FACING THE HARD SITUATION
The Beginnings of Deafness—The Cows in the
Corn—Re-adjustments—The “House of the Deaf”—Spirits
of the Past on Our Side—The Course in Philosophy—The
Reverence of the Ignorant Herder—The Slave and the King.
Every deaf man will tell you that for months or years he was able to
convince himself that there was no real danger of losing his hearing.
Then, suddenly made evident by some small happening, Fate stood solidly
in the road pointing a stern finger—and there was no denying the
verdict: “_You are on the road to silence!_” How foolish and dangerous
to fight off the disagreeable thought when most cases of deafness could
be cured or greatly helped if taken in time! It is safe to say that
if the first symptoms of defective hearing were as uncomfortable as a
cinder in the eye, or as painful as an ordinary stomach-ache, the great
majority of cases would be remedied before the affliction could lead its
victims into the silent world. But deafness usually creeps in without
pain or special warning; if it is caused by a disease of the inner ear
there are probably few outward symptoms, and it will not be considered
serious. Then suddenly it will demonstrate its strangle-hold upon life,
and cannot be shaken off; it is like a tiger creeping stealthily through
grass and brush for a spring upon the careless watcher by the campfire.
I first looked into the dim shadows of the silent country one night in
Colorado. Our people had broken up a piece of raw prairie land, ditched
water to it and planted corn. It was a new crop for the locality, but we
succeeded in getting a good growth for cattle feed. In those days there
were few fences, except the horizon and the sky, and cattle wandered
everywhere, so as the corn developed we took turns guarding it. One
night a small bunch of fat cattle on their way to market was herded
about a mile from our cornfield. Feed was scarce on the range, and these
steers were hungry. We could see them raise their heads and smell the
corn. We knew they would stampede if they could break away. I was on
guard; my duty was to ride my pony up and down on the side of the field
nearest the herd.
Those who know the plains which roll away from the foothills of Northern
Colorado will remember the brilliant starlit nights. The dry plains
stretch away in rolling waves of brown to the east, while to the west
the mountains lift their snow-caps far up into the sparkle of the
starlight. It is a land of mystery. Any man who has ever lived there has
felt at times that he would give all he possessed to be back there with
the shapes that live in the starlight. Great dark shadows slip over
the plains. You see them slowly moving and you wonder at them. How can
they shift as they do when there are no clouds? That night, far over the
prairie, I could see the fires which the herders had built; two or three
horsemen were slowly circling about the bunched cattle.
It seemed entirely safe, and at one corner of the field I got off the
pony and let him feed as I walked along the corn. The night was still,
and I could hear nothing, but suddenly my little horse threw up his
head, snorted and pulled at his picket pin. I fancied he sensed some
sneaking coyote, until out of a shadow near the field I saw half a dozen
black forms with white gleaming horns, running for the corn. Part of the
herd had broken away, and as I mounted the snorting pony the sickening
thought flashed in upon me that I could no longer hear them. Before we
could turn back the herd forty or fifty steers had entered the corn.
They went aimlessly, smashing and crashing their way through the stalks,
and with the other riders I went in after them, but I could hardly hear
them. I remember that in order to make sure I held my fingers to my
right ear to shut out sound. In the shadow of the corn I ran directly
into a steer! He was tearing his way along, but I did not know he was
there until my hands touched him. Then for the first time I knew whither
I was bound. Probably there is nothing quite so chilling to the heart,
unless it be the sudden knowledge that some dear friend must soon walk
down the road with death.
Deaf people who read this will recall incidents connected with the first
real discovery of their affliction; up to that time they have been
able to throw the trouble out of mind with more or less confidence.
They could argue that it was due to a cold, or to some little trouble
that would soon adjust itself; they were slightly annoyed, but soon
forgot it. Then—perhaps they cannot keep up with the conversation;
they seem suddenly to lose the noises which are a part of daily normal
life. Neither their work nor their play can go on without a complete
readjustment of their methods of communicating with others. Suppose
society refuses to do more for them than they have ever done for the
afflicted? Many a man has been made to realize how small a moral balance
he has to draw upon when at last he knows that for the rest of his life
he must depend largely upon the charity or indulgence of those with whom
he associates. For this is really our condition in the silent world.
A person of dominating power may push through life thinking himself a
master, but we must live with the humiliation of realizing that our
friends cannot regard us as normal. It is a staggering blow to the man
or woman of fixed ambition, or of that warm personality which demands
human sympathy and kindly companionship. The old life must be broken up.
