Tainted eye drops cost Aerial Gilbert more than her sight. Her first marriage crumbled; bird-watching and jewelry making became memories.

“Most relationships don’t survive those kinds of losses,” she said. “You discover friends who can handle changes like that, others who disappear.”

Gilbert is a Humboldt State University graduate, a member of the USRowing Adaptive National Team and the outreach director for Guide Dogs for the Blind. She visited the North Coast Nov. 28-Dec. 2 as a guest of LightHouse for the Blind, which has been providing solutions for those living with vision loss since 1902.

Gilbert’s been blind since 1988.

“For the first couple of years, I felt the responsibility to make people OK about my vision loss,” she said. “If they shut their eyes, they can’t imagine being able to do anything. Their response is to feel terribly sorry.”

Gilbert said her blindness frightened some and made others feel vulnerable. Her mother wanted to “take care of me like a child.” A well-liked professor at Mills College avoided contact.

“He was really nervous about seeing me again, and then he said, ‘Aerial, you are no different than before. The only blind people I see are begging on the street.’ Did he think my brain fell out of my head?”

Her mouth broke into a wide grin. Hedda, her guide dog, hopped up to nuzzle her arm. Laughter, humor and wit filled a 90-minute interview that felt a third as long.

“I haven’t found a creative way to drive yet, so my mom helps me with that,” she said. “There were some things I had to write off. Like bird-watching. It’s like OK, if I can’t see, that’s done.”

But life unfolds in surprising ways. She retrained as a medical transcriber and the man who trained her became her husband.

“I’ve never seen him,” she said of Larry Lobel. “We were hiking Catalina Island when he saw a bird he didn’t know. I asked him about the size, the color, the eye bands and how long its beak was.”

Gilbert called it a canyon wren; the picture in her husband’s birding book confirmed it.

“I guess I’m a bird-watcher in a different way,” she said.

Told that a birding-by-ear seminar in Arcata last spring included discussion of a downloadable program for birders linking sounds to picture, Gilbert locked in.

“You mean for my iPod?” she asked. “I’ve got the new one, the little nano, and it is so cool. It’s not completely accessible, but I’ve memorized the clicks.”

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They are arranged marriages, but they don’t last a lifetime.

“Sometimes it doesn’t work, but that’s really unusual,” Gilbert said of guide dog pairings.

The blind go to either the California campus in San Rafael or the Oregon campus outside of Portland for two to four weeks of training. By the middle of the first week, they are paired with a dog that’s spent four to five months in formal guide work training after being raised by one of the 1,000 puppy handlers in eight western states. There is no charge for the service.

Webster was her first guide dog, but a degenerative spine disease prompted a guide dog version of disability. He retired to a sheep ranch in Pendleton and has been gone for years, but Gilbert said she’s still close to those who took him in.

“The first retirement and getting a new dog is the most difficult,” she said. “That’s the dog that changed your life.”

P.J. came next.

“Just a dog with letters,” Gilbert recalled thinking. “Then I met him. Tall, smelled different from the other dog. He had one brown ear — that was weird. I didn’t know if I’d be able to get used to him.”

P.J. had no inhibitions. The first night, she said he draped his head across Gilbert’s neck and filled her heart by morning.

A yellow Labrador, Audrey, made Gilbert work for her approval.

“The trainer told me I would have to earn her respect, but that once I had it, there would be a depth of relationship unlike anything else,” Gilbert said. “It took a month, but it was true.”

Cancer struck Audrey 18 months into their relationship and Gilbert nursed her the next six.

“I used a cane and kept her with me,” Gilbert recalled. “I pureed her food. She was special to me, not the kind of dog who could live with someone she hadn’t bonded with. I loved her too much.”

There was no recrimination in her tone; no indication that she would do it any differently. Much of the last two decades has featured Gilbert filling the void of one loss by embracing something new. It’s a reservoir of resilience that seems bottomless.

Gilbert said her last two guide dogs, Deanne and Hedda, are polar opposites.

“Deanne was such a unique dog — an old soul at 2,” she said. “The depth of the relationship, the surprises, the things she understood about my every movement. The connection was immediate.”

It takes time to build that connection, she said, the nonverbal communication that links the blind to their guide dogs in ways no amount of training can do.

Deanne served for eight years before retiring to a 40-acre vineyard in the Napa Valley, where Gilbert said Deanne now volunteers as half of a pet therapy team that visits the local hospital.

“It’s the kind of retirement every woman would love,” Gilbert said. “The woman she lives with is one of our board members. She takes Deanne to her work every day and never leaves her home alone.”

As the agency outreach coordinator, Gilbert had a say in her next dog.

“‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ should be her theme song,” Gilbert said of the 7-year-old jet-black German shepherd who has been her eyes for the last five years. “I wanted a large male shepherd and tried out two up in Oregon. Then out came Hedda — a small female, bouncing, leaping and springing all over the place. I’m usually the kind that weighs the pros and cons before making decisions. Right then, I told them this is the one. I want her.”

Hedda apparently feels likewise, lunging at her leash and howling as Gilbert and three Humboldt Bay Rowing Association juniors carried a boat to the water.

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Gilbert is a self-identified technology geek who has learned to appreciate photography differently.

“I point at the sound, take the picture and hear what other people see in the photograph,” she said. “I get such a kick out of it. Sometimes people have to line me up.”

That’s exactly how it works when she rows as a single.

“It’s like getting to drive. I’m totally responsible.”

She takes care in who she picks to go alongside or behind to keep her on target. After initially balking at her desire to compete against the sighted singles, race officials hooked her up with a headset and figured it out.

“It was windy, the earpiece was squeaking. I finally just ripped it off and rowed while they screamed at me down the course.”

She finished fourth and hasn’t looked back. The 2004 inductee into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame identified that race as her most memorable sporting achievement.

Much of the weekend was about memories for Gilbert, who left with a promise to return annually and an oar from the first boat in HSU rowing history.

“I’ve already got the brackets to put it up on my bedroom wall,” she said on Monday. “I’m going to hang my medals from it.”

HBRA President Jerry Simone and the three HBRA junior rowers who went out with Gilbert Friday will remember something else.

“Toward the end of the row, Shenae (Bishop), in bow, called for a closed-eye drill that is common in rowing, so they all rowed blind together, beautifully,” he said.