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how to hear parked cars so I could avoid them while riding down the street. “You would click your mouth just like a bat, kick it out there, and listen for the returns,” my older brother, Ellery, says now. Also, the rubbery echo of the bicycle tires rolling down the street provided me with invaluable information including sound changes as I approached parked cars and other objects. No one taught me echolocation; I just figured it out on my own.
    My parents always encouraged me to go outside and play with the other kids on the street, and they never stopped me from trying new things. Soon after I learned how to ride Cindy’s bike, my parents bought me a bike of my own, and I rode it for hours a day. I loved the feeling of freedom and control.
    One day I came in the house from riding my bike, and my dad was on the phone.
    “Well, he was just out riding his bike,” he said. There was an edge to his voice. Then, a pause.
    “Did he crash into anything?” Pause.
    “Then what’s the problem?” My dad hung up. I don’t want to say he slammed down the phone, but he hung it up with some force.
    It turned out that a neighbor had called to inform my dad that his son ( not the older kid who can see but the younger kid who is blind , she had said) had been spotted riding a bicycle down the street. I guess the well-meaning neighbor thought my parents should know. But just as my parents had ignored the doctor’s recommendation to send me away to a school for the blind, they ignored comments like these. No one in my family treated me like I had a disability. They expected me to do for myself. So I did.
    As I mastered the art of bike riding via echolocation, I ventured farther afield in Palmdale, a town of about two thousand. I can still conjure up a map of our part of town. At the center of the grid in my mind is our house at 38710 Stanridge Avenue. Our house was between Third Street and Glenraven Street. Between the streets ran the avenues, each named with a letter of the alphabet, along with a number. The avenues were one mile apart. Our house was between Avenue Q and Avenue Q3, although it was closer to Q. So we were between Q and Q3 on the north and south, and between Third and Glenraven on the east and west.
    Although I mastered riding the streets, I came home more than once to find one of my parents on the phone, hearing yet again about their blind child out riding unaccompanied around the neighborhood. The calls always ended with the neighbors hanging up in frustration. My parents never gave in, and eventually neighbors got used to the blind kid riding his bike and the lack of outrage expressed by my parents and finally stopped calling.
    I spring from stubborn and self-reliant stock. I also can only hope that my parents’ persistence served to educate my neighbors a little about what blind people can do. My father’s can-do attitude was a huge influence on me. His name was George Hingson, and he was born in 1914 in Dewey, Oklahoma. A quiet man with a grade school education, he left home when he was just twelve or thirteen years old. I’m not sure why. To support himself, he went to work herding sheep on the Idaho-Montana border in the Bitterroot Mountains, a subrange of the Rocky Mountains. It’s a beautiful, pristine wilderness with rugged peaks and steep canyons carved by glaciers, but not an easy place for a young boy to live outdoors for months at a time without home or family. Big game flourishes in the area, which means predators are about, so my father’s job was to protect his flock of sheep from wolves, bobcats, and mountain lions. He used to tell us a story about accidentally cutting off his thumb with an ax then burying it in the snow for three days until he was able to get somewhere where doctors could surgically reattach it. I never saw much of a scar, but he couldn’t bend his thumb at the first joint. So even my dad, the tough guy who always defended me, had accidents too.
    Later, Dad worked as a