Ronald Broadnax is an educated and analytical man, accustomed to working out knotty problems. After all, that's what electrical engineers do: They spend their days patiently sorting through glitches and figuring things out.

Yet Broadnax spent several seconds being mystified by the obvious on that summer day in 1998 when the road-construction flagman disappeared.

He was driving along Mineral Springs Road, heading to his home in Durham County from his job at IBM in Research Triangle Park. A section of the road was being repaved, causing traffic in both directions to share the single clear lane. Ahead of Broadnax, a worker held a sign that said "STOP" on one side, and "SLOW" on the other.

The flagman was there. Then he wasn't there.

People don't just disappear, of course. But Broadnax knew only what he could see. And what he couldn't see -- at least for a few moments -- was the road-crew flagman. Broadnax recalls this thought passing through his mind: "Where is that guy?"

When he next saw him, the flagman was leaping out of the way of Broadnax's vehicle, lest he be run over.

That was the moment, as much as any, in which Broadnax became a blind man.

He'd known the moment was coming, of course. Unless you're the victim of a catastrophic accident, blindness doesn't surprise you. Broadnax, 53, compares the process of going blind to the onset of gray hair: It's slow and stealthy, a barely discernible change that defies any daily attempt to measure its progress.

He'd known for years that his vision was deteriorating. First he'd had to get glasses. Then he'd asked for a 17-inch monitor for his office computer, and then a 19-inch one. Finally, Broadnax had taken to simply leaning into the monitor until his nose was just a few inches away.

Yet, perversely, he could still drive. Broadnax could still see big things, such as buildings and cars, if he was far enough away from them. Only when he got close did those things disappear into the dead zones in his vision.

That's where the road-crew flagman went. Broadnax knew the dead zones were there, but he hadn't understood how far they had encroached into his vision. When he got home, he handed his car keys to his wife. He hasn't driven since that day.

It took Broadnax seven years to take the next step, however. It wasn't until September of this year that he arrived at a blandly modern brick building near downtown Raleigh and checked in for a short residency at the N.C. Rehabilitation Center for the Blind.

Broadnax needed to learn how to be blind.

Coming into focus

Life gave Broadnax a number of clues that the rehab center was in his future. It just took him a while to tune in to them.

He was reared in the Rockingham County town of Eden, north of Greensboro, the youngest of nine children born to a farmer and his wife. Broadnax's grandmother was sightless from the beginning -- Broadnax's beginning, that is -- but he attached no particular significance to it.

It was just the way it was. Broadnax was too young to ponder the implications.

In the early 1970s, when Broadnax was a teenager, his oldest brother developed retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive ailment that sometimes ends in total blindness. "By the time he was 30, he was using a cane," Broadnax says.

Still, his brother's ailment had no wider resonance. "At the time, we never thought of it as something that was hereditary," he says. "Never thought we could be next in line."

The realization that all the Broadnax children should be concerned about blindness came more than a decade later, when another brother developed vision problems. That's when Broadnax started paying attention. The oldest brother was living in another state when his sight failed, but the second brother was still living in Eden. Broadnax got a play-by-play description of going blind.

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