My first thought was to seek “medical advice.” That is what we are
always told to do. The air about the deaf man is usually vibrant with
advice, and frequently the less attention he pays to it the better off
he is. The local doctor in the nearest town was an expert with pills,
powders and blisters, but he went no farther. Like many country doctors
of that time, he was little more than an expert nurse, though if you
had told him this he could have shaken a diploma in your face. I went
to see him one evening after milking. He had a kerosene lamp with a
tin reflector with which he illumed my ears; his report was that the
trouble was caused by wax growing on the ear drum. If I would come in by
daylight he would scrape it off with a small knife. There was nothing to
be alarmed about; I would outgrow it. As a precaution he would advise
me to blister the ears—or that part of the skull immediately behind
them—and——
“_My charge is two dollars!_”
Since then several famous aurists have peered into my nose and ears;
they told me the truth, and charged more than this doctor did for his
wild guess.
Later I shall describe some of the local treatments to which my poor
ears have been subjected. It would make a volume in itself were I to
tell all, and it would record the experience of most country people
who go down the silent road. Frequently the city man may obtain expert
advice from aurists who fully understand that they are dealing with an
interior nerve or brain disease. Most of us who were “brought up” in
the country fell into the hands of physicians who appeared to think
deafness is what they call a “mechanical disease,” much like the sprain
of the knee or wrist. That country doctor saw only the wax on the ear
drum, when the real trouble was far inside. So we are blistered and
oiled and irrigated—and the real seat of the trouble is not reached. Of
course I should have found some one competent to treat my case. That is
easily said, but the great majority of young men in my day were without
capital, quite incapable of taking advice, and they labored under
the conviction that any public admission of serious disease would be
considered a weakness that was like a stigma.
I have been singularly unsuccessful in obtaining original impressions
from deaf people in trying to learn from them just what were their
sensations when it became evident, past all argument, that they were
to walk softly through ever-increasing silence. It would seem that
they rarely have great imagination; perhaps silence, and a lack of the
stimulant of sound, destroys that faculty. Psychology estimates that of
all the senses hearing has the greatest influence over the emotions and
the morals. I fancy that the violent effort to readjust life habits to
a new existence bewilders most of us, so that the mind is incapable of
working in exactly the old way. Apparently many of the deaf fall into
a morbid, hopelessly despondent frame of mind, which does not permit
any reasonable and useful research into the habits and landmarks which
characterize a strange country. I know how useless it is to tell the
ordinary deaf man that it is a rare privilege to know and to study the
ideas which special messengers bring to us in the silent world. I know
that what I tell him is true, yet I am forced to agree with him when he
says that he would give it all for the privilege of hearing a hand-organ
playing on a street corner. Still, it is a part of the game for us to
believe that in many ways the deaf are the favored of the Lord.
As far as my own experience goes, I know that I went about for some time
in a daze. In spite of the verdict of the country doctor I realized
that my hearing was surely failing, and I remember that I began to take
stock of my mental and physical assets for the great game of life that
was opening up before me. When a man does that fairly he will realize
how industry and skill are changing all lines of life. When I was a boy
playing ball we always put the poorest, most awkward player in right
field. That was the jumping-off place in baseball. As the game is now
played right field offers opportunity for the best player of the nine.
After standing off and looking at myself fairly I was forced to conclude
that I was not fitted to enter the silent world with any great hope of
making more than the most ordinary living there. Try it yourself. Cast
up your personal account, giving a fair valuation to the things you
can do really well, and then tell me what sort of a living you could
make for your family if tomorrow you found yourself totally blind or
totally deaf. Like many young men I had received no special training
for any life enterprise; I knew no trade and had no particular “knack”
at tools or machinery. I had attended a country school and one term of
high school, but had never been taught the true foundation principles
of any of my subjects. I had read many books without direction or good
judgment, with no definite end in view. The sum total of my life assets
seemed to be that I was an expert milker and could take care of cattle;
the most promising position for me that of a rather inferior hired
man. Thousands of men have gone through life with a poorer outfit, but
they have had, in addition, the boon of perfect hearing; how great an
advantage this is no one can know until he must face the world without
it.
Every healthy young man looks forward to the time when he may build
four strong walls about his life. These walls are home, wife, a piece
of land and power. In the flush of youth we feel that if we build this
square and live inside we may laugh at adversity and say in our hearts,
“_The world is mine!_” But this becomes a troubled dream when one comes
to understand that he must crawl through life crippled—with one great
faculty on crutches.
It is rather curious how at such a time the mind grasps at meanings
hardly considered before, and makes new and rapid applications from
things which formerly seemed of no consequence. I remember picking up
at this time a school reader which one of the children was studying.
