Making Waves
For any surfer, taking on the monster waves at Nazaré in Portugal is a death-defying risk. For Matt Formston,there’s another consideration: he’s blind
Matt Formston has one memory from when he could still see.
He’s not completely sure if it’s real, as he must have been very young, maybe three or four. In that one memory, it is Christmas Eve. Formston and his family are at the house of some friends who live on the same street in Narrabeen, a coastal suburb of Sydney, Australia. The dads are messing around, and one of them points to the sky as a shooting star streaks across it and says, ‘Look, that’s Santa!’ The reason Formston thinks it could be a real memory is that the image in his mind is sharp: all the stars are so clear.
Back then, he could still catch a ball, and he would look straight at the camera when his parents, Don, a marketing manager for a beer and wine company, and Loraine, a hairdresser, took pictures of him. Not long afterwards, he stopped being able to do both. Formston was diagnosed with macular dystrophy, a genetic disorder that results in a build-up of pigment at the back of the eye. By the age of five, he had lost 95% of his vision. Now, he sees only around the very edges, and in blurs and lines and dots.
When they realised their son was going blind, Don and Loraine circled the wagons. This was the 1980s, when ideas about disability were very different, and they were determined that their son should go about his life as normally as possible. To the choruses of ‘you can’t’ that surrounded him, the message at home was ‘let’s find a way’. He stayed in mainstream school. He learned to ride a bike; he would navigate by feeling with his foot for the edge of the grass that lined the side of his road. He played rugby union, in the position of ‘blindside flanker’. (Now, he says, when he does motivational speaking, that’s his one good joke.)
One time, when he was a teenager, he was coming home from school on his skateboard when the wheels of his board hit a rock. He smacked the back of his head against a low brick wall and lost consciousness. When his parents got to the hospital, the doctor informed them that they suspected Formston might have sustained some vision damage, as he couldn’t look at the light. His parents laughed, told the doctor that it was fine, his eyes didn’t work, but could they just make sure his brain was okay? The doctor, incensed that they’d let their son take that kind of risk, stormed out.
Getting around on land, having to memorise every kerb and pothole, was – and is – exhausting for Formston. In the water, though, he felt at ease. Narrabeen is a surf town – it gets a name-check in The Beach Boys’ Surfin’ USA – and as Formston wa
