Pod Insights Personally Short Sighted, Episode 5: How to surf when you're going blind About this episode Graham faces his fears and travels to Vancouver to learn how to surf from blind screenwriter Ryan Knighton https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/authors/79826/ryan-knighton.
Special thanks to Ryan Knighton.
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0:31 Speaker 01 This is a CBC Podcast.
0:36 Speaker 02 My name's Graham Isidore. You're listening to Short-Sighted.
0:41 Speaker 03 You there, Graham?
0:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
0:59 Speaker 03 See all the space you got between them? What you thought?
1:04 Speaker 03 I love it. Do you hear it coming?
1:08 Speaker 03 Do you want to try and pop up just like maybe three times?
1:14 Speaker 03 You got a bit of muscle in there? Yeah.
1:19 Speaker 03 The only thing you could do today is what you guys are doing, which is learning in the whitewash. Right. And even then, it's a little challenging because they won't be coming in in clean lines. It's a little unpredictable. It's surfable.
1:33 Speaker 03 We think.
1:37 Speaker 02 It's an overcast day in December, and I'm standing on a beach in Dofino, B.C. I'm in front of a spot surfers call the Long Beach Incinerator. As a first-time surfer, the name Long Beach Incinerator does not inspire confidence. I am, however, comforted by the fact that if I drown today, at least it'll make for a good headline. "Tragedy Strikes With Notoriously Brooding Journalist And Rookie Surfer Lost To The Incinerator." More on that after the weather.
2:09 Speaker 02 Between my eyesight and a light fog, it's hard to tell whether sky ends and the ocean begins. Things blend together, a wash of grays punctuated by the crest of the waves. I'm here with Ryan Knighton, my friend and instructor for the day. Accompanying us is our editor, Chris, and Ryan's kid, Charlie. Ryan lets me know that the weather is less than ideal for a beginner. Still, he's stoked to walk me through the basics.
2:35 Speaker 03 So, the front of the board is called the nose.
2:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:38 Speaker 03 The back's the tail.
2:39 Speaker 02 Okay.
2:40 Speaker 03 The sides are the rails.
2:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:42 Speaker 03 Okay? And just so, because I'm going to refer to them.
2:44 Speaker 02 Ryan is a patient and thorough guy. Surfing is this bedrock in his life, a constant he turns to for exercise. It's meditative qualities. But the fact that Ryan surfs is surprising for a lot of people, mostly because Ryan is blind. So, okay, I'm excited, but very nervous. It's gonna be fine. I was just like, you know, do you still get nervous when you do this?
3:08 Speaker 03 Every time.
3:09 Speaker 02 Okay.
3:10 Speaker 03 Never goes away. Especially if I'm paddling out with my coach, because paddling out is like you're just paddling out into the void. Like, it's just, I don't know what's out there. I don't know how far I've gone. Once I get past the break, it goes quiet. Um, you know, you're just out in the water. It's like, I don't know if I'm being dragged around. I don't know if I'm being pulled out. I don't know what's going on. So, it's always a little scary.
3:30 Speaker 02 But you love it.
3:31 Speaker 03 I love it. Do you want to try and pop up just like maybe three times to get a bit of muscle memory before we get out?
3:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, definitely. I knew Ryan's work long before we met. He's featured on my favorite episode of This American Life. He's written on TV shows like Billions. But it was actually Ryan's travel writing for a farm magazine that caught my attention. He'd go on these adventures, reporting back from a blind perspective. There was a safari without sight, a wellness retreat in Baton, navigating the streets of Cairo. I would read these things and feel immersed inside the stories. They're so rich with details, painting these vivid pictures despite the fact that Ryan didn't rely on, couldn't rely on, visual details. It was this point of view that felt wholly his own.
4:20 Speaker 02 Even before I really understood how much my eyes would impact me, I looked for Ryan's work and was drawn toward the pieces. Anyway, about a year and a half ago, we were both a part of a development room for a creative project. I was excited to get to work with him. I'd hope to pick up some pointers, maybe ape a bit of his style. But working together, we'd get into these little side conversations, bits of banter I'd end up ascribing far too much meaning to. It's not that I'd never talked to another person with vision loss before, but often during those conversations, bad eyes were the only thing we had in common. Distant cousins sat together at a wedding. With Ryan, there was the shooting-the-shit pleasantries you'd have with any coworker you like.
5:05 Speaker 02 And then there was the stuff about eyesight. He'd talk about his experiences, share these anecdotes of his day-to-day, small interactions with strangers, how things changed after his diagnosis progressed, and it was like, "Oh, someone else gets this." Here is another person working in the field that I want to work in. He cares about the same art and literature I care about. We both happen to have sight issues. And it meant being able to riff on these things in a way that I had never really gotten to riff on them before. I'd talk about some of my own experiences without this constant need to explain the context or justify what I was saying, and it was just really...
5:50 Speaker 02 it really mattered to me. Zooming out, Ryan's vision is certainly a big aspect of how he lives his life, and it means doing some things differently, but it didn't stop him from succeeding with what he wanted to do. And that mattered a lot to me, too.
