When Brian Bushway gets up in the morning, he can expect a busy day. He might be prepping for international seminars and mentoring new young members of a nonprofit he works with. He might rehearse for a gig with members of the band, The Sindicate, at the Roxy that night. And, to unwind, he might put in five or 10 miles on his mountain bike. He’s only 24. And he has been blind since the age of 14.
Bushway, a Pepperdine graduate and Malibu resident, doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “Just because you can’t see doesn’t mean you can’t do most of the same activities everyone else does,” he said. “You just do them in a different way.”
Such insouciance at his own abilities was pretty much the way he decided to cope with a sudden loss of vision at an impressionable age.
“I got out of school at the end of seventh grade and would skateboard all day with my buddies,” Bushway said. “Then I noticed that I couldn’t quite see the light across the street at the crosswalk. By the end of summer, I was totally blind.”
The doctors were baffled.
“Optic nerve atrophy, which basically means they have no idea what caused it,” Bushway said.
His family dug in to help him adapt to a sightless world.
“None of us knew what was going on, but I was still functioning in a fairly normal family way,” he said. “So you just develop your other senses.”
Among them, an acute sensitivity to sound waves. Bushway navigates at home, on the street and even on his mountain bike through echolocation, the same method bats use when darting through a night sky. This requires him to emit a sound, usually a tongue click, and ascertain his distance from objects around him through the sound waves bouncing back.
“There’s a certain leap of faith,” Bushway explained. “But anyone can do it.”
Echolocation is what he teaches to new members of the nonprofit foundation, World Access for the Blind, whose motto is to use “a modern, no limits approach to equalize opportunities for the success of blind people.”
It’s not always easy. When he was working on his degree in speech communication, with a minor in nonprofit management, he sometimes had to wait for textbooks in Braille. He did a great deal of his work orally.
But he still managed to find time to jam with a rock band that evolved into his current gig. The Sindicate recently played The Malibu Inn and was one of the top two winning groups in the Battle of the Bands at Pepperdine University last year.
“When I first became blind, I was bored out of my mind,” Bushway said. “I couldn’t do all the things my friends were doing. So my uncle gave me an old guitar and I started learning some chords. As a teenager, it’s safe to express yourself through a guitar.”
In fact, he developed into a skilled rocker and writes his own music.
“I carry a little dicta-phone around with me in case I come up with an idea during the day.”
He also turned to the bass.
“There were too many other good guitarists out there who were better than me,” Bushway said.
And, whereas he says he welcomes the opportunity to bring awareness of the plight of the visually impaired with his music, his passion is his work with World Access for the Blind. With most of their instructors and mentors blind themselves, the organization is geared to helping improve the quality of life for blind people.
“We teach perception development. Echolocation, in a teachable format, is just one way,” Bushway explained. “It’s just a different way of seeing. Most people don’t understand the depth of what they can do through sound perception.
“When we see, vision is light reflecting off an object,” he continued. “Well, hearing is just sound reflecting off an object. There’s stuff we’ve yet to discover about our true powers.”
Ryan Wakeman was Bushway’s roommate at Pepperdine and said he doesn’t recall ever making any kind of accommodations for Bushway’s sightlessness.
“Gosh, after the first day, you don’t even think of him as blind,” Wakeman said.
Dan Yoder, another college friend and guitarist for The Sindicate, echoes the sentiment. “It just isn’t part of the conversation,” he said. “Brian’s mojo as a musician is about the essence of the music. He really shoots for a higher purpose.”
Yoder recounted a recent afternoon with his band mate and Bushway’s own sightless mentor, Dan Kish, founder of World Access.
“We were hiking up to a cabin in the mountains and I was totally lost,” Yoder said. “I had to follow Dan and Brian. It really was the blind leading the blind.”