But that hasn’t stopped him from pursuing his dream of flying. As a cadet commander in the local squadron of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), Sergeant Parks has not only flown airplanes; he has risen through the ranks and now supervises up to 15 CAP cadets.
“Nobody in the Civil Air Patrol is ever going to tell you that you can’t do something,” he says.
“He’s come out of his shell a lot since he first came here,” says Lt. Col. James Jordan, commander of the Bangor-Brewer composite CAP squadron. “The other cadets really look up to him.”
Lieutenant Colonel Jordan recalled an honor guard presentation two summers ago in which Parks participated. “He performed flawlessly. He counts the steps, and does everything from internal pictures in his mind
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But his biggest thrill was learning to fly.
A tall, strongly-built young man (who can put away two heaping plates of spaghetti at a sitting), Parks is modest about his accomplishments. “I’ve landed the thing, but the pilot got it in pretty close,” he says. “I can see well enough to distinguish the horizon, so I can sort of tell the tilt.”
Maj. Terry Dauphinee, the CAP pilot who trained Parks on the CAP’s Cessna 182 airplane, relates a different story. “He asked me, ‘How will I know if I’m really flying the plane?’ So when we were coming in, I asked for permission to touch him, and I put both my hands on his shoulders. His whole face lit up.”
In addition to his CAP activities, Parks has attended YMCA and church camps, and participated in a missionary trip to Honduras in 2005, where he helped build three houses and a medical clinic. At camp, he engaged in outdoor activities from sea kayaking to whitewater rafting to rock climbing.
He’s proud of his ability to inspire others. He recalls learning how to rappel down a rock face at a 2002 CAP encampment. “It was scary,” he said. “But as soon as I did it, this other kid, who was really terrified, said, ‘If Parks can do it, I can do it.’”
“I’ve always wanted him to have a lot of experiences,” says his mother, Susan Hall, who has raised two legally blind children (an older sister, Catherine, attends the University of Maine at Farmington). “Other people can see a picture, but he can’t.”
But he has enough sight to avoid bumping into the furniture in his house, or to inform his mother that one of four bulbs in a fixture above the dinner table has gone out.
Park’s mom joined the Civil Air Patrol after his affinity for it became apparent. “Pass the salt please, Lieutenant,” he says to her. Parks enjoys ribbing her; she gets her son back at encampments, where he has to salute her. ”I don’t always tell him when I put my hand down,” she says.
Parks plans to attend college, but hasn’t decided where he wants to go. An honor student at Bangor High School, Parks is keenly interested in computer programming, and wants to design software for the blind. He does all his schoolwork in Braille and emails it to his instructors. He carries around an instrument called a BrailleNote that provides audio and Braille readouts, enabling him to perform a whole range of tasks that would have been impossible a generation ago. After college, Parks hopes to write programs for the next generation of BrailleNote users.
