Saturday, January 24, 2015

Ways To Go

Heights?

So, as I mentioned, I just found out that my friend Julie Zickefoose is afraid of having a clam clamp down on her foot.  I thought that was sort of random, as phobias go. Until she supplied the missing element, which is that the clam clamps down on her foot and pulls her under the water, which truly is terrifying. I, too, am afraid of drowning. I can't stand movies that depict, in any scene, someone being pulled underwater by a rope looped on a foot, or a chain and the combined weight of fellow slaves, and drowned. Approximately 40% of movies produced in the last decade contain such a scene. I don't go to the movies anymore unless Gene Wilder is certified to be in them.

And this is in spite of something I take to be true--that drowning is actually an almost pleasant way to die. We know this because many people have drowned and been yanked back to life, and they report back. Regardless, it's a fear of mine. I've never hauled clams into the scenario, though. It would have to be one big-ass clam.

I'm not entirely certain I have any specific working phobias anymore. I'm not afraid of spiders. One day I was in our cabin, which is practically a spider B&B, with a friend who does have a spider phobia (a very loud one, in fact), and I went to put on a sweatshirt I'd draped across the furniture the day before, and my friend screamed bloody murder. "Don't put that on! It probably has a spider in it!" she emoted, and then instructed me to turn it inside out first to check. So I did. And a big-ass spider fell out of it. I really never considered the possibility. I'll have to ask her  how she got the notion, if she ever comes back.

I'm not afraid of snakes, if someone hands me one nicely, although the unexpected ones can startle me something fierce; and I think the whole idea of snakes that climb trees or swim is a bad one, but we don't have swimming or tree-climbing snakes here. Basically, I'm not interested in dying, although I don't have any real objections to being dead. Later.

But back when I had some of your standard phobias, they all had something to do with dying. I was
afraid of heights. Not heights precisely, but falling off them. And I was afraid of water. Water is drowny, and I swim like a pebble. And--here's the only interesting one--I was afraid of railway trains. It's called siderodromophobia. Just that diesel smell and the brake screech could do me in. I know where I got it. I got it when Mom took me by train to North Dakota to visit Grandma. I was about three. The train cars were fine, but for some reason we kept having to go from one to another, you know, to eat or something, and the in-between bits were hellish. There was some kind of terrifying and totally inadequate platform with a pleated accordion curtain around it, and the whole contraption had all the integrity of a voting booth going sixty miles per hour during an earthquake. You get a terror when you're three, and it adheres to you.

And all that made the incident at Harper's Ferry especially interesting. I was there hiking with friends, in high school. We'd done a few miles, and it was getting dark, or we were getting hungry, or tired, or some such calamity, and we realized that we could slice off several miles of the return trek if we took the railroad bridge across the river. No one was allowed on the bridge, but this is not an important detail when you're a teenager. Trains didn't come by that often. Everyone agreed on the new plan, and we all started across.

The bridge was very high. And very over the water. And not designed for pedestrians. We had to nimbly traverse the railroad ties, and between each tie was the roaring river, far below. Getting across was the work of a minute, for most of us. For those of us paralyzed by fear, somewhat longer. I was bringing up the rear, by a lot, when the train whistle sounded behind us. It was coming out of the tunnel and headed our way. The bridge forked partway across and some of us chose the left branch and some chose the right. I don't remember which I chose. All I remember is wondering if it was possible to die three ways at once.

I haven't been afraid of railway trains since. You can only get so scared, and then you're either dead or you've moved on. I do turn my sweatshirts inside out at the cabin.

54 comments:

  1. There's nothing like actually experiencing the phenomena that one is afraid of to make you no longer afraid of them. When I waited tables, I used to have nightmares that I would be working alone, go into the kitchen for a bit, and come out to find the dining room full of people all needing to be attended to at once. And then, finally, it actually happened. And you know what? I was fine. Everyone got fed, I reaped beaucoup tops, and I never had that nightmare again. Plus I wanted to work alone all the time because it turned out top be so lucrative.

    I can't think of anything I'm really phobic about now. I am fearful of dying -- not death, mind you. But the process. I hope that however I go, it's quick and painless. The idea of doing a slow death spiral at the end sounds horrific.

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    1. I still have dreams of being in a rickety old Jeep with a load of mail and it's starting to get dark and I've hardly gotten rid of any of it, and it makes me anxious, and then after a while I realize I don't care. Which never happened in real life. (The not caring part.)

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  2. Wow. Reading this made me feel a bit anxious and I'm not afraid of any of those things. Process of dying? Yes, plus I'd rather stick around. I used to have a flying phobia and even went through hypnosis for it. Then I was still afraid of flying, but I was calm about it. I read an essay by Pioneer Woman about her flying phobia, and realized that what I feared was how awful the FEAR itself felt. So I gave up the phobia and now I am totally indifferent to flying. Whew...

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    1. I used to be afraid of fear, when I was having panic attacks. I still kinda hate it.

