Published Oct 23, 2007
The AIG and I went to a Haunted House last weekend. It was kind of a lark — we were having a night on the town, walking down the street, and there was an empty ticket line for a haunted house. Seemed rather season-appropriate, so we went in. And then the AIG shivered in anticipated fear as we made our way to the head of the line to get in, and screamed her way through the (admittedly very well-done) haunted house.
I laughed for a while, but, the next day, we again found ourselves facing an unexpected attraction, this one a hundred-year-old carousel. I brought my camera on to take some cute photos, and soon was panning back and forth as I looked through the viewfinder. Then I took my head out of my camera, and, goodness! wasn’t that a fast carousel? And wasn’t my horsey going up and down so quickly? And weren’t things zooming back and forth as I brought my head back from the eyepiece? And, in no time, I was gripping the pole as tight as I could.
So clearly fear is universal, especially fear of trivial things. The carousel reminded me of how silly it was when I was briefly terrified in my Costa Rica zip line1 jungle canopy tour2 — zipping from tree platform to tree platform, I reached one where we broke out from the jungle, over a canyon below. I sat there, suspended in my harness from the zip line, and told the tour guide that I couldn’t do it — I was too scared. “OK,” he said, with sympathetic eyes. Then he pushed me and I shot out into the void. Of course, it was tremendous fun — just the unexpected change was shocking.
I felt more more anticipation-fear at the Vietcong tunnels at Cu Chi in Vietnam. Actually, it was fortunate — we came around a right-angle turn to suddenly see the exceedingly small entrance to the tunnels, which were designed in the first place to be small and cramped for the Vietnamese of the 1960s, who were something like 5’4” and 115 lbs. on average.
(Other people’s photos, found on Google, for illustration purposes.)
Good thing I didn’t have to spend a lot of time anticipating that! I wonder how scared I’d be if I went back there again? Either way, fear can be kind of… fun!
1 This is the actual tour I took.
2 This is just the most similar footage I could find on YouTube, just we were much higher up.