ANAHEIM HILLS – As the plane sped toward takeoff, faster and faster and faster still, the thought suddenly hit him, hit him where the most sobering thoughts always do.
Right in the gut.
“What,” Jim Skvarla said to himself, “am I doing here?”
Good question. Honest question.
See, this Cessna 172 was being piloted by a kid, Jim’s kid. Sure, Andrew also had flown a helicopter and ridden in a glider.
But he was still just a teenager and Andrew’s mother, Bridget, had been given the option to come along and she decided to stay safely grounded.
Yeah, also on-board that day was a more experienced pilot with access to all the controls. But Andrew most assuredly would be captaining this plane.
“I have to admit, going down the runway, I was nervous,” Jim says today. “It ended up being quite a rush.”
It was quite a rush for Andrew, too, flying and landing so expertly that it was almost like, well, you know, he wasn’t blind.
“I’ll never doubt Andrew,” says Carol Anne McGuire, a former teacher of one of the most mesmerizing athletes around, “because I’ve seen him do the impossible.”
Like ride a bike around the neighbor, even down the hill near the family home, turning left at just the precise time to make the corner.
Like stand in the backyard and throw rocks at the overhead power lines, hitting them repeatedly with more accuracy than the Angels’ starting rotation.
Like play baseball on his Nintendo Wii, continuing to drill pitch after pitch, many for home runs, home runs make-believe and also too impossible to believe.
“It’s fascinating,” McGuire says. “I mean, it’s a completely visual game. It gives me goose bumps. He’s done that with almost everything he’s tried.”
Andrew, 18, wrestled last year as a junior at Canyon High. He won 11 of 12 matches, one of his beaten opponents mad enough afterward to slam the mat in disgust, another upset enough to cry.
Most of the others, however, reacted quite differently, including the several who, as the decision was being announced, as they were officially being identified as the loser, lifted Andrew’s arm to signal his triumph.
Canyon’s former coach, Scott Lawson, calls Andrew “an instant crowd favorite,” all eyes drawn to the wrestler who can’t see.
“A lot of things Andrew does ‘wow’ me, but nothing he does surprises me,” Lawson says. “I truly believe he can do anything he wants.”
So the kid flies, given the ability to soar by parents unafraid to see their first born fall.
He arrived three months early, Andrew weighing only 2 pounds and so small that Jim and Bridget placed his hand and foot prints on a football because that was just about his size.
He was rushed to Children’s Hospital of Orange County, whisked away so quickly that Bridget wouldn’t have the chance to see her son until almost six hours later. It would be a week before she was allowed to hold him.
The very thing that kept Andrew alive in the coming months – oxygen therapy – ultimately robbed him of his vision with a condition called retinopathy of prematurity. The first surgery failed to correct the problem. So did the next two.
Suddenly faced with a challenge most atypical, Jim and Bridget chose a path remarkably conventional.
“One day,” Jim says, “we just decided he was going to be raised like a normal kid.”
So it began at the Blind Children’s Learning Center in Santa Ana and continues now, Andrew mainstreaming his way into the marching band and onto the track team, paddling at the Newport Aquatic Center and attending homecoming and prom.
This summer, he visited the 9/11 Memorial and the Statue of Liberty. Yeah, this blind kid, in New York sightseeing.
“The Skvarlas are some of the best parents I’ve ever encountered,” says McGuire, a longtime teacher of the blind for the Orange Unified School District. “The gift they gave Andrew was challenging him to do things even they probably thought were beyond his capabilities.
“If he failed, they’d just say, ‘OK, let’s try something else then.’ Their mindset has been that this is an opportunity to succeed not an opportunity to fail. His blindness isn’t a limitation. It’s a chance to see how far they can push things.”
Not unlike many in the blind community, Andrew has been gifted with a superb sense of spatial awareness, an ability to picture and measure movement and acute hearing.
When someone hits a golf ball, for example, he can instantly determine the musical key of the sound produced.
And remember his prowess on the Nintendo Wii? Each pitch is delivered with a certain sound effect, allowing Andrew to precisely time his swings.
“I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything,” says the kid who doesn’t need eyesight to perfectly envision his world. “I’m always happy, always positive and always willing to meet new people.”
Andrew’s attitude is so prevalent that his sisters – Alyssa, 16, and Jaclyn, 15 – have asked him why he always has to be so happy.
It’s an approach to aspire to, Andrew’s outlook summed up the first day he walked into the family’s new house and, touching a mirrored wall in front of him, put his nose an inch away and announced, “Hey, look. I can see myself.”
“He’s an amazing kid,” Jim says. “His attitude has been good for the entire family. The way he approaches life has helped all of us. We all can learn from him.”
We sure can, learn that limits aren’t really limits at all, that anything’s possible if you have the guts to close your eyes and picture it happening.
We all can soar like Andrew Skvarla, who, just the other day, decided he wanted to try something new.
He went hang gliding.
Contact the writer: jmiller@ocregister.com
