The Eye Test

Last year my Alaska driver’s license expired while I was living in Boston. After a week living on the edge, knowing I would rue this day but seeing little lawful alternative, I trudged into the Registry of Motor Vehicles, where an hour’s wait, a quick eye test and $30 bought me a Massachusetts license. Fast forward a year and I’m back in Alaska, buying a Subaru from Bellingham to replace the rusted-out one I sold on the way out. I need my Alaska driver’s license to avoid Washington sales tax, and to regain my bonafides.

I google: I need a passport, social security number, proof of residence, knowledge test, and eye test. I make an appointment, which is mercifully simpler than in covid-times-Massachusetts where Rosie and I crawled over hot coals and transited the seventh circle of hell this summer to get her permit and license. 

 

We won’t talk about what happened at my first appointment. (Why does a person need to know what coverage minimums you need when your insurance company takes care of it?). Take two, and I pass the test with FLYING colors. My confidence soars for a hot second, and then like every geriatric driver in America, a riffle of anxiety courses through me: the eye test. I casually stroll over to Booth Four where a woman who smiles under her mask processes a bunch of paper and has me sign things and then asks me to wipe the black eye test reader with an alcohol wipe and Read Line Five. 

 

I wipe fastidiously. Maybe if I clean it really well, I will see really well. I lean in, take a breath, and peer in. Hallelujah! There are 9 lines, and line 5 is big and clear. I bet I could read line 7! With the careful diction of a Wheel of Fortune contestant solving a prize puzzle, I read off the letters. There are two rows of letters, separated by a black vertical line. I read both sets of letters with ease and sit back.

 

There is a pause.

 

“And the rest?” 

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Read the rest of line 5, please.”

 

The riffle of foreboding becomes a shiver. I look again. There are no more letters in line 5. There are three columns. The first two contain clear black capital letters against the yellow-lit background. The third column is blank, an empty box of yellow light. I explain this to the woman.

 

There are numbers in the third column, she says, and we go around like this a few times. She is kind, I am bewildered. The woman who administered my knowledge test walks by and peers in to ensure there is nothing wrong with my eye tester. The numbers are there, she says. Try again. 

 

They don’t understand. It’s not blurry, it’s not jumping around – it is blank. Heat rushes into my ears: I am going to fail this test. I am going to lose my license. How am I going to get home? What is my life going to look like?

 

I can’t fail this test. 

 

The nice masked woman watches me. She suggests I shift my head. I move so my left eye looks into the right side of the viewer. And in a sleight-of-hand-of-God there are numbers in the third column, big and black and bold. I read them quickly, clearly, before the masked woman decides that actually I’m cheating. I don’t mention that when the third column appeared, the first column disappeared. 

 

She tells me some people have monovision, and I should check with my eye doctor.* I have eye cancer, I confess to her, but - this was weird. 

 

I couldn’t describe it to her, the shock, the betrayal. There was nothing there. And then there was. There was no in-between, no fade.  

 

Later I thought about Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. I loved that book and made Alder listen to several of the more fantastical chapters as Sacks, a neurologist, tells of patients with neurological aberrations that take chunks of their memory, chunks of their vision, chunks of cognition. I have a revelation: 

 

“I’m the man who mistook his wife for a hat!” I yell gleefully as I recount the story to a friend. 

 

In the three-plus years since my ocular melanoma diagnosis, I have struggled to fit words to my vision. There is a dark curtain over the top two-thirds to top half of my right-side field of view. The remainder is blurry, aqueous. Where the liquid below meets the curtain above, the image squeezes slightly like an hourglass. This generally makes people pinheads, which is amusing when I want it to be.  

 

Because my right eye was dominant, at first I wore reading glasses with tape over the right lens to mute the noise. My left eye is learning the routine like a dimwitted dog, slowly but dutifully getting smarter. 

 

Another way to understand it: Imagine driving with the right side of the windshield smeared with Crisco and the top third or so grayed-out with charcoal crayon. Spatter a few charcoal scribbles around the bottom, move things around a bit like a lava lamp, and this might simulate my experience. 

 

As can be imagined, driving in Boston was stressful, particularly at night. I sometimes wondered if I should be driving people’s children around. I couldn’t ask the soccer carpool to weave through town to pick and up drop off my son, to take my share of misery that is rush-hour traffic on Route 128 and the dank stink of dirty soccer socks. And truthfully, I liked driving the carpool. It’s where I found out about homework Alder hadn’t mentioned and why the second fifth-grade dance was summarily canceled (there be drama!). I drove carefully. I asked the boys to look out the right side when needed. I double- and triple-checked. I managed. 

 

But this: this vanishing act at the DMV. It unnerved me. I can’t describe it with Crisco and charcoal crayons, spiders flying on invisible threads just out of reach. It was hallucinogenic, that DMV eye test: It is deeply humbling to learn that you can’t trust your own eyes. 

 

It seems every lesson I learn is a variant of humility. I am repeatedly surprised by all that we as humans don’t know, all that we don’t control. Unexpected loss – of a spouse, of love, of health – it teaches us to tread lightly. You don’t know which step will crack you through the veneer of crusted snow and whether you’ll drop into sugar or slush or water or emptiness. We need snowshoes for this life. There is no proper armor for all eventualities. We are naked, really. We drape clothing over ourselves and bend steel and flint and great rivers to our will, but we are in the end no more in control than spiders flying on invisible threads. 

 

But twinned with humility is awe. Because despite all of it, we recount the story laughing. Because despite all of it, there is beauty everywhere. In the pop of an alpine blueberry’s cold sweetness. In the thin arms of a son’s hug. There is always beauty. It waits for us to see it, aqueous and liquid and fleeting though it may be. 

 

These are the Days of Awe in the Jewish tradition, the eight days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, a time of introspection, reflection, forgiveness, atonement, and recommitment to cultivating our best selves. Shana Tova. May it be a sweet year.   

 

*It is legal in the state of Alaska to drive with legal vision in only one eye. It is more common than you might realize - many people are less forthcoming about it than I am. 

North Douglas sunset view of glacier ... serenity

Jumbo looking toward Admiralty Island 

Fall colors on Mt. Roberts trail

Blackerby Ridge view on a bluebird blueberry day

Summit of Mt. Olds with the boy, looking toward Canada