When I posted a story a few weeks ago about Stacy Cervenka, I got a number of comments and e-mails. Someone (they didn't leave their name) brought the following article about Stacy to my attention. It seems Stacy got a promotion. The article ran in Roll Call. I hope Roll Call will forgive me for posting it here. Sometimes it's easier to get forgiven than it is to get permission. There were some great photos in the Roll Call peice, so if you're really interested you might look it up at www.rollcall.com.By Elliott WilsonRoll Call Staff
October 26, 2006
Photo caption: Capitol tour guide Stacy Cervenka points upward to the Rotunda's focal point, "The Apotheosis of Washington."
Capitol tour guide Stacy Cervenka points upward to the Rotunda's focal point, "The Apotheosis of Washington." As cameras flash, she describes the painting of George Washington rising to the heavens, accompanied by women representing victory and liberty and 13 others symbolizing the states.
She is familiar with artwork, but she has never seen it. Cervenka was born with optic nerve hypoplasia and is legally blind.
The staffer for Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) makes her way through swirling crowds of tourists, tapping her long white cane across the grid of floor tiles while pointing precisely to canvases, finely etched sculptures and small gold squares marking the desk locations of late Congressmen.
Cervenka sometimes worries she will gesture toward a telephone and call it George Washington or point out Sakakawea, also known as Sacagawea, to perplexed tourists who are staring at one of the many other works of art, artifacts and architectural elements of the Capitol.
Nonetheless, she has yet to make any major foibles on the tour or on the job. And just last week, the former intern and staff assistant moved up to the post of legislative correspondent in Brownback's office.
Capitol tour guide Stacy Cervenka points upward to the Rotunda's focal point, "The Apotheosis of Washington."
A Final Tour
Sighted people have more than a million nerve fibers leading between each eye and their brain, allowing a seamless transition between the shapes and colors of their environments and the views that they see. Cervenka's optic nerves convey very little.
Her right eye has deteriorated over the years and now gives only glimpses of light and occasional hints of color. To describe the sight in her left eye she asks, "What do you see out of the back of your head?"
She uses software that reads e-mails and Web sites aloud and another that scans print into Braille but insists the technology "doesn't change what I do."
Despite the special computer programs and the cane propped up behind her desk, many of the Kansas constituents attending her tours and others entering the office do not realize she is blind until well after meeting her.
As the slender, sleekly dressed blonde glided through the office, a colleague, Steve Lautt, recounted his first day at work. When Lautt met Cervenka, he did not think much of her unfocused gaze and the gentle shifting movement of her eyes. It was not until she picked up her cane and took him on a tour that he discovered she was blind.
"I was bumping into more stuff than she was," he recounted.
Last Wednesday's tour was her final one before moving up to legislative correspondent. It was a big day for her and she worked furiously at her desk until tour time, a computer-generated voice quietly gurgling along to the sound of her hands tapping keys.
Once her five guests arrived, some from Wichita, Kan., a friend from church and others, she grabbed her cane nonchalantly and led them out the door.
She described the modern edge of the Hart Senate Office Building walking backward, cane trailing behind her. Gesturing to her left, she noted the "strange statue of mountains and clouds," adding that "no one knows what it is until I tell them."
Her guests nodded along, seeming at ease with the blind woman's lessons on abstract art. She took them underground and down a long corridor, pausing to note the exact location of a post office door and to lament that the Senate's "little city" lacks a video rental shop.
Cervenka, a fan of "Grey's Anatomy," explained later that she enjoys films, sometimes utilizing descriptive video service or in the case of the TV show, just taking in the dialogue and sound effects.
Her hobbies are not much different from that of any 20-something woman. In addition to working with blind youths, she recently joined the Internet matchmaking Web site e-Harmony and enjoys rollerblading along paths, using a very long cane to accommodate the extra speed.
Practical Skills
At work, getting around mail carts, construction projects and fast-walking federal employees is not the hurdle it once was.
When she came to D.C. as an intern through the American Association of People with Disabilities, she lacked the confidence she has today. "My first day I was terrified" and "wanted to go home," she remembered.
When an introduction to a staffer turned into an errand to the printing and graphics department, Cervenka almost gave up. She had to retrieve a chart for the Senator's floor presentation, but had no idea how to wind her way through hallways, down the elevator and to the room.
She laughed quietly when recounting the 10-minute adventure that would take her less than two today, but pain seemed to rise as well. "I can be kind of introverted," Cervenka said.
For two years she attended Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., leaving campus just once by herself. The thought of hailing a cab, getting to a grocery store, and seeking out customer service to pick up snacks was too intimidating, Cervenka said.
"It wasn't like I was sitting there in a rocking chair," she said, but "I didn't have the practical skills that I needed."
She got those skills at the Louisiana Center for the Blind. At the school in Ruston, La., she took courses in cane travel, Braille, technology, home economics and industrial arts. Cervenka soon learned to find her way around new places so she could stray away from memorized routes.
The industrial arts class put power tools in her hands, requiring her to pull the triggers on drills and saw through boards. She went rafting and mountain climbing, but domestic challenges caused the most anxiety.
Her two most harrowing tasks were grilling a steak and lighting birthday candles. "I was afraid I was going to set myself on fire," she said.
"I worry a lot. That's just my nature," Cervenka added.
Even after finishing up at the eight-month program, and completing her studies at the University of Minnesota, she was still brimming with fears. However, her new trepidations had less to do with crossing streets or getting groceries; they were those many feel after college graduation.
"I have jumped out of a plane," said the sightless skydiver, but the first batch of interviews "were a hundred times scarier."
She got the gig with Brownback's office, and she gave guided tours up until the final jaunt last Wednesday.
"Hopefully we'll go out with a bang," she told the tourists, beaming as she boasted that she would "be handling issues in the back now."
It's in the DetailsCervenka now will work with Kansas constituents on topics from education and disabilities to abortion and gun rights, but before taking her first meeting that afternoon, she wandered the Brumidi corridors, Statuary Hall and all the old stops on another tour.
She offered an art history course. Layering historical anecdotes over the Capitol decor, she explained that fresco painter Constantino Brumidi "built pictures into the walls" by working on wet plaster and described the artist's treacherous fall from scaffolding high up in the Rotunda.
Soon after, another guide echoed the same story about Brumidi clinging to the unstable bars for more than a half-hour.
Much about the tour route is indeed a speech that can be memorized as well by a blind woman as any sighted person. She explained that her trouble is that "if you can see, you have a visual jog."
Even without that luxury, she picked out faces in paintings and listed off their significance without trouble.
"Every tour guide does things differently," Cervenka said. Without visual cues, she relies on careful calculation to point out the sights, but the richest aspects of her tours are things that most never notice, even those with great vision.
She guided visitors to a statue of Abraham Lincoln and encouraged them to grasp his boot. Her hands traced the wrinkles of the cold stone as she explained how exhausting it would be to chisel out these palpable details.
Cervenka described the bold floral aroma that invades the Rotunda when Hawaiian politicians decorate their state's statue with fresh flowers each year. Later she slipped the square toe of her high-heeled boots back and forth across a set of steps to show "the grooves from all the feet."
With Cervenka, such easily ignored details become an important complement to the visitor's experience, but she admits they do not complete it for her. "I give all these tours, and I do not even know what half of this stuff is," she said.
Adding with frustration, "I don't really know what the Apotheosis looks like."
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