My eye fell on the old familiar poem—how many of us have performed a
parrot-like recitation of it in the little old schoolhouse!
“Oh, solitude! where are the charms
Which sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the midst of alarms
Than reign in this horrible place.
I am out of humanity’s reach,
I must finish my journey alone;
_Never hear the sweet music of speech,_
_I start at the sound of my own!_”
I had read this many times before without getting its full power. Now I
saw that I was drifting with other deaf men out of reach of the “soft
music of speech.” Suppose that I were to end my days on a desert island
of complete silence! The idea haunted me for days, and I thought it out
to the end. At last it came to me that Robinson Crusoe and Alexander
Selkirk were but examples of brave spirits who could not be conquered by
ordinary conditions. Other men have been marooned or swept ashore upon
deserted or unknown islands—men of feeble will, without stern personal
power. They made a struggle to hold on to civilization, but finally
gave up, surrendered to natural forces, and either perished or reverted
to barbarism. They, “heirs of all the ages,” renounced the progress of
their race and went back nearer to the brute. Crusoe and Selkirk were
made of sterner stuff. They were not to be beaten; out of the crudest
materials they made home and companions and retained self-respect and
much of the sweetness of life. Each made his own house in a new world,
fashioned it by sheer force of will and faith. I made up my mind that I
would do likewise. I would build my own house in the silent world and
would make it a house of cheer.
But who will help the deaf man to build his house? Where can he find the
material? I meet deaf people who complain bitterly because the people
with whom they work and live do not treat them with full understanding
and consideration. Let us be honest, and remember how little _we_ ever
went out of our way to stand by the deaf before our own affliction put
us out of the social game! No doubt we laughed with the others at
the queer blunders of deaf people, or let them see our annoyance when
communication with them became a trouble. The chances are that we will
receive fairer treatment from our associates than we ourselves gave to
the afflicted in our best days. As for me, I vote the world a kindly
place; people treat me reasonably. They are not cruel, but many of them
are busy or selfish, and I fully realize that it is no pleasure for the
average man or woman to attempt communication with the deaf. I do not
blame them for avoiding it. And even when they use us well, from the
very nature of the situation which separates us they can help but little
in the building of these isolated houses of the silent world.
But I have lived to learn a strange thing. The silent world is peopled
with the ghosts and shadows of men and women who have lived in other
ages. Somehow they seem to feel that they would like to relive their
lives, and repeat their message to humanity; but only the blind, the
deaf and those otherwise afflicted seem to be able to meet them fully.
The great undying souls who have made or modified history and human
thought live in books, pictures and memories, but only in the world of
silence can they give full comfort and power. For we come to know them
so intimately that we learn how each one of them went about his great
work carrying a cross of some kind—and the bond of sympathy to the
afflicted grows stronger. You with light physical crosses perhaps think
that you take full inspiration from Milton. Have you ever thought how
much clearer his message can be to the blind or the deaf? Here, then, is
our help and our hope. Our ears are not dull to the reverberating echoes
of the past, and we can reach back for the best worldly solace—the
experience and advice of those who have fought the good fight, and won.
It would be nonsense for anyone to claim that he goes through this
preparatory course in philosophy with patience or good temper. He misses
too much. The future is too uncertain. The dread of losing the rest of
his hearing and the thought of the blight which this would mean to his
future will at times drive the deaf man to desperation. At times he is
almost willing to take the advice of Job’s wife—
“_Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God and die!_”
And some of us never gain the faith and philosophy which make life in
the silence endurable. Others acquire them slowly by a burning process
which scars, but in the end gives them new strength. I remember two
incidents which influenced me during the first days of my realization of
what was ahead. They are of distinctly opposite character.
One day the regular herder was sick and I took his place. He was a
“lunger,” a victim of tuberculosis, who had waited too long before
coming to Colorado. At one time I worked with three of these men, and
I came to know how their disease could send them to the top round
of ecstasy and to the lowest level of depression in a single day. I
have seen them get up in the morning dancing at the very joy of life,
planning their “going home” to surprise the old folks with their cure.
Yet by night perhaps they put a handkerchief to the mouth and took it
away stained with blood—and their spirits would fall to earth abruptly.
They are even more distressing companions than inhabitants of the
silence who feel that they have lost life, fortune and future with the
closing of their ears.
This herder had built up trouble for me without telling me about it.
The deaf man usually runs blindly into that form of trouble every week
of his life; it is a sort of legacy which others leave at his door.