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  3. I am afraid of pissing off my wife!
    the Ol'Buzzard

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    1. I'm sure you have good reason, Ol'.

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    2. That's not a phobia; that's your survival instinct, bud! Be afraid. Be very afraid.... Bwa-ha-ha!

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  4. I remember sitting and talking with a friend on a train track near my house with our bikes parked nearby. We heard the train whistle but were so used to hearing it, we forgot that we were in the way of the train. At the last minute we pulled our bikes off the rail, pulled to the side and I will never forget the rush of air that almost pulled in again as the train went by.

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    1. Eww. One time after I had just learned to swim and was all proud, I swam out to a friend's boat, aiming for the ladder in the back, and when he turned around and saw me closing in, he had this look of horror and cut the engine. I didn't know about staying away from props. I was a foot away.

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    2. Holy hell. How can I reserve drowning as a potential exit, now that you've bloodied the waves with propellers? I imagine them unconnected to any craft, but spinning like chain-saw frisbees just beneath the waves. Just-averted incidents seem particularly traumatic. I wonder if your friend had nightmares.

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    3. Yeah. I think we all have memories of some complete-but-near miss that we can summon up whenever our eyelids close. Hey, if you're not supposed to go up the ladder, why do they put it there?

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  5. Up near Bellingham, Wa., there's a very fast, very silent commuter train that comes whipping around corners with no warning except a slight vibration of the track. The track is between the road and the sea cliffs. That was such a close call with death. Fellow grad student saved my life.

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    1. It is a plumb miracle we ever made it into our thirties.

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  6. Scary. Both the post and the comments. Another phobia to add to my bag, along with the drowning and the airplanes and the choking on hard candy. Oh, and the getting old.

    Murr, if some students went left and some went right, how did you all survive? I'm hyperventilating just thinking that some of your group didn't make it.

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    1. I'm still not worried about getting old. Just stopping getting old. Um, I was dead last and I made it, so I guess the answer is we all made it off the bridge before the train caught up to us.

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    2. Ah, that explains it.

      I'm worried about getting old because I've seen a few too many elderly in nursing homes or hospital beds and it doesn't look like fun.

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    3. I do find myself giving more thought to those end-days scenarios now. Not obsessively; just, is there a plan, man?

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  7. I know what you mean about childhood fears that linger into adulthood. When I was 6 or so, one of the neighborhood kids told me some horrible stories about death and destruction from tornadoes; she actually made it sound as though they were alive and sentient and intentionally lethal. I remember running home, occasionally looking up in terror at the lightly overcast sky, and hiding in the basement until my mother came looking for me. To this day, when the sirens go off, I get panicky. I realize that tornadoes are nothing to sneeze at, and that there's nothing wrong with a self-preservation-type fear, but mine goes well past that and into the realm of phobia. I can still hear Connie saying, "And then, the tornado decided to come back and finish off the town!"

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    1. I remember similar tales about hell and eternity! Ha ha! The things kids say!

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  8. Someone in your FB comments said he's not scared of heights, just edges.That's my problem!
    By the way, down here, there are snakes that shinny up trees and snakes that swim.Quite a few.

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    1. Well, I don't swim worth a durn, and now trees are totally out of the question, although I still walk under them, so...oh crap.

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  9. I suspect it is my innate laziness but I don't do phobias. All that shrieking and anxiety is exhausting. I don't do snakes well, but can look from a safe distance. And even appreciate their beauty. Except the time I found myself swimming with one which swam much better than I do. Much, much better. I held my breath and sank to the bottom while it zipped over my head.

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    1. You're in the same area as Dinahmow, ain'tcha?

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    2. Same country, but a considerable distance away.

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    3. But you both have kangaroos...right? Right?

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  10. I stopped worrying about dying after I started watching "I survived, Beyond and Back" on television. It's a show about people who have died and have been brought back to life. Virtually all of the speakers wish they had stayed dead and they'd explain where they went and what they did. Each person had a different view of where they went and who they saw. It gave me a softer view of death.

    Oh, I did die a couple of years ago, in a hospital bed at St. Vincent. I had just had an aortic valve replacement surgery and five days later, I went into complete heart block, where my atria (the top two quadrants of my heart) refused to communicate with the ventricles (the lower quadrants). Fortunately, I was wearing a heart monitor, so a code blue was called. I came back into my body when a nurse rolled me over. I was rushed to the "cath lab" where my cardiologist put in a temporary pacemaker and that was replaced with a permanent one later that day.

    While my heart was doing its weird thing, I felt like I was asleep. No tunnel, no lights, just sleeping. Not a bad way to go! Dying doesn't seem like as big a thing to me now.

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    1. Some deaths are easier than others. Glad you opted back in, for our sake! And still ticking. Literally.

