Alligator in a Shoe Factory: Fear

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Take no counsel from your fears.”—Stonewall Jackson

“Take the counsel of your fears.”—American Proverb

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—1/30/12—If the creator has ever visited this planet, I have a good idea of where and when that was: England, 1943.

My father still tells a story that he heard from an Army Air Corps friend over 60 years ago. It seems that a B-17 was struck by anti-aircraft fire returning from a bombing run over Germany. The plane’s engines were untouched, but part of the electrical and all of the hydraulic systems were disabled. The situation called for a belly landing after dumping excess fuel because the landing gear was immobilized.

As the bomb and gun crew gathered behind a bulkhead, the crew chief noted that his ventral gunner was missing. Upon nervous inspection, the chief realized that the hatch to the cramped pod could not be manually opened. When he finally found the words recoiling in his larynx, the chief informed the gunner what was about to transpire—a landing that would crush the bottom of the aircraft in order to spare the rest. The young man’s last words were unintelligible over the roar of the engines, but if God was anywhere about in the universe, He surely heard the gunner’s screams.

I suppose I was about ten when I heard my father carelessly tell that story. Sixty years later, I still have nightmares of the runway rising up to meet 20 tons of metal. In between the bomber and the concrete was an acutely conscious airman witnessing his final landing from a vantage better than the pilot’s, but worse than divine providence.

Fundamentalist preachers love black-and-white questions like: “Will you be ready when the black plane of death circles overhead?”

In 2008, at an anti-gay-marriage rally in California, an evangelist asked, “What’s more important—respect for others or the fear of God?”

Of course, only a saint is going to think of others when the bullet with her name on it gets close enough to read. I’m not sure whether I will fear God at that point or fear the bullet, but I’m reasonably sure I won’t be thinking of anyone beside myself. Call me self-absorbed if you like, but no one dies without some personal regrets.

The choice of respecting others or fearing God is complex if one reads the Old Testament and the literature based on it with an open mind.

I recall reading Samson Agonistes as an undergraduate and thinking that Milton neglected to tell Samuel’s story of 300 foxes set on fire to burn the Philistines’ crops because the British moralist surely disapproved of the animals’ torture. Professor Miller assured me that Milton did approve of the fiery deaths, the same way he supported the indiscriminate killing of Philistines. Thousands died and, surely, I argued, some of them were innocent. The professor red-penciled my essay with a yawning “C,” and I’ve been afraid of Milton ever since.

I lost my fear of God, however, a long time ago, but I still pay Him and His creation a nodding respect.

I’ve looked down the barrel of an East German border guard’s AK-47, gone weak in the knees hanging drapes in a ninth-story office, shivered uncontrollably in surgery, and waited for a surgeon to tell me that my wife was going to be OK, so I think I know the emotion I am speaking of. It is not what one feels finger-filtering a horror film or jumping a diamondback rattler on a downhill run in Arizona. Though laughter often allays stress, itdoes not as a rule accompany the real threat of serious bodily injury.

As a long-time member of a municipal recreation center’s board of advisors, I take a proprietary interest in the facility where I exercise a few times a week. This has never been truer than when budget cuts forced the center’s director to eliminate the weight-room supervisors, whose job was to maintain the sign-in sheet and keep kids under twelve safely outside. One blue-shirted employee’s simple presence also added an important element that only I’ve recently come fully to appreciate: civility.

One afternoon, I was using the quadriceps machine while, ten feet away, another patron was using the leg-squat machine. For reasons known only to him, this well-built young man grunted conspicuously with each repetition and, when he finished a set, he dropped 400 pounds several inches on to the weight stand. It was steel on steel, making a noise well in excess of 100 decibels. Finally, I had had all I could take, and I said, in the least challenging voice I could muster, “You know, if you break that machine, no one will be able to use it, including you.”

Leaping to his feet, the heavyweight lifter said, “Mind your own business, Old Man! I’ve paid my dues. You Stupid!”

I denied myself a stress-reducing laugh and said, “Excuse me, but what does that sign behind you say? I can’t read it from here.”

“It says, ‘Please don’t drop the weights.’”

“Well?” I said as my mouth went dry.

“I didn’t drop the weights,” he said, slipping two 45-pound disks from his bar. “This is dropping weights,” he said tossing one disk about ten feet to his left and another to his right.

“No,” I said, rising from my own machine, “That’s not dropping, that’s throwing.” With my heart hammering in my ears, I went to get my jacket and left by the back door. A half-dozen or more people were in the room when the flash point was reached, but no one spoke a word. Quite simply, we were struck dumb with terror. In less than a minute, we’d all become that small Jewish boy, hands overhead, being herded down the street by several Nazi thugs. Fear has a way of multiplying and magnifying the foe.

As a board member, I knew the exercise room has four cameras that record almost everything that goes on but, of course, it never occurred to me to tell the weight hurler that everything he’d done had been captured on a CD. That would have given him something to think about. As for me, I suffered two nights of insomnia thereafter and found several reasons to change my weight-lifting routine.

Fear, however, is not always so palpable.

Some friends of ours recently built their dream retirement home, including a bedroom for their daughter-in-law, who lives 2,000 miles distant. The young woman is germ- and pyrophobic, so her East-coast bedroom features a toilet separated from the shower and sink by four walls and a door. It also has a ground-level exit in case the all-brick house burns on the one weekend a year she’s expected to reside there. It all has to do with compartmentalizing one’s apprehensions, our friends assure us. I wish it were that easy; I can corral my own fears while the sun is up, but they keep jumping the fence at night.

Judging from some crime-statistics, Americans have never been safer, yet the international prophets of doom say that the Death of Nature is just over the horizon, given the untold fingers on untold nuclear devices. As a consequence, I fear I’m a version of that old Frank and Ernest cartoon in which Frank hears Dr. Ernest declare, “You’re phobophobic.”

To which Frank says, “I was afraid of that.”