Down the river some two miles lived a ranchman who had seeded wheat and
made a garden on a low flat where the river curved past a bluff. The
herder had carelessly let the cattle get away from him the previous day,
and before he could stop them several cows had trampled through this
garden with all the exasperating nonchalance that a fat and stupid cow
is capable of showing. When a man has lived for a year or so on “sow
belly,” pancakes and potatoes, and when he is naturally inclined to a
profane disposition of language, he knows precisely what to do to the
responsible party. As I came along the river behind the herd, I saw
this ranchman and his wife advancing to meet me. He opened up at long
range, but as I did not know what it was all about, and, moreover, could
not hear him, I kept on riding right up to meet him. My pony had once
belonged to a mule driver noted for his remarks to mules, and the little
horse actually seemed to recognize a master in this excited individual.
This man’s boy afterwards told me that as he advanced his father was
relating in a dozen ways in which he proposed to punish me. Shooting,
it appeared, was too easy. He would meet me man to man and roll me in
the cactus, etc., and worse! Unfortunately, I did not hear at all until
I got close to him, and then his breath had failed somewhat, so that he
was not doing himself full justice. So I rode right up to him and asked
him the most foolish of questions—so he must have thought:
“_What can I do for you?_”
He looked at me in amazement.
“Are you deaf?”
I told him that I could not hear well.
“Ain’t you heard a word of what I’ve been handing you?”
“Hardly a word!”
“Well, by God, if that don’t beat all! I’ve wasted all them words on a
deaf man!”
There was genuine sorrow in his voice as he spoke of the loss sustained
by society through my failure to hear. All his anger was gone.
“Come,” he said. “Get off your horse. The woman’s got dinner ready. Come
in and eat.”
“But suppose the cows get on your wheat?”
“Darn the wheat. I don’t make a new friend like you every day. Anyway,
the boy can herd ’em.”
He put his boy on my pony and we went into the house, where over
coffee, fried pork, riz biscuits and rhubarb sauce we pledged eternal
friendship. His wife was a very happy woman as she explained matters to
me.
“My man is terrible profane at times. Some men go and get drunk now
and again to relieve their feelings, but my man don’t do that. He just
swears something awful, and when it’s all over he’s all right again.
He was awful to you, but when he found out you didn’t hear him, he
was terrible shocked, and came out of his mad like the man in the
Scriptures. He met his match at last, and I do hope he’ll quit.”
I have heard that the Indians never torture or mutilate a deaf man.
They seem to think that he is specially protected by the Great Spirit.
Here was a white man with much the same feeling, and I have seen a
like forbearance in other cases. I think the great majority of human
beings seldom or never take deliberate advantage of the hard of hearing;
they may be amused at our blunders or annoyed by our mistakes, but
they hesitate to treat us with the severity they could justly accord
one in full possession of his faculties. Some deaf man could probably
point to bitter personal experiences, but this is my own feeling. The
above encounter also helps to prove what I feel to be a psychological
truth—that most of our fear comes as a result of sounds registered by
the brain. I frankly confess that if I could have heard this big man I
should not have gone within a hundred and fifty feet of him. I shall
discuss this phase of fear later; but I learned early in my affliction
that:
“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.”
One January night I was caught out in a Colorado blizzard. Only those
who have felt and seen the icy blasts pour down out of the mountain
canyons and roar over the plains, driving the hard flakes like the
volley from a thousand machine guns, can realize what it means to face
such a blast. The cattle turn from such a wind and drift before it,
half-frozen, heads lowered, moaning with pain. A herd of horses will
bunch together, heads at the center, ready to lash out at the wolves. I
was riding carelessly, rubbing my frosted ears, when the pony stepped
into a prairie-dog hole, fell and threw me into the snow. Then with a
snort, reins dragging, he started at a wild run directly into the storm.
I stood in the snow, in the midst of whirling blackness, with nothing
to guide me except the rapidly filling tracks of the deserting horse.
I knew he was headed for home, and I followed as best I could, feeling
for his tracks in the snow. After wading for a few rods, I saw far ahead
what seemed like a dim star, close to the earth. It grew brighter as I
approached, and sooner than I expected I stumbled upon a small group of
buildings and a sod corral—The star proved to be the light in the house
window. My horse stood with drooping head in front of the door.
Then the door opened and revealed a sheep herder. He had on a fur coat
and bags were tied about his feet. Out he came with his lantern, and we
put the horse in a shed. The air was filled with a low and plaintive
crying from the sheep in the corral, bunched together where the snow was
drifting in over them. There was nothing we could do for them, so we
made our way to the house.
