At age 16, Erik Weihenmayer came to the Carroll Center for the Blind on Centre Street to learn to adapt to the total loss of sight he had recently experienced due to a rare disease. In that program, he had his first exposure to rock climbing on a trip to North Conway, NH. Seventeen years later, he would become the first blind person to summit Everest.
Weihenmayer, now 54, returned to the Carroll Center Monday to tell his inspirational story and to lead the incoming class of summer students in team-building activities.
Weihenmayer, whose trip up Everest was captured in the 2003 documentary Farther than the Eye Can See, spoke to the students about his experience at the Carroll Center. Weihenmayer began his talk with a laugh line, “And by the way, let’s make this super casual. If you guys have questions, don’t raise your hands, I won’t call on you.” Earlier that day, he had given a keynote address to an audience of 8,000 at the Lions Club International convention with skateboarder Tony Hawk and climber/filmmaker Jimmy Chin.
Weihenmayer, who initially resisted accepting his blindness, came to the Center to learn life skills such as braille and echolocation:
You guys obviously know about echo-locate, right? Yeah. So there’s a teacher I remember who walked us down the hallway, and he said, ‘Listen to how the sound changes when you walk. Find an open door, you know, versus a closed door, as you walk down the hallway.’ And sure enough, I felt the texture of the sound change. And I could hear that open room to my left. And that was the very first time I realized, wow, I can hear objects.
Erik Weihenmayer
Weihenmayer shared stories of learning computer programming (Basic) on an Apple IIe and of deflating a beach ball that landed in his lap at Fenway Park without knowing the tradition around it (see video).
Weihenmayer’s first big climb was Mt. Denali in 2007, which he summited on Helen Keller’s birthday. After student teaching at BB&N and six years of teaching middle school in Arizona, Weihenmayer set out to make his life all about adventure. He extended his adventures to kayaking (documented in the film The Weight of Water), filmmaking, and skiing.
Recalling his trip with the Carroll Center to North Conway many years ago, Weihenmayer told the story of the beginning of his love for rock climbing:
I was a scrappy kid, I was a wrestler. I remember just feeling my way up this granite wall, kind of problem solving, using my hands and my feet as my eyes, connecting the dots, trying to get your body from point A to point B to point C without seeing the rock, just trying to figure out the patterns of the rock. And I got up to this little beautiful dish in the rock and sat there for like half an hour with one of the instructors. And I can hear the valley below me! I think it was fall, so you can hear the trees and the leaves that have fallen off the trees rustling and blowing across the valley, I think there was a chainsaw in the distance because they were building a hotel. And I could hear that was creating enough sound that I could kind of hear the whole valley in front of me, below me. And I thought this was an adventure. I had thought as a blind person, adventure in my life was kind of over and what I realized on that weekend was that it was just beginning.
Erik Weihenmayer
Weihenmayer further described his work in Tibet, where blindness has been stigmatized, where he took six kids on a 21,500 ft climb, which was captured in the documentary Blindsight. “It flipped disability on its head.”
A Carroll Center student described having written a report on Weihenmayer and Ray Charles as being particularly gifted. Weihenmayer replied, “I don’t know that I’m gifted; I think I’m stubborn. …We all come with a certain set of tools; you just need to dip into your toolkit. Coming here this week will enhance your toolkit.” His assistant shared the quote: “Everyone is a genius. But if you try to teach a fish to climb a tree, he will fail. And he will go his whole life thinking he’s stupid…we are each unique.”
While rain storms prevented the planned tandem bicycle-riding activity, the students participated in several team-building activities with Weihenmayer to kick off their first day at camp.
