I have always had a healthy, visceral terror of heights. I suspect I inherited it from my gramps, who had it so bad he was wary of climbing even two rungs up a step ladder.
My hiking mates, on the other hand, are utterly fearless. Whenever a trail skirts a sheer drop, they skip along nonchalantly while I instinctively press my entire body against the rock face, hugging the mountain with every ounce of grip I possess. Curiously, my fear comes with a strange paradox: if there is deep water below, the terror completely evaporates. In fact, I love nothing more than leaping off high cliffs into a river. But sheer drops onto solid rock? Absolutely not.
Lately, this acrophobia has taken on a life of its own, reaching its absolute zenith whenever I am in a car traversing a narrow mountain pass with no guardrails—especially when I’m sitting in the passenger seat staring straight down into the void.
Not long ago, Russell and I headed up into the Cederberg for a weekend hike. As the road snaked higher and higher up the pass, with nothing between our tyres and a sheer thousand-foot drop, panic took hold. It got so bad that I couldn't take it anymore—I made Russell pull over so I could take the wheel myself.
My brilliant survival strategy? I immediately veered across the road to hug the solid cliff wall on the right-hand side, crawling along at a snail's pace on the complete wrong side of the road.
By every objective measure of road safety, I had replaced the mild, theoretical risk of sliding off an edge with the immediate, high-probability danger of an oncoming car obliterating us head-on around a blind corner.
It was a stark, comical reminder of a deeper truth: the thing we truly have to fear most is fear itself. It arrives disguised as wise self-preservation, whispering that it is keeping us safe, when in reality its blind panic often steers us directly into far greater danger.
