Jodey Porter
Special to The Lake Report

At 72, I have had an extensive career as a senior Ontario public servant. I’ve been an Ontario Human Rights commissioner, a member of the United Nations Council on Human Rights and executive director of the Canadian Diabetes Association. 

I’ve also been mostly blind, most of my life and this past March I travelled to New Jersey to meet the canine companion that will enable me to recapture my life.

Like most people my age, I thought there wasn’t much more I needed to learn to fulfil my life’s aspirations.

Now, as a first-time student at The Seeing Eye Guide Dog School, I have just 25 days to absorb everything I need to start a new life. It’s like learning to walk, talk and think all over again.

Here’s the backstory.

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When people see guide dogs with their partners walking down the street, it looks so simple, so easy, so flawless, all in harmony, all in tune, all working forward.

You just cannot imagine how wickedly and brutally difficult all this is to learn. 

Doc is 19 months old, full of extraordinary energy and knows a lot more than I do about what is on the road ahead. It is a complex dance without music. It is gymnastics class without sight.

A sightless person is directing the dog who sees, hears and senses so much more than the owner. I must learn each of the many orders he has spent his life learning and accompany each with just the right physical gesture to make sure we communicate.

On our first working day together, we walked down a busy street in Morristown, N.J.,  with obstacles placed intentionally in our way — pylons on the street, traffic roaring ahead of us (a car driven by one of the instructors), people who come up and try to be friendly with your dog when it’s working.

We walked and walked and walked and walked. 

I have learned about outfitting Doc with something called a working harness, a gentle leader, short leashes, long leashes and on and on. There are ways to find empty chairs in dining rooms, ways to settle your dog under a table, ways to give and not give your dog food and water. 

There is an extraordinary regimen to live by and live up to, and it is all about creating a team.

How did we do? Well, I’m not sure Doc was very proud of his user, but we did pretty darn well. 

We did walk straight into the pylon obstacle, but Doc saved me from the fake traffic accident, was not distracted by random dogs and remained solidly focused on the goal ahead, moving forward, safely, checking how I was doing. All rather incredible. 

Pretty wild when you put our new partnership into a living, breathing, mechanical world with cars, dogs, kids, homeless people and even an early St. Patrick’s Day parade. It is sensory overload. 

This is so incredibly hard and even though I have spent most of my lifetime in a world of visual impairment I had no idea how complex and challenging the task would be.

As the days pass, we have no time to become overconfident. 

We traverse shopping malls, deal with escalators, cross busy streets, around traffic circles and crossing islands, through pedestrian walkways. Always distractions, distractions. And then there is the terror of unpredictable cars and inattentive drivers. 

A growing partnership between dog and owner, hoping to be safe.   

It’s a lot to digest and a lot to achieve. I have been through security checks at courthouses, up-and-down staircases, across the entire town of Morristown, small streets, country roads, into the heart of a vibrant commercial town centre. 

We take a bus ride, then get onto a train for a big adventure into New York City. 

There’s lots to learn on the way. Plenty of new commands, nuances and physical and verbal gestures to be memorized, made part of our two-entity capability. Frankly, it is all outside the realm of what we expect as people. 

By now you will realize that there is an incredible team of people who make this all happen.

Since Seeing Eye Inc. was established in 1929, the organization has created 18,200 partnerships and now serves some 280 new and returning students each year. 

There are 180 staff members with 35 full-time instructors responsible for training the dogs and the students. 

Each partnership costs about $75,000 and none of it comes from government or insurance. I paid just $150 in tuition. The rest comes from foundations, corporations and other gifts.

This is a family, make no mistake, and the dogs and people and teachers and managers and historians and funders all move together toward a single end — freedom.

• Next: I’ll offer an inkling of who some of my fellow students are and what makes them tick.

NOTL resident Jodey Porter is a former provincial assistant deputy minister of health and member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Her story is told in collaboration with writer Tim Taylor.