Musings on an irrational fear

I have an irrational fear.

I'm scared of dams.

I'm so scared of them that, whilst I like putting pictures on posts to make them visually more interesting, I can't do it or I'll be too scared to come back and write anything else.  Just a picture of a dam can get me very worried, and sometimes I scare myself stupid by peeping at them on google earth. 

I just googled "fear of dams" and found that, rather comfortingly, there are a number of people out there with the same fear.  But it's a really stupid fear all the same.   I'm 53 years old, I've lived all my life up to now, and I'm still here.  I've been very close to a number of dams, and each time they've made me very, very worried.  My heart starts pounding in my chest, my palms, and various other parts of me, start to feel damp, the rate of my breathing increases. Some of the more modern dams that resemble a grassy bank I can just about handle, but the towering wall-type ones may quite possibly put an end to me one day.

I've wondered many times where this fear comes from.  A few ideas of things I remember:

- When I was very young, three or four, we lived in a house that had two stories and an attic, and up in the attic there was a cold water tank which, presumably was fitted with a stopcock.   It was also fitted with an overflow pipe, which protruded from the outside wall at the side of the house about twenty five feet up.  The next door house wasn't far away, there was about ten feet in between the two which had been concreted so that our neighbour could park his car there.  I don't know why I found it frightening, but somehow the sound of that overflow spilling water twenty-five feet onto the concrete below used to scare me stiff.  I think it was the echoing nature of the sound rebounding between the walls of the two houses.  This seemed to give me a fear of water being higher than I was, and may be a part of the cause of my phobia.

- I read a book once in the children's section of the library in our home town.  I was probably five or six years old - it was about the construction of the Boulder Dam in Colorado.  I remember feeling scared looking at this book, and my mother asking me if I wanted to take it out on loan, take it home, and I said "No!" very quickly and slammed it shut.

- A few years later, when I was nine, I think, I had a dream that I was up at the top of a very big ladder, cleaning the windows of the Houses of Parliament.  And I don't know what made it happen, but the ladder came away from the wall and tipped me into the Thames, and I hit the water at such a speed that I touched the bottom before I came up again.  The next day I asked at school how deep the Thames is and someone told me 70 feet, which I now know was somewhat more than the truth, which is 10-20 feet depending on the tide.  However, the fear of deep water from that dream has stuck with me ever since, despite the fact that I can swim all day long with no trouble.

- A few years later again, I'm about thirteen and we've just moved to Somerset, and I'm reading this book about the Lynmouth flood disaster, which talks about a thirty-foot wall of water coming down the Lynn valley and taking out anything in its path.  That probably added to it, too.

- A year or so later again, I'm fourteen and for some inexplicable reason, I've joined the school sailing club.  My physics teacher had asked who was interested and I put up my hand, and the next thing I know, one afternoon after school, we're winding our way up a lane in the school minibus to the local reservoir, and suddenly this huge concrete wall appears in the corner of my eye.  It's the first time I've ever seen a dam close up and I'm transfixed by the sheer size and imagined power of the thing.  The moment passes quite quickly and we are up there on the shore of the reservoir.  I'd sailed a boat before, done a course, even, but on a shallow lake, not on a reservoir.  Anyway, I get allocated this Enterprise dinghy, and my boatfellow is none other than the school oddball.  Since I arrived in Somerset, I've seen him in conflict with someone at the school just about all the time.  He's an uncontrolled rural hooligan, and suddenly I'm aware that I'm in a boat with him, and we're sailing on this reservoir.  Suddenly, he makes a lunge for the tiller, and I move quickly so as to balance out the boat.  But now, he's in control.  He decides to take us closer to the dam to have a better look.  There's a rope stretched across the water with those plastic floats attached to it twenty yards or so before the dam to stop you getting too close, but he sails up to it and tries to sail through it.  Luckily, the rope stops us and the boat rebounds, turns itself round and heads back to the shore again.  I get out as quickly as I can and sit out the rest of the session - it's the last time I go anywhere with the sailing club.

Yep, I think it was that one that did it.

It's a shame, because one of the things I've really enjoyed doing in my quieter moments is trout fishing.  And reservoirs are generally very good places to go fishing for trout.

I was OK in the Isle of Man, because all the dams were the grassy bank variety.  These, after a few visits to get my courage up, I could actually walk along.  And the fishing was better off the dam, because your fly didn't keep getting snagged in the gorse while you were casting. 

And then one time, just to remind me that I wasn't cured, I was in Spain and driving up to Granada through the first bit of the Sierra Nevada from Motril, and suddenly the most enormous, towering grey wall came into view and it was all I could do to keep the car on the road, I was scared absolutely shitless by the sight of that thing.  It's called the Rules Dam I think, and I'm certainly NOT putting a picture of that one here, I just tried to look at it on google earth but I didn't have the courage to zoom in to make it any bigger than half an inch on my screen, and I'm still feeling the adrenaline now.