We Have Nothing to Fear But Spiders and Heights

I am afraid of spiders. I grew up in Georgia where we had lots of spiders, some of which were venomous. The fiddleback, as we called the brown recluse spider, was much dreaded, and my sister was recently bitten by one with ensuing pain and medical treatment. We weren’t sure whether she would lose a leg for a while there. The black widow was hard to avoid. Even the non-venomous spiders came with some scary folklore. For example, the writing spider, as we called the orb weave spider, was always listening for your name so he could write it in his web, whereupon you would be cursed and die. To complicate matters, it was considered very bad luck to kill a spider.

One of the most harrowing events of my childhood was when I was biking through the woods to my after school job at a small textile factory. I rode into an enormous web across the path, and the biggest spider I ever saw jumped on my shirt. When I extricated myself from the web and got the beast off me, I saw that the meadow I was riding through was riddled with these giant webs. It took me an hour to go about 100 yards as I was panic stricken and afraid to get near any of the webs.

As a boy, I dreamed of emigrating to Australia and having a pet kangaroo like Skippy of TV fame. When I found out about the funnel spider and all the deadly arachnids on that continent, this dream was dashed. I don’t think I can go to Australia at all, even as a tourist unless they eradicate the spiders.

Here in the Hudson Valley, the spiders are harmless. If they are not, please do not inform me. They are everywhere, even in the house, and I have learned to live with them. Mrs Vache Folle takes care of any spiders that want killing. Over the years, my spider fear has abated considerably, even though I never underwent any kind of treatment. Oddly, the daddy long leg never scared me at all, and I delighted in throwing them on my sister, who was scared of them.

On the other hand, I have developed a fear of heights that I never had before. When I was a teenager, I rappelled down cliffs and into caves. I hiked along precipices without anxiety. I went hot air ballooning. Being at a great height was not problematic. I never jumped out of a plane or scaled El Capitan or anything like that, but I was not height phobic. That is, until the incident at Moro Rock.

It was 1997 or so when Mrs VF and I visited Sequoyah National Park. One of the must see features of the park is Moro Rock, a triangular piece of rock that juts out over a drop of thousands of feet. There is about a quarter mile trail from the parking area out to the point where there is a magnificent view. I didn’t know if it was the altitude of 7,000 feet plus, but I became short of breath as we neared the point, and the guard rail, a single rail less than waist high, began to seem to me to be designed to trip people and send them over the edge. The path was so narrow along a ledge that I couldn’t avoid looking down, and returning hikers meant squeezing up against the rocks or the ledge to allow passage. Little children were running on the path, and I was sure one of them would fall. At the point, I was suddenly seized with panic at the idea that I would lose control of myself and jump off the cliff.

It took a long time to make the trek back down the trail. I hugged the rock and fought back panic. Mrs VF, seeing my distress, decided to torment me by pretending to lose her balance or skipping along the precipice. We were having marital difficulties then, and she apparently didn’t like me very much. From that time on, I have had a problem with heights. I don’t know why. Even getting up on a ladder bothers me. Air travel and being in a tall building does not trouble me, but don’t ask me to stand on the edge of a cliff or to watch someone else stand on the edge. That 1997 vacation was hard to get through as Sequoyah and Yosemite, the main stops on the tour, both involve cliffs. We went horseback riding along cliffs, and I thought I would not make it. We went to the top of the domes at Yosemite, and I couldn’t wait to get down. We foolishly hiked down, and the trail was narrow and fraught with many opportunities to fall.

I wonder what I will become afraid of next.