After making a deposit of berth fees for my boatyard, I’m going as usual out the bank to the steps, feeling the nub of my cane hitting the first void (that’s the word I use for any place where the cane refuses touch, comes up empty-handed, so to speak), not thinking, of course, because all this touch-and-feel stuff is second nature to me—translating the taps, vibrations up the cane to my hand and in turn into my brain, where the sensation is translated to the dimensions of space. And, in any case, I know the bank steps well from years of using them pre – sight loss, nothing to it, six wide stairs of—what? Not marble, maybe sandstone—and just as I’m to the first step, feeling for the drop, this hand takes my elbow and a voice says behind me, Let me. I push back slightly, saying Back off, because I hate help most of the time and especially when I know the place and layout and have the whole thing premapped in my head, yet even more so when it’s a clammy hand on me, a sopping wet palm. Then next thing I’m going through the air and there’s an explosive flowering of sparks in my eyelids (a classic flowering of sparks, probably from the pressure of the brain striking so violently against the cerebral sac), or not so much the eyelids but back near the center of my brain. Then I’m being transported to the hospital, waking to the jitters of bad truck shocks over the potholed main streets (another ability one learns with sight loss is naming streets based on pothole thuds and thumps and various brands of pavement and blacktop—there is a shocking inconsistency in the various grades of paving materials, a conspiracy of gradients), feeling on my way to the hospital partly used and violated because there is still a cold sort of faint impression on my elbow, the point where I think the man touched me—and his voice is hovering in my ear, that Let me. And then I’m being tended in critical care, hardly hanging on, with severe hemorrhaging (I’m told later) and a very bad contusion along my temple.

Near-death experiences abound. I’m angelic. I’m lifted through the joists and beams of the hospital and am flying out over the town. I’m fully vested with sight. The Hudson is fantastically blue. It hooks to the west near Indian Point, the domes of the power plant spewing steam. To the south through the milky haze of a summer day is the thin gray conjoined monolith of the World Trade Center on the horizon; and to the left of it, the needle point of the Empire State Building injecting the sky. Holy. Holy. Holy. I’m vested with visions. I see it all.

It is this vision alone that has sustained me through it all, kept me alive. It is this vision—because it was so good and pure—that I count as actually seeing. It makes me want to thank the man who helped me down those steps, to offer him my hand, to plant a check for at least a thousand dollars in his hands. It is true that before the fire rose up to take my eyes I was so used to seeing the open vistas of the Hudson that I hardly knew I was seeing them and took for granted the simple sight of the Westchester shore. Sailing a boat itself is an extremely visual experience, much more than people would ever imagine: the luffing sails always in need of trimming, those small little wavelet ripples along the taut cloth near the top of the mast, the heeling of the boat against the horizon.