6:08 Speaker 02 I didn't tell Ryan any of this, of course. Didn't want to blow my cool.
6:13 Speaker 02 The opportunity to surf was this chance to spend some time with a friend in person. But as a concept, it also appealed to my poetic sensibilities. A lot of the time, when I get down about my vision stuff, I freeze up, stick to old patterns and things that feel safe. And surfing is not like that.
6:52 Speaker 03 Blindness wasn't really the problem. It was being safe all the time that really bothered me. And being-- because being safe means you're bored. And those are the things you have to fight against. It's easy to get complacent and say, you know what? I'm not going to go outside because I'll get hit by a car, maybe. It's so much easier not to go outside. It's so much easier not to cross the street. So even with surfing, I'm like, people are like, wow, it must be so dangerous. I'm like, have you tried to cross an intersection lately with your eyes closed? Like, this is what we do every day.
7:24 Speaker 02 When Ryan told me he surfed, I assumed that had been a part of his life before he lost his vision, something he held on to with adaptations. But he didn't actually start the sport in earnest until he was 40, well after he went blind. A friend to his death taught him how to do it as part of a magazine article. And he was addicted after his first session. So much so that after years of week-long trips, he eventually moved west from Vancouver to be closer to the waves.
7:53 Speaker 02 Year-round, he'll get dropped off at the beach, going out on his own until his partner, Tracy, comes to pick him up, sometimes hundreds of feet away from where he originally started.
8:04 Speaker 03 And so for that independence, that feeling of, how do I describe it? Well, it's like when you're blind and you're going around the world on, on land, you know, you're constantly holding people's elbows. You're constantly being narrated to, you're constantly having the world mediated to you and being guided through it. And for me, surfing on the inside is as much about the surfing as it is about just being alone.
8:42 Speaker 03 It sounds strange at the age of 51, but it's like, I need that, I need the medicine of that independence. So I don't feel like a child all the time, hanging on people's elbows, being guided, being told what to do, being told what's around me. I love the things in me that it cures. And I didn't know what they were until I started surfing.
9:08 Speaker 02 Logistically, without being able to see the ocean, Ryan has to rely on his other senses to catch a wave.
9:15 Speaker 02 Once he's up, the excitement and adrenaline takes him the rest of the way.
9:20 Speaker 03 I'll spend a little time in there, not catching anything, just feeling kind of the rhythm of how the waves are behaving. You kind of have to spend a little time feeling out what it's doing that day and then associating the sound with it.
9:33 Speaker 03 But if they're coming in and they're peeling, you'll actually hear the waves start to go because it's curling in on itself.
9:47 Speaker 03 And I want that to be a certain distance from me every time. So I have enough time to paddle and hear it coming and then catch it and be in that pocket where it's curling over like that. And then you sort of angle with it, like if it's coming from the left, going to the right, like opening up the way like a zipper. You want to get in that little pocket of sound and ride it because that's where all the energy is and it makes you go the fastest and gives you the most control.
10:16 Speaker 03 It's a bit of math. You know, but a lot of it, you know, it comes much more intuitively after time. You just sort of, it's like music. You just sort of develop a muscle memory of how to behave around different sounds of it.
10:34 Speaker 02 On the beach, we put on our wetsuits and got ready to go out into the water. Listening to Ryan, I felt like I had a decent grasp on everything I was supposed to do. Of course, you'd never really know how something is gonna feel until you're in the middle of doing it yourself. With the rented board under my arm, I made my way towards the surf. Looking stoically, I realized I felt a bit nervous. I'm not very agile. I don't usually like things I'm not immediately good at. Walking towards the shore, Charlie, Ryan's kid, pointed out that I put on my wetsuit backwards.
11:13 Speaker 02 By the time I made it into the surf, Charlie and their dad were already in the water. Ryan and his kid fuzzed out silhouettes against the waves. I bobbed up and down, looking for my first wave, then looking forward and listening instead.
11:40 Speaker 02 In my head, I pictured standing up triumphantly. I discover a preternatural inclination towards the sport, riding in on the crest of a wave. Ryan, the blind surfer, his squinty friend Graham.
11:56 Speaker 02 As the sound approached, I paddled forward, feeling the momentum starting to push and anticipating the moment where I'd propel myself upward. Holding my breath, the wave washed over.
12:15 Speaker 02 I fell, almost immediately.
12:21 Speaker 02 But then, I did it again.
12:28 Speaker 02 And again.
12:32 Speaker 02 And again.
13:34 Speaker 02 Short Said was created and hosted by me, Graham Isidore. Editing and sound design by Christopher Ross Hewer. Music and additional sound design by Ron Kelly. For CBC Podcasts, the producer is Lea Simone Bowen. The sound designer is Julia Whitman. The coordinating producer is Roshni Nayar. Kate Evans is the senior producer. Tanya Springer is senior manager. And the executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. The director of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani.
14:52 Speaker 01 For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.
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