Ok, not being deaf, acting deaf for a week. As Patrick would say “Since you can actually hear but can’t talk, you are technically a mute!”
Were I left you last, I was about to board a 4 day 3 night cruise from Olympus to Fettiey. I spent the next 4 days in a closed environment. The same people were sealed on this boat for a considerable amount of time. My results were interesting though probably not surprising once you read them. For starters, as said before, silence is contagious.
I found that the boat as a whole ended up being a quiet bunch, but particularly quiet when the deaf group was in the same area. If we were in the distance, I could hear them being louder, but still not as loud as I would have expected. It’s almost as if the other 10 passengers didn’t want to make us feel like we were excluded by talking around us. Funny thing was, the 3 real deaf people would have full signing conversations across the dinner table during every meal, so they didn’t feel left out at all. They just went about their life like normal (which it was).
Since I couldn’t sign, I chose to look stoicly out into the Mediterranean, acting uninterested in the three other’s conversation. Or I would look intently and watch their hands, pretending to get something from the conversation. I was posing to be the quiet one of the group (if you could ever in your most open heart believe that). I was living a lie, and doing a terrible job of it (I thought).
Sometimes when the captain was giving important information out, I pretended to read his lips as I stared diligently at the centre of them. When an ice cream boat drove up to ours, I surprisingly got a whole lot better at reading lips, even from a distance.
I’ve been told more than a few times that I tend to have a good balance of people and place in my posts. I feel that sometimes the balance is tipped by a particularly beautiful place or person. I think its only fair that I try and describe my setting for the first time in over a week:
I’m on a boat in the Mediterranean. The water is very warm and very blue. It’s hot as balls here and there isn’t a whole lot to do but get tan, swim, and swim some more. It feels like you are in a Nautica commercial. The food on the boat is surprisingly bad. It’s bland and always the same ingredients, most of the time without even a guester of doctoring it up to make it appear to be different. The land around us is completely arid and occasionally has ruins, but our captain is not a tour guide, he just drives the boat.
That’s about enough of the setting, well almost. We slept out on the roof of the boat all three nights under the Turkish stars. Every night there were so many shooting stars you would think that the crew took the money they should have spent on food and a proper cook and bought 70 or so stars for the trip.
Speaking of eating, Stacy chews loudly and with her mouth partially open. I’m not picking on her to be mean; I’m illustrating a point. Chewing with your mouth closed is feat that is effectively done with the aid of hearing. She is profoundly (completely) deaf and without hearing the subtle noise yourself, it is impossible to keep your mouth shut all of the time. I know what your thinking “No, I was raised right, that’s why I don’t chew with my mouth open.” Wrong, your jaw muscles are naturally more relaxed than what society suggests they should be.
If you don’t believe me, put in your ear phones and have a meal (take your time). Blast some music and talk to a friend so that your not fixated on the task of beating my point. Don’t worry about understanding your friend over the music, just talk. Then ask your friend how loud your eating ended up by the end of the meal, you savage!
I did happen to do something productive on the boat. I did a Scuba Dive on the second day. Luckily I had two books full of dive logs and certifications to prove that I wasn’t some crazy deaf guy who didn’t know what he was doing. I was amazing, as soon as I showed everyone the papers, that was it. No extra tests, no lack of trust. Sure they may have given me the very most experienced diver on the boat as a partner, but the truth of the matter was, once under water, there was no difference between hearing people and deaf people. In fact, the deaf people are better off because they can sign back and forth to each other as much as they like.
Everyone was great. They didn’t treat me like I was stupid or slow, but they didn’t ignore me or try and take advantage of me. You could sea collective honor in helping me. A fulfilling sense of sympathetic pride in all that I had accomplished (pretending to be deaf ?)
I want to say that a communities humanity is judged based upon how they treat their members off all sorts and sizes. I will say that this would would be a better place if we all treated each other like we couldn’t hear. Maybe that’s the point. We can’t hear each other, not in the literal sense of, but in the sense of taking the time to understand your neighbour. When you can’t hear, the would around you gets very Japanese (read my posts on getting directions in Japan).
Really it’s an illusion though. Deaf people are no different than you and I. You would know that if you just hung out with a few for a week. We think that they are disabled, but really they just can’t hear.
By the way, if you ever want to get knocked out by a deaf person, just call them disabled. They hate that shit. They also hate Helen Keller by the way because she said in an interview that, given the choice of gaining back one of her two lost senses, she would rather have hearing than sight. That she could live without sight. “What the fuck would she know about either!?” Said Dana 
When we got off the boat, we spent one night in Fetteiey, a charming port town. while walking around the town, Dana looked up and smiled at me as she set one foot into the street. She was distracted by my amazing looks (probably not). A car came wizzing bye. I a moment of importance, I grabbed her arm and yanked.
All those times I had been catching keys before they had hit the ground (after dropping them) had began to make sense. All the times I could anticipate the fall and correct my stance and reach down with my peripheral vision began to make sense. All the years that I didn’t place base ball and didn’t play video games to finely tune my hand eye coordination were void. It was life saving time.
I pulled and luckily Dana weighs a measly 110 pounds. I snapped her back like a child, thank God she wasn’t some 6 foot Nordic gal. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. My week with Dana didn’t flash before my eyes, but if I didn’t act as quickly as I had, she would have been dead. She stepped out at the last second. The car wouldn’t have had time to slow and she would have been pizza.
To be fair, she wouldn’t have crossed without looking unless she was with a hearing person who could warn her. Her guard was down; she was chewing with her mouth open.
It was the first life I had ever saved. It felt good.
The next day we went to a town called Pamukkale. It is known for it’s mountain sized calcium deposits and springs that flow from them. The place looks like a giant ice mountain, but is actually flowing with warm water and the air temp around us is in the high 90s. It’s an amazing place where you are not allowed to walk on with shoes. You quickly understand why when you see that your bare feet mixed with the ultra fine graininess of the calcium causes for a perfect grip. Even at a steep incline, with a river of water flowing down, you simply couldn’t slip here if you tried.
Tomorrow we are going to Ethesus, one of the 7 wonders of the world apparently. A place that has so many ruins, it makes Roam look like a half assed side show. This will be the last I see of my deaf friends for this trip. But some of them live in California and I hope to see them again when I return.
I’ll leave you with one last anecdote. Over the 7 days I’ve been with the bunch I haven’t been the best student. I still get my R’s and T’s mixed up in the signing alphabet and I only have a few vocabulary words. In the same 7 days, Dana would get frustrated in this fact more than a few times. She would let little slips of her voice come out when no one else was around. These were unicorns in the world of a deaf person. You just don’t talk for fear of how it might sound (not being able to hear your own voice often leads to a distortion in it.)
But every time I heard he voice, It was beautiful, so one day I told her so. She smiled at me and soon after just talked. She told me that I was the only hearing guy she has ever talked to after he hearing went (other than her brother, who still has a lot of his hearing.) She said “Your lucky your too stupid to learn to sign.” But I think she’s the lucky one. From my own stupidity, she was able to open up and do something that she probably thought she would never do again.
I thought that I would be the only one to learn over the last week. I thought that it would be business as usual for them. Just another hearing guy, learning a bit about their world that has always been and will always be. But I left a mark. For the first time in my travels I didn’t just do all the taking. I left a mark.
That is the best story so far. And I’ll bet just this one week makes the entire trip more than worth it!