Seeing is believing.
But don’t count out feeling and hearing, either. That’s how Renee Chalifour, who’s blind, appreciated the beauty below her Thursday at Gunstock Mountain Resort.
While zip lining, she felt it. And heard it. And loved it.
“By listening to everything that is around,” Chalifour told me. “It’s the breeze, the warmth of the sun.”
She’s been blind since the age of 2 ½, when something called optic nerve atrophy, caused by a benign tumor, took her eyesight. Her spirit of adventure, however, is fine, and that goes for the other five visually impaired people who zipped 50 feet in the air on a perfect day at Gunstock, with lots of green and no humidity.
They’ve experienced frustration in the job market and uneasiness in society, but on this day they flew, moving from their comfort zones, challenging themselves, hovering above all pre-conceived notions of what blind people can accomplish.
“It is liberating, which applies to our self esteem, confidence and beyond,” said blind zip liner Stephanie Hurd, who organized the event.
Hurd is the community relations director for Future in Sight, which until recently was called the New Hampshire Association for the Blind. She raises awareness, informing blind or partially blind people about hand-held magnifiers and colored dots to better see markings on a stove dial and voice-activated iPhones.
Through this community have come friendships and outings like the one at Gunstock. Chalifour and Hurd, best friends, have already gone skydiving together.
Hurd described that adventure as, “Whoosh, a free fall drop of 9,000 feet in one minute, and when the parachute opens, poof, dead silence and calm and serenity. Two contrasting experiences in one.”
Hurd was born with leber’s congenital amaurosis, meaning the connection between her retina and optic nerve is split like a frayed wire.
And while that hasn’t stopped her from zip lining or jumping from a plane, it has led to unspoken discrimination while job searching.
By law, of course, blindness can’t be used as a reason not to hire someone, but try telling that to Hurd.
“You can have all the skills, but you have to change employers’ opinions and their stereotypes of what you can and can’t do,” Hurd told me. “The only thing different is I’m blind, but I have all the abilities to work.”
Chalifour, who’s job searching, feels the same sense of prejudice, telling me, “People figure in their own head that I could never do something because I can’t see. They can’t tell you that, but we all know that’s what they think. They think they could not do it, so they assume we probably couldn’t do it, and they’re wrong and we wish they would just give us more of an opportunity.”
Which, in part, is why Hurd organizes activities like zip lining. She was thrilled that three newspapers covered the action. The red carpet is rolled out for any chance to spread the word about independence within the blind community.
They took a few practice runs on a short, low-hanging cable before moving to the big boy, Gunstock Mountain and its nearly 4,000-foot ride over trees, the parking lot and a small lake. Pulling hard on the bar increases speed, with experienced zip liners moving 60 miles per hour; easing up on your pull slows you down.
Gunstock guides used ear-splitting air horns to signal the blind zip liners as to when to begin braking. Landings were smooth.
Andrew Leibs of Portsmouth said the rush he felt at the start of his ride was a tad unnerving. He called himself a “geriatric James Bond.”
“I felt like my feet could almost touch the trees,” Leibs said. “It’s that first pushing off, that first moment of fear you feel when you have to sort of let go, but once you get going the fear goes away.”
Adele Robertson of Exeter explained her experience this way: “Awesome, more exciting than terrifying, something I always wanted to do. It wasn’t scary at all. I was hanging onto something and I knew it was going to end at some point and I was going to be back on the ground.”
Meanwhile, the two close friends, Hurd and Chalifour, started planning their next adventure together: hot air ballooning.
Hurd’s daughter, Mindy Hurd, whose vision is fine, drove her mother to Gunstock, went zip lining and overheard the conversation.
“Take me with you,” she said.