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Through a tunnel of vision that grows smaller every day, Ryan Knighton sees the world with more clarity than most. Cockeyed is Knighton’s account of his plunge into darkness, beginning with a life-altering diagnosis on his 18th birthday and winding its way through the tribulations and frustrations that come with diminishing eyesight.
Knighton had a typical childhood, working several jobs to a heavy metal soundtrack, all the while blissfully unaware that he was going blind. The Langley, British Columbia, resident tells harrowing tales of “driving braille,” motoring straight down ditches, straight up a decorative field of boulders, and straight through stop signs and stoplights. The constant stumbling and tripping were all chalked up to being a clumsy kid, as was a potentially deadly incident behind the wheel of a forklift, involving a coworker, Pat: “I didn’t catch, despite the twenty yards between us, Pat in the shade trying to pull a palette down from the stack, right there in front of me, between the forklift and the trailer. … Then an image flashed. He materialized in my eye, just to the left of the forks, a body in contorted motion as he leapt out of the way, safe.”
The truth came out several years later on a visit to the eye doctor — Knighton was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare disease that slowly and deliberately eats away at vision — and he moved out of his parents’ home soon afterwards. He could still make out most objects in the daylight when he moved to Vancouver, but depth perception and night vision were now far beyond reach. “My diagnosis still hadn’t sunk in, not really, but I still felt unbearably anxious. I didn’t want to tell my mother that...I’d be blind within a matter of years. It would kill her. I had no choice, though, no way out.”
From this point onward, Knighton uses telling anecdotes to characterize his situation, sandwiching stories of hilarity between stark and depressing realizations. He talks at length about his long white cane, which spent its initial few months tucked securely inside of a satchel. In this fashion, Knighton could pass as a sighted person, sacrificing independence and mobility to fit in with the crowd.
This behavior lasted through most of a trip Knighton took to Korea, where he spent several months teaching English and masking his disability. Tricking the schoolmasters and a classroom full of seven year olds (most of whom went by adopted English names like “Batman” or “Shampoo”) was relatively easy, but Knighton’s burden rested heavily on himself and his future wife, Tracy. Giving up the charade with a few weeks left in the country, Knighton’s life took a positive turn. From that point on, Knighton seemed more at peace with himself and with the world that existed around him.
The writing in Cockeyed is truly a reflection of the author’s mood, and therein lies the strength of the book. Despair and dejection are permanently tied to blindness, and Knighton accurately conveys all of the angst and self-pity that had built up over the past 15 years: “A friend once described to me the single-frame newspaper comic that I was about to imitate. In it a storekeeper and his jittery expression are stuck behind the counter. A blind man is about to take his next step into a large pyramid of neatly displayed light bulbs. I saw the comedy in it, but I had to wonder what stupid hardware chain would build a pyramid of light bulbs in the middle of an aisle, in front of the checkout, no less.”
A story of misplaced pants, stumbles over curbs and peeing next to urinals, Cockeyed also serves as a testament to Knighton’s seemingly limitless supply of determination.
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