Fear of heights

   I believe my first misadventure with heights occurred back when I was about four years old, or thereabouts. There was a swing in a tree out behind the duplex we lived in, in Youngstown, Ohio. My dad was pushing me in it and I was going higher and higher and suddenly was terrified.
   I don't know what terrified me. I know that at the apex of the swing there was really nothing between me and the ground. I'm just not sure how I knew that was a bad thing.

don't look down

   Perhaps I fell one day, from someplace high. Perhaps I fell that day, it was long enough ago that my memory is perhaps cloudy enough to not remember the possibly almost tragic result of my ride on that swing. For whatever reason, the fear of being in a high place has been with me for a long time.
   Fortunately, I have been able to avoid situations where I might actually have to deal with this fear. Any time I have had to deal with it, it has been something which crept up on me that I was unable to plan ahead for.


   Back in 1973, my Dad and my brother Bob and I made a trip back to Gibsons, B.C. for a visit. My mum had passed away in the spring and we just wanted to connect with the family we had there. One day, my Dad, my Uncle Keith and my brother and I decided to climb Soames Hill. Soames Hill towers over the main harbour at Gibsons and provides a wonderful view of the town and surrounding islands. We set out for its base one afternoon and began climbing. At the beginning, it was a fairly gradual ascent. Little by little, though, things got steeper and the landscape more difficult to traverse. At some point, I found myself inching my way up a sheer rock face. It had been a path which simply narrowed, got steeper and then petered out into merely footholds. I had been looking up for the most part, trying to find the easiest way. There stopped being easy ways and I made the mistake of looking down. I was about a hundred feet up in the air and knew, from where I was and what was below me, that I would not survive a fall from there. I was paralyzed, almost sick to my stomach, and seemingly unable to go up or back down. Eventually, my Dad and Uncle talked me through taking very small steps forward and I finally found myself at the top of the rock face. From there, things were easy and we ended up at the peak of Soames Hill, looking out over Gibsons. We took pictures up there but none of them contain any of the real terror I'd undergone getting there.

The view I survived to see.

   I think little bits of that day have followed me around--a watermark of fear had been created which has been etched indelibly on my psyche. Part of the dynamic going on was the feeling I had that falling off that rock face would have ended the almost unbearable fear I had been experiencing. I now wonder how many other people who might have been in similar but perhaps even more dire and inescapable situations simply decided to jump and end the fear.
   I now approach high rise balcony railings very gingerly and test them before I actually lean up against them. I then am able to lean out and look over or simply take in the view. Often, however, I almost forget what I am doing and suddenly what feels like tiny electrical shocks pass up the backs of my legs as I realize once again just how high up I am. I almost imagine there is no railing and I am suspended in space, then falling.
   In what seems to me an unthinkable and almost evil  incongruity, it is much easier to climb to a high place than it is to get back down. I found myself needing to get on to our roof last weekend to check things out before the remnants of Hurricane Sandy blew through. Getting up on the roof was not an issue. My unreasonable fear kicked in, however, when it was time to get back down. I had had a dream earlier that week that I found myself suddenly on a rickety and narrow footbridge suspended over a several hundred foot drop into a river.  I was terrified and wanted to jump, to end the fear. Little bits of this dream came back to me while looking down from the edge of the roof. Jumping off the roof, in a twisted way, seemed almost preferable to the fear involved in being suspended up high for the three or four seconds it would take to orient myself on the top of the ladder. I approached the ladder more than once and had to back off. I have been on the roof several times before and had to keep reminding myself of this as I finally negotiated my way back down.

   I even found it difficult to to Google fear of heights, in order to get a pic or two for this post. It is way too easy to superimpose myself into many of the pictures you find when you do this particular search. Each and every time I got that same electrical pulse up the backs of my legs and an almost metallic taste in my mouth, in my fear.
   This loathing of heights generally does not impede my ability to function normally on a daily basis (apart from making it a bit of an adventure to clean my eaves troughs) and I have never had any particular need to address it in any corrective way. The technical term for a fear of heights is acrophobia. There is apparently some debate as to its cause and treatment. Some believe it occurs as the result of an early childhood trauma, others believe it is an innate part of a person that they are born with. Some believe it has something to do with how we process the visual cues we need in order to perform motor activities. As a brief example, the visual cues available to me at the top of the ladder (grey sky, other rooftops) are vastly different than the ones at the bottom of the ladder (solid earth being one of them).

   Fear of heights is not something I am particularly ashamed of. It is certainly common enough. And it almost makes sense, to have some level of fear of potentially dangerous situations. At least up to the point where it paralyzes you.
   So you will never see me working on a skyscraper and you will never see me piloting a hot air balloon and you will never see me rock climbing in the Grand Canyon. My friends will all be in low places and, hopefully, the only lofty things I will need to deal with will be my aspirations!