On the Canyon Rim

This is a picture of me, Chris Zimmerman, meditating serenely while sitting calmly in the great outdoors.

Or is it?

No, that's definitely not what was going on.  Great big, ugly fear had wrapped icy fingers around my heart and I was trying to calm myself by sitting down, breathing deeply and closing my eyes.

Why?

...Because I was sitting three feet from the rim of a canyon.  You see that brown dirt in the foreground?  Step off of that and you die.

Why I consented to yet another hiking trip in a canyon is beyond me.  Apparently I'm a slow learner.  Cloudland Canyon was horrible and visiting the Grand Canyon was THE WORST.  Maybe visiting a canyon is like childbirth.  The torture of going through it fades with the beauty of the results.  A couple of years later, you voluntarily sign up to do it all again.

Enthusiasm is catching, so when Josh called sounding all excited and invited us to Bryce Canyon, I ignored my inner demons and said yes. (It's easy to agree to something that's happening in the nebulous future. My son knows this, so he booked the cabin immediately after he hung up from talking to me. He's a sly fox, that boy.)

Don't get me wrong.  It was breathtaking.  It's just that if you make one misstep, you walk off the edge and plunge to your death. Your. Death.  This is not a joke.  People actually do this.  (The number two cause of death in this National Park is by lightning.  That idea did not excite me either.  They suggest that you go inside during storms.  Great advice - except for when we were two hours into a hike when a storm blew in.  There was no "inside" to go into.)    

After our arrival, we decided to take a quick evening stroll on the rim.  Everyone was encouraging me like I was a three-year-old.  "Come on, Mom!  You can do it."  "You're doing great!"  "Nice job, Mom."  "Just a few more minutes."  That sort of thing. Jerry even held my hand.

We climbed higher and higher and the path got narrower and narrower.  Soon even the cheerleading wasn't producing its desired effects upon me.  I felt dizzy and sick and decided to stop.  I blamed it on altitude, sent the others on ahead then sat down under the tree and tried to talk some sense into myself. When I see the picture, I'm kind of proud that I wasn't actually holding on to the tree. 
I'm pretty sure that thought crossed my mind.

As they were coming back down from the lookout point, the family stopped right near me and Josh took out his camera.  Then it happened.  He was right in front of me, just inches from the edge himself when I heard this strange tone in his voice.  "Don't move, Mom." he said sternly.  I panicked.  I knew there must be a snake coiled up behind me and apparently the snake fear trumps the fear of heights fear, because I jumped up, toward the abyss.

"Why did you do that?" my son said.  "I just told you not to move."

"The tone of your voice scared me," I replied.  "Where's the snake?"

"What?"  He was mystified.  "I told you not to move because the canyon was reflected in your sunglasses and I thought that would be an interesting picture."

Our next vacation together better involve water.  And sandy white beaches.

www.StillSwimmingUpstream.com

A Scary October Story

Don't read this post if you frighten easily...

Last week Jessica was visiting and as we stepped outside onto our front porch she screamed one of those screams of sheer terror that I, personally, reserve for snakes. I screamed too as I jumped back and grabbed her, which did nothing to allay her fear I might add.  I had to laugh when she pointed out what we were screaming about - a tiny chameleon on our railing.  Turns out that lizards -- really just miniature snakes with tiny feet when you think about it -- don't bother me at all.  Good to know.

Yesterday I decided to clean the basement and stuck the Swiffer behind my piano.  I captured a whole bunch of pill bugs in various stages of life and was so grossed out by this catch that I put my telescoping feather duster under there.  When I pulled it out again, a big, brown spider was attached to it.  A slender spider, it was easy to identify: brown recluse.  The very name sends shivers of horror up and down my spine!

Either of these events could have sent me -- a card carrying phobic -- over the edge, but together they multiplied my angst exponentially.  I had difficulty sleeping last night.  My entire body was tingling and I was certain that I was in the beginning stages of paralysis.

When I awoke this morning apparently perfectly fine - except emotionally, of course - no one was more surprised than I was.  Emotionally though, I'm a wreck!  Where there's one spider, there's a potential for many more, right? 

My kids had an audio of Charlotte's Web (read by the author) that we listened to endlessly while they were growing up.  You may recall that Charlotte gave birth to countless baby spiders by the tale's end.  Who knows the sex of the spider I threw outside yesterday?  I was in a panic but even if I hadn't been, truthfully I don't know how to tell a spider's gender anyway.  Chances are that even if I did, in the heat of the moment I wouldn't have had the presence of mind to check.

Today I'm going to buy an industrial can of Home Defense and have Jerry spray it this weekend.  I can't do it myself because insecticide creeps me out, but that would be belaboring the obvious now, wouldn't it?

Daytime Nightmares

The cable installer guy said, "You have a lot of black widow spiders in your yard. Your cable box was full of 'em."

The meter reader said, "Don't worry about the black widows, worry about these brown recluse spiders. They're nasty."

The concrete repairman said, "Did you see the big snake in your driveway?"

The utilities man said, "The snakes don't bother me nearly as much as when a lizard drops out of the trees onto my head."

Turns out we've moved to phobia heaven.