Crashing Through by Robert Kurson

expression on her face. He moved his hands over her features and tried to bend his own to match. She pushed and tugged on his face, crinkling his forehead and lifting an eyebrow.
    “That’s it!” she said. “Now you’re perplexed! Remember that!”
    Soon May was practicing his visual communication skills and expressions on attractive women he encountered.
    “It works,” he told Kuns.
    The play ran for six weeks. A reviewer from KCBS radio in San Francisco said that May’s rush to the end of the stage during his temper-tantrum scene made him fear that the actor would plunge into the crowd, much like Marlene Dietrich had during her famous fall from the stage in 1975.
    After the play closed May finally found a bank job. A college friend, Rich Boulger, connected him with the Bank of California, where the boss promised to do what it took to support him. The regular paycheck broadened his world, but the work, in the end, did not. He had begun to think of himself as a kind of pioneer, someone who wanted to lead into the wilderness rather than follow by rote. The bank was fine for the moment, but when he sifted through his papers and made his phone calls, there were no wildernesses in sight.
             
    As the winter of 1980 approached, May’s friend Rob Reis called and proposed an absurdity.
    “Let’s go skiing.”
    “You mean cross-country skiing, right?”
    “Nope.”
    Reis knew of a downhill skiing program for the blind at California’s Kirkwood Mountain Resort, near Lake Tahoe. It had been launched by Ron Salviolo, a man May had met a few years earlier at Enchanted Hills, where Salviolo had worked as an expert in deaf-blind counseling and had amazed May with his ability to find just the thing that made a kid great.
    At the resort, Salviolo, a long-haired hippie type from New York, got May going by towing him down the bunny hill with a bamboo pole. By the end of the day May was on his own and guided only by Salviolo’s voice commands: “Turn left…easy right…go, go, go…slow down aaannnndddd…stop!” The freedom was a revelation to May—he was winging through open space faster than he could run, faster than he’d dreamed of running, whooshing through without a cane or a dog, free to turn and fly without the undertone of obstacles that had forever been bound to his awareness.
    Soon he was tackling Kirkwood’s toughest runs and skiing at speeds that spooked some pros. In 1981, he and Salviolo entered the national downhill competition for disabled skiers. May’s category was B1, totally blind male. The winner would qualify for the World Winter Games (later to be known as the Paralympics). Most competitors had been skiing for years, not months. May and Salviolo smoked the competition. They were going to Switzerland.
             
    The United States team landed in Geneva in March, where they boarded a bus for the various resorts that would host the 1982 World Winter Games. The team was assigned a twenty-seven-year-old Swiss translator named Fiona, whose smiling accent—a heady mix of Swiss, French, Scottish, and American—transfixed May from “
Bonjour.
” The amputees whispered about her beauty. May was captivated by her descriptions of the passing countryside. She did not say, for example, that railroad tracks went up a hillside; she said that the tracks were like two black snakes playing tag on their way to a mountaintop school. Flowers were not orange but “sunburst.” The world outside the bus excited her and she couldn’t wait to describe it all. Fiona painted pictures in May’s mind, and he knew he had to know her.
    The skiing competition began the next day. May and Salviolo stood in wonder as team after team skied with the guide safely stationed yards behind the blind skier.
    “Let’s do it our way,” May said.
    They began their run, Salviolo in front, the tips of May’s skis just eighteen inches behind, a strategy that made for unprecedented speeds but wildly increased the