When Fear Fell Away
Friday, August 29th, 2008On This blog you have heard a great deal about this book of mine, now at the printers and soon to be sold on Amazon.com. It’s about time that I introduced you.
“BootsnAll Folks, please meet Hey Boomers, Dust Off Your Backpacks, by Linda J. Brown.”
The following is my frontispiece because the secret to world travel lies in overcoming fear. This is my true story of twenty years ago:
“We were descending the summit of Pyramid Peak near Aspen, Colorado, when I had my first – and final – face-to-face encounter with fear. I stared him down and I haven’t heard from him since. It was August, 1988, and I’d climbed this killer mountain three times before, never much thinking of its drastic reputation among mountaineers as the toughest and most dangerous of Colorado’s “Fourteeners,” the mountaineer’s term for any mountain over 14,000 feet. But the death of famed theoretical physicist Heinz Pagels, just the week before, was on my mind.
At fifty, I was only a year older than he had been on that gorgeous July day when he hugged the same rock face and edged his right foot blindly around the curve to find a solid place on the narrow ledge. Pyramid is what is called a “rotten” mountain and it was his bad luck to find a rotten rock with that right foot. Thinking of him that day, I survived his ledge but here was a scree-covered slope just ahead with my name on it.
Someone else in my party had already crossed an angled slab of granite and was waiting to grab my hand once I’d taken the several long steps necessary to traverse the sideways-slanting rock crossed by the trail. Then, I stopped short. There was nothing for four-thousand feet to catch a plummeting body. Plus, tiny pebbles of scree littered that slick rock and they could easily send my boot soles skidding.
“I could die ten seconds from now!” I heard a part of my mind whisper to myself as fear found a wide open door into my heart. I felt his cold fingers along my spine and noticed how that affected the backs of my knees and put a stricture in my throat. For one split-second, I even considered challenging my own belief that what one takes up the mountain, one must also carry down, including my own inexpert body.
Then, I remembered the lessons of the labor room, twenty-five years before. My babies were born by natural childbirth and I went into labor fully trained to cooperate. Midpoint, and simply out of curiosity, I had experimented for one tiny moment to see what would happen if I stopped doing the breathing and relaxing exercises that I’d been taught. Wham! The pain hit hard. Now I understood why those women down the hall were screaming and crying in such fear; they were unprepared and so afraid, that their bodies naturally clenched up and worked against them. There, in that labor room, I took charge of myself and resumed the exercises and all went well.
And on this mountain, I took charge of myself again. “Tak, tak, tak, tak, tak, tak.” said my mind, verbalizing the six steps required; using my hands to rehearse the placement of my feet. That launched my body across the open space and, in seconds, I was holding my friend’s outstretched hand.
Fear had lost his foothold and must have fallen into the abyss insted, because I haven’t seen him since.
Over the next two decades, there were many opportunities for fear to return to my heart. I left my happy-go-lucky life in glorious Aspen to plan and lead group tours to the Soviet Union, taking Westerners to meet the people of that vast land when the Iron Curtain fell apart. Strange and dicey things happened all the time, but they gave me exhilaration and happiness instead of fear and worry. That sort of travel led to an appetite for more and I began to roam the less-traveled places of the world…alone. Recently, I proved that I could safely wander across the entire Northern Hemisphere by myself, with only a backpack, for a year. Soon, I’ll set out to do the same throughout the Southern Hemisphere.
Even as I age along, I do not encounter that old rascal, Fear. My beloved mountain, Pyramid Peak in Colorado, took him away from me forever.”
Now that you have read a sample of my book, do plan to order a copy for yourself. I’ll let you know when it’s available.
lindajbrown