The Blind Feel a Day by the Sea

The last thing Ron Martinez expected to find at the beach Tuesday was a slimy sea slug, which oozed through his fingers. It was an eerie sensation he had never experienced, even before he became blind.

“It feels kind of gross, actually,” said Martinez, one of 10 students from the Orange County Braille Institute who explored the tide pools at Dana Point.

It was a day for the senses as students followed interpretive guides from the Orange County Marine Institute. What the students could not see they could hear and smell and touch: the seaweed drying in the sun, waves crashing, sea creatures crawling over palms.

The students, all of whom are legally blind adults ranging in age from 19 to 61, visited the beach as part of a class designed to help them develop their senses.

“The beach is one of my favorite places to be,” said Pauline Houston, 59, of Buena Park. “It’s the sound; it’s so peaceful,” she said.

Like the others, Houston was encouraged to hold scuttering sand crabs and touch sand-covered sea anemones that anchored themselves to rocks in the shallow ponds. Touching the creatures and listening to the waves were exercises intended to help the students become more self-sufficient, said Wanda Marshall, director of the Braille Institute in Anaheim.

The nonprofit institute tries to give blind students self-confidence, vocational training and other skills to help them be reintegrated into society, she said.

“There is a great variety of sounds that can enable a person to orient themselves to their surroundings if they are alert to them, sounds that we as sighted people disregard,” Marshall said. A blind person can learn to tell the direction of traffic by its sound, for example.

For 22-year-old Martinez of Yorba Linda, there is all that to learn. Martinez lost his sight about 4 months ago when a gun he was holding discharged accidently. The bullet struck his head and severed his optic nerve, he said.

After his recovery, Martinez said, he joined the Braille Institute because he wanted to re-enter the work force.

“I was just sitting at home feeling like nothing,” he said. “But they help you to get in your head that you can still accomplish a lot of things.”

But on Tuesday his first accomplishment was to grin and bear the sea slug traveling over his hand.

“I didn’t know beaches had all these things,” he said. “If I did, I probably never would have come,” he joked.