160 pounds, square-jawed and with a lively smile, and in top physical condition. He conceived of his own looks modestly—he knew he wasn’t the football player type, but no one seemed to run in the other direction, either.
    Around Christmas, May starting dating a woman named Cathy. That should have ended his relationship with Marcy, but by now he had noticed in himself a reluctance to be without a backup girlfriend. He tried never to lie to these women, preferring secrecy instead, but he knew it was dishonest all the same, and he did not like that part of himself.
    As graduation drew near May turned his thoughts to the