While some fears are accrued through information from other people, there are those that come from within. My personal fear of heights seems to have been growing imperceptibly since a time in my childhood when I was able to hold my foot out over the ledge at the Grand Canyon to frighten my mom.
My fear has morphed from a stomach-dropping feeling of "Oh wow, that's a long way down" to "I will surely die within a few minutes because I am going to fall off of this [fill in the blank]." Being a Minnesotan, I have plenty of flat ground to walk on from day to day, which doesn't really stir my nerves. But it comes up time and again when I travel.
In Turkey, it took all the determination I could muster to clamber up a rickety, rusting ladder to get up to a cave dwelling in Cappadocia. In that case, it was more fear of the ladder than of the height, and it was fairly easy to conquer.
In Aguas Calientes, Peru, on the suggestion of a hotel staffer, I went for a hike to Putucusi, a mound of a mountain from the top of which you can look across to a panorama of Machu Picchu. The hike was going along swimmingly until we rounded a corner and were confronted with a huge, nearly vertical ladder clinging to the side of the mountain.
"Well, we're done," my husband said. I approached the ladder, touched its wooden rungs, which were dark and slippery with absorbed rain, and craned my neck up to see the top, which I could not. I knew that I probably could get up it, but coming down would require either heavy animal tranquilizers or a cherry picker, neither of which was readily available. We stood there as a few other people balked at the ladder and then ascended.
I shook my headI couldn't make myself do it. The longer we stood there, the more nervous I got, and I talked myself out of it. I've never been able to live it down in my own head. "What could I have seen and felt up there?" I ask myself over and over again, knowing full well that the view was surely amazing, and a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
I thought about that when I was standing at the base of Temple V in Tikal, again craning my neck up to trace the lines of the ladder-like "staircase" that leads almost vertically to a narrow look-out at the top. I was also thinking about how I'd heard that they shut down climbing up the site's Temple I because someone had fallen to their death.
Only a few people were climbing up; many more were on the ground, gasping at the fearsome verticality of the steps. I knew that I would be terrified going up and in some new and undefined state of beyond-frightened on the way down. I also knew that I was still kicking myself from the last time I let fear win. "What the hell," I said, "you only go around once." And then I chewed a homeopathic calming pastille, took a deep breath and started to climb.
Did I like it at the top? Sort of. I liked the incredible view of the other temples, and the endless green of the surrounding rainforest. I liked the fact that I made it up and was challenging myself. I did not like the narrowness of the platform at the top, which obliged people to cling to the roof comb as other passed by. I did not like the woozy, spinning feeling that I got when I made the ill-considered and probably involuntary decision to look down. But I enjoyed what I could of it before making my husband descend ahead of me and coach me down as I grasped at each tread/rung and clung so tightly that bruises appeared on my shins later that day.
Everyone's fears are different, and I can't insist that someone "should" do this or that. All I know is that even though I was scared out of my mind, I am happy that I climbed Temple V in equal proportion to my disappointment in not having climbed Putucusi. It was a difficult step to take, but one that I think will take me to wonderful new places in the future.
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