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  11. My nightmares mostly involve airplanes, usually ones crashing on or near me. I'm not sure why that is, but over the years I've had various airplane-crashing scenario nightmares. Sometimes I'm on the plane. Mostly I'm observing one come down very close to me. The other nightmare is trying to dial a phone in an emergency and not being able to.

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    1. OOoh I have that one too! All I have to do is punch in the numbers but my fingers are too fat or shaky or the keyboard needs translating...yes.

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  12. I can't think of anything I'm afraid of, not even dying. I just don't want to go before I'm ready. You know, forty or fifty years from now.
    Having a train coming up behind you must have been really scary, I'm glad you survived.

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    1. Now if I'd been sensible, I would have been afraid of driving drunk and hitchhiking and a few other things.

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  13. Is that a picture of you and Dave on the roof of your house? All three photos are great. I hope you don't mind if I save a copy of the spider webs. Spiders are one of my favourite things.

    You've made me realise I'm no longer afraid of anything, not even death and dying. It's a pity it's taken me until my 70th year to realise this, but better late than never.

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    1. That is we! The spiderweb is in front of our house too. I absolutely love that picture. Hope you can get a decent copy off this. And I am less afraid of death than I was when I was younger. I hope that trend continues.

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    2. Oh, I love spiders, too! We have so many of them on our property because we have a lot of trees and shrubs. In late summer, they build their webs all over the yard and over the outside of our windows at night. We dare not walk around the yard after dark. Some spiders decide to come into the house, and we let them be. We have an arrangement with them: we traverse the floor, and the walls and ceilings are theirs.

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  14. I'm surprised no one's mentioned claustrophobia. That's really my only phobia these days...probably from some childhood stressful situation, I don't know. But I do know that if I am in the back seat of a cab in Kathmandu that was meant to hold three people uncomfortably, and we are 5, and I'm in the middle in the back, well, I gotta get out. NOW. Funny how uncontrollable it is.

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    1. That is EXACTLY how I feel in a cab in Kathmandu. Actually, I just had my first real experience of claustrophobia ever (I kind of have the opposite), and it was horrible, and it was in a dream. I was supposed to try on a dress in a closed box (I was in the closed box) with no room to raise my arms and the dress got tangled up in my head and I had to kick my way out of the box. It was horrible. Hate to think my unconscious is picking out new phobias for me to try.

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  15. There was a Lutheran Church camp near Harper's Ferry that I had to go to when I was about 13. Must've been nearby. Being dead isn't a worry so much as the process of getting dead. Most of us don't get the chance to decide how we want to go. Quick and painless would be ideal, however.

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    1. Me too! It wasn't in West Virginia. Caroline Furnace Lutheran Youth Camp in Strasburg VA, which isn't far away. Were you that cute boy?

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  16. I don't think I have true phobias, but I certainly don't like spiders, mice or snakes to share the area that I am currently occupying. Our home is on the edge of a little woods along the river, so there is a constant turf battle here. I am more than happy to give them the entire outdoors. I just want to have exclusive use of the indoors. I don't think that is a lot to ask. But I am constantly fighting for my space. I've also become much more uncomfortable at the edge of high places as I've gotten older. As long as I look out, and not straight down, I'm ok. Oh, and I am sure that Jono was the cute guy.

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  17. Brilliantly written and fun to read. I can associate with the fears. I fear scorpions.

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    1. I only ever met one. It was in New Mexico. Kind of on the scrawny side. It's possible I'll never meet another one.

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  18. Can't believe you told that railroad bridge story and nobody brought up the movie Stand By Me. But that was a loooooong bridge (trestle, actually). And Stephen King was telling the tale, so ...I don't know what "so"...just....so....you and Stephen King. Maybe HE was the cute boy...naw. Never mind.

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    1. Yeah, no. He wasn't the cute boy. There WAS a cute boy though. Otherwise I'm quite certain I'd still be on the far side of that bridge.

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  19. This is fookin' brilliant. And not just because you exposed my giant clam phobia. Come on. Who isn't afraid of being held underwater by a yard-wide clam? Railroad trestle over rushing river with train coming? Yep, sign me up for the three-way phobia.

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    1. See, I wasn't afraid of being held underwater by a big clam. Not until you mentioned it. I think it will do for a replacement phobia, especially since I never go in the water.

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  20. Cliff magnets. They suck you over the edges of heights.

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    1. Oh, Dudette. That's right. I used to walk across bridges terrified that I would suddenly jump over. And I had no suicidal impulses EVER. Must've been cliff magnets.

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  21. For a while I was afraid of bridges collapsing under me and pulling me down to drown and bleed to death under polluted water. Then the doctor increased my prozac dosage and bridges no longer bother me. I can even stand at the railing of the Fremont bridge during the Providence Bridge Pedal and look dooooooowwwwwnn at the river with complete equanimity.

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    1. I think throwing the "polluted water" in that scenario is sort of special. I have friends who hate the Fremont Bridge because of possible earthquake pancaking. Dave used to climb to the top of the bridge when he was a young pup. I mean the arch!

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