So when spring came I headed west over the hills. I stayed off the roads and slept in the open. Many nights I would stay at another commune, until they finally began to get farther apart, then tapered off entirely. The country was not as pretty as before.
Then, three days' leisurely walking from the last commune, I came to a wall.
In 1964, in the United States, there was an epidemic of German measles, or rubella. Rubella is one of the mildest of infectious diseases. The only time it's a problem is when a woman contracts it in the first four months of her pregnancy. It is passed to the fetus, which usually develops complications. These complications include deafness, blindness, and damage to the brain.
In 1964, in the old days before abortion became readily available, there was nothing to be done about it. Many pregnant women caught rubella and went to term. Five thousand deaf-blind children were born in one year. The normal yearly incidence of deaf-blind children in the United States is one hundred and forty.
In 1970 these five thousand potential Helen Kellers were all six years old. It was quickly seen that there was a shortage of Anne Sullivans. Previously, deaf-blind children could be sent to a small number of special institutions.
It was a problem. Not just anyone can cope with a deafblind child. You can't tell them to shut up when they moan; you can't reason with them, tell them that the moaning is driving you crazy. Some parents were driven to nervous breakdowns when they tried to keep their children at home.
Many of the five thousand were badly retarded and virtually impossible to reach, even if anyone had been trying. These ended up, for the most part, warehoused in the hundreds of anonymous nursing homes and institutes for "special" children. They were put into beds, cleaned up once a day by a few overworked nurses, and generally allowed the full blessings of liberty: they were allowed to rot freely in their own dark, quiet, private universes. Who can say if it was bad for them? None of them were heard to complain.
Many children with undamaged brains were shuffled in among the retarded because they were unable to tell anyone that they were in there behind the sightless eyes. They failed the batteries of tactile tests, unaware that their fetes hung in the balance .when they were asked to fit round pegs into round holes to the ticking of a clock they could not see or hear. As a result, they spent the rest of their lives in bed, and none of them complained, either. To protest, one must be aware of the possibility of something better. It helps to have a language, too.
Several hundred of the children were found to have IQ'
within the normal range. There were news stories abou them as they approached puberty and it was revealed that' .,. 40 there were not enough good people to properly handle them. Money was spent, teachers were trained. The education expenditures would go on for a specified period of time, until the children were grown, then things would go back to normal and everyone could congratulate themselves on having dealt successfully with a tough problem.
And indeed, it did work fairly well. There are ways to reach and teach such children. They involve patience, love, and dedication, and the teachers brought all that to their jobs. All the graduates of the special schools left knowing how to speak with their hands. Some could talk. A few could write. Most of them left the institutions to live with parents or relatives, or, if neither was possible, received counseling and help in fitting themselves into society. The options were limited, but people can live rewarding lives under the most severe handicaps. Not everyone, but most of the graduates, were as happy with their lot as could reasonably be expected. Some achieved the almost saintly peace of their role model, Helen Kelley. Others became bitter and withdrawn. A few had to be put in asylums, where they became indistinguishable from the others of their group who had spent the last twenty years there. But for the most part, they did well.
But among the group, as in any group, were some misfits. They tended to be among the brightest, the top ten percent in the IQ scores. This was not a reliable rule. Some had unremarkable test scores and were still infected with the hunger to do something, to change things, to rock the boat. With a group of five thousand, there were certain to be a few geniuses, a few artists, a few dreamers, hell-raisers, individualists, movers and shapers: a few glorious maniacs.
There was one among them who might have been President but for the fact that she was blind, deaf, and a woman. She was smart, but not one of the geniuses. She was a dreamer, a creative force, an innovator. It was she who dreamed of freedom. But she was not a builder of fairy castles. Having dreamed it, she had to make it come true.
The wall was made of carefully fitted stone and was about five feet high. It was completely out of context with anything I had seen in New Mexico, though it was built of native rock. You just don't build that kind of wall out there. You use barbed wire if something needs fencing in; but many people
still made use of the free range and brands. Somehow it seemed transplanted from New England.
It was substantial enough that I felt it would be unwise to crawl over it. I had crossed many wire fences in my travels and had not gotten in trouble for it yet, though I had some: talks with some ranchers. Mostly they told me to keep moving, but didn't seem upset about it. This was different. h set out to walk around it. From the lay of the land, I couldn't=' tell how far it might reach, but I had time.
At the top of the next rise I saw that I didn't have far to go.. The wall made a right-angle turn just ahead. I looked over it~ and could see some buildings. They were mostly domes, the: ubiquitous structure thrown up by communes because of the' combination of ease of construction and durability., There: were sheep behind the wall, and a few cows. They grazed on grass so green I wanted to go over and roll in it. The wall enclosed a rectangle of green. Outside, where I stood, it was: all scrub and sage. These people had access to Rio Grande irrigation water.
I rounded the corner and followed the wall west again. `
I saw a man on horseback about the same time he spotted me. He was south of me, outside the wall, and he turned and rode in my direction.
He was a dark man with thick features, dressed in denim and boots with a gray battered stetson. Navaho, maybe. I don't know much about Indians, but I'd heard they were out here.
"Hello," I said when he'd stopped. He was looking me over. "Am I on your land?"
"Tribal land," he said. "Yeah, you're on it."
"I didn't see any signs."
He shrugged.
"It's okay, bud. You don't look like you out to rustle cattle." He grinned at me. His teeth were large and stained with tobacco. "You be camping out tonight?"
"Yes. How much farther does the, uh, tribal land go? e' Maybe I'll be out of it before tonight?"
He shook his head gravely. "Nah. You won't be off it,_. tomorrow. 'S all right. You make a fire, you be careful, huh?" He grinned again and started to ride off.
"Hey, what is this place?" I gestured to the wall, and he pulled his horse up and turned around again. It raised a lot .' of dust.
"Why you asking?" He looked a little suspicious.
"I dunno. Just curious. It doesn't look like the other places I've been to. This wall..."
He scowled. "Damn wall." Then he shrugged. I thought that was all he was going to say. Then he went on.