It was a tiny one-room affair, built of sods piled up like bricks,
with a roof made of poles covered with sods and wild hay; it boasted
a wooden floor. There were a stove, a table, three chairs and a small
cot. In these days there would be a phonograph and a collection of the
latest music, but this herder’s only constant companions were a dog and
a canary bird. For fuel there was a small pile of cottonwood sticks, a
box of buffalo chips, and a barrel containing bunches of wild hay tied
into knots. Two other men were there, also driven in by the blizzard. I
shall always feel that the mental picture revealed to me by the contrast
between those two men in that lonely hut had the greatest deciding
influence in helping me to fit myself for the life of the silent world.
They were both white-haired old men, though full of vigor. One I
recognized as the cattle king of Northern Colorado. His cattle were
everywhere; he owned half a town and an army ran at his beck and call,
yet he could barely write his own name. It was said he always signed
his checks “Z,” because he could not be sure of spelling “Zachariah”
properly. He had no poetry or imagination, except what he could drink
out of a jug. In the old days, when the plains were ruled by brute
force, this man was happy, for life becomes tolerable only as we can
equal our friends in manners and education. But how the plains had
changed! Schools, churches, music, culture, were working in with the
towns—the leaven which was to change the soggy biscuit of the old life
to the “riz bread” of the new. That strange, fateful, overmastering
thing we call education was separating the people of the new prairie
towns into classes more distinct than money and material power had
ever been able to create. This old man had railed and cursed at the
change, for a premonition of what was to come had entered his heart, and
something told him that his blunt philosophy of life was all wrong.
In this country a man may climb from poverty up to wealth, or he may
leave wealth to others, but it is not possible for him to climb in the
same way up into education, and he cannot leave these benefits to those
who follow him. The old man had begun to fear that he had climbed the
wrong ladder. There he sat, bitter and hateful, chained to prejudice,
the slave of ignorance. He had no companion to share his narrow prison
except his money—the most useless and irritating single companion that
any man can have for the harvest years.
His companion was about the same age, an educated man, a “lunger,”
forced to spend the rest of his life in these dry plains. I had seen
him before at the county convention, where there had been talk of
nominating him for county clerk—a much-desired political job. He might
have been nominated but for his own actions. He stood straight up in the
convention and said:
“Gentlemen, I refuse to let my name go before this convention. I have
been approached by certain people who would compromise my manhood, and
now I would not accept your nomination, even if you offered it.”
“Made a fool of himself. Had a cinch and threw it away!”
That was the way they talked in the street afterwards; but I remember
going home that night with this thought dancing through my brain:
“I wish _I_ could get up and do such things.”
He would have ranked as a poor man, or at best one of modest competence,
yet in his enforced exile from home and friends he was sustained and
comforted by a mighty host of men and women who came trooping out of
history at his call.
There they sat in the dimly lighted room—the cattle king and the
scholar, a slave of disease. Their chosen companions were about them,
and these had turned the king into a slave, the slave into a monarch.
For one there were only the spirits of hopeless gloom, grinning,
snarling as though they knew that fate disdains money in exchange for
the things which alone can bring comfort and courage into the shadow
of years. For the other man the dim room was crowded with a goodly
company—the great spirits who live forever in song and story, who
gladly come back from the unknown country at the call of those who have
learned to know them.
I saw all this, and then I seemed to see myself in the years that were
coming, in the shadow of the impending affliction, a resident of the
silent world. It was evidently to be a choice of masters. I remember
now as though it were yesterday how on that howling night in that dim
sod house I made a desperate vow that I would, if need be, go through
fire and acid before I would end my days or sit alone in the silence
as mentally hopeless and impotent as that “cattle king.” And I had been
ready to say “me, too,” only a short time before to the cowboy who said:
“If I could round up and brand the money old Zack can, I wouldn’t care
how little else I knew.”
Take a man with dull hearing, little or no education, no surplus
capital—nothing except health and a dim idea that “education” will
prove the tool to crack the safe wherein is locked opportunity—and what
college will take and train him? I am sure that the colleges to which
my boys have gone would never have given me a chance. But one fine day
in September found me entering the gate of the Michigan Agricultural
College. I do not think I ever passed the examination—I think the
instructors felt somewhat as the Indians do about the deaf. At any rate,
I entered, not knowing what I wanted or what I was fitted for. It might
be interesting to see what sort of an education may be picked up in this
go-as-you-please manner, or what is required to fit a man for a happy
life in the silent world. However needful it may be for a deaf man to
acquire excellence in some definite work, it is most of all important
that he soak in all possible poetry, human sunshine and inspiration
against the time that he must enter prison.