Everyone, even the people headed there, ask me why I’m going to Attu.

“I asked to.”

“You asked to go there?”

It’s hard to explain. I first saw Attu in my mind almost 10 years ago, while I was writing a novel. I knew that one of World War II’s strangest battles had taken place there, so I sent my main character to fight in it. I did research, of course, but the time I spent on Attu was imaginary, that fever dream of writing fiction. Now I thought I’d make good on a promise to my character to see the place where — like a lot of people — he’d given up so much.

In the years since World War II, Attu has passed hands from the Army to the Navy to the Coast Guard, which operates a loran station there. Though it’s the size of Martinique, on any given day there are no more than 20 people on the island. But now the Coast Guard is scheduled to pack up and leave, meaning that for the first time in centuries Attu will be uninhabited — nothing but fog on the mountains, the surf crashing and hushing, birds wheeling endlessly. A Brigadoon, receding back into the mist. This will be a rare chance to see Attu before it closes at some rapidly approaching date, see it before it goes back to what it was: untouched, a deserted isle.

What it is is a long way, at the very end of the Aleutians; the international date line has to swerve to miss it. The ride out is part of the place, as is the possibility you won’t make it. This is the Cradle of Storms, where the warm Japan current meets polar air from the north and the North Pacific meets the Bering Sea, spawning rogue waves, 50-foot seas, and 100-knot winds. The Wind Devil is strong here, Aleuts say.

All day photographer Charles Mason has been regaling me with stories of airplane crews that ditched or disappeared, and now Max Thompson, an ornithologist with us, adds one. He’s an Attu hand from way back, a collector of specimens, bird skeletons scraped clean of muscle.

“That Herc’s still up on the mountain,” he says. “When we make our approach you can see the pieces.”

Up on the buzzing flight deck, Tom Gauntt confirms this, shaking his head at the pilot’s stupidity, the sheer boneheadedness of running into a mountain. It was 1982, the same basic plane as the one we’re in. Two Coast Guard men burned to death in the wreckage. I go back to my seat and buckle up.

It’s a supply flight, to refresh the cupboards of the loran station. It has three rows of commercial airline seats fastened to the deck, then nothing but cargo. The strapped-down pallets behind me are stacked with Diet Pepsi and jars of salsa, beer, and Pop-Tarts, Priority Mail. Along with me are Charles; Max, the bird expert; and Cindi Horan, a Coast Guard medic spelling the station’s corpsman for a two-week leave. As Tom brings the Herc down out of the clouds, everyone grabs a window, hoping to catch sight of the island. The pitch changes as we descend; the plane seems to slow and float.

We’re lucky. The ceiling’s high, and Tom gives us a treat, flying several gut-clutching passes along the southern shore so we can see the black beaches, the waterfalls cutting the steep green cliffs. “It’s like Hawaii,” I say, though I’ve never been. “Like Kauai,” Charles says, ignoring, like me, the old snow caught in the folds of rock.

Below, the dark water brightens as it sweeps over the reefs and pinnacles of Massacre Bay. When the Army invaded in May 1943, landing craft snagged on these outcrops and sank, dragging their heavily equipped crews to the bottom. The shore is cluttered with the listing, rusted remains of barges, engines, and trucks buried upside down. Somewhere under the waves, among the sunken landing craft, sits a ditched P-38 Lightning, its twin abandoned by a river in the next valley. As Tom brings us around, we can see pieces of the downed C-130 on the mountainside. The tail’s intact, bright orange paint still vivid.

“Guy wasn’t even close,” Charles says, incredulous, though I can see all too easily how it happened. There’s no control tower on Attu, and the fog sits down low. As in the Bermuda Triangle, man and machinery seem to have a tough time here.

The station house is low and white, tiny beneath the line of high mountains behind it. There’s an unsettling resemblance to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, the inspiration for Stephen King’s The Shining. I’ve associated Attu with snow and isolation, imagining the rimed, grimy Quonsets of John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing. Nowhere to run, the elements unforgiving, the land silent. That fear of going too far, never getting back. As if to confirm my worries, a logy old Saint Bernard lumbers over — Coco, the station mascot. His eyes are cloudy and he smells like a rug in someone’s cellar. He’s 13, meaning he’s been here far longer than any of the 20 Coast Guard personnel, each of whom does a year-long tour.

The station’s tidy as a hospital, smelling of floor wax and green beans steaming for dinner. The first thing in the door is a magazine rack, giving the place the still feel of a waiting room. A glass cabinet in the front hall displays relics from the battlefield — rusty grenades and mess kits, a Japanese soldier’s glasses — and a plaque warning all personnel that back in 1972 a crew member injured himself while tampering with a 40-millimeter shell (shown, now exploded, in the case below), so don’t touch any ordnance you find on the island.

There’s a sauna and Jacuzzi in the station, and up on the rec deck a big-screen TV, Ping-Pong table, and bar. All of this is deserted, as if the crew has been neatly slaughtered, beamed off into space. The big TV, like all the others, is tied into a VCR system in the basement that shows up to four movies at once. I wonder what else the crew does to pass the time. Nineteenth-century lightship tenders wove baskets, and whalers carved scrimshaw. Our first day I see people deep into the Internet, or reading, or getting ready to go fly-fishing. Always they surprise me, suddenly appearing beside me in the long, empty hallway. Never any footsteps.

The Coast Guard will be the last people to live here. The first, the Attuans, arrived an estimated 8,000 years ago, after crossing the land bridge either from Asia or the North American mainland. They lived in grass-thatched dugouts called barabaras, fished the salmon in the streams and hunted otter from sealskin boats. In 1741, a Russian expedition under Vitus Bering arrived, and in the space of 25 years Russian trappers overran the Aleutian chain all the way to Kodiak, forcing the Attuans as well as other Aleuts to serve as hunting crews. The Russians brought disease, alcohol, and the Norwegian rat to Attu, and also the lucrative arctic fox. In 1745, a band of traders executed 15 Attuans for some unknown transgression on a spit of land soon branded Murder Point, hard by what even the Russians took to calling Massacre Bay.

The fur trade had collapsed by the time America assumed ownership of the island in 1867, the otter population seriously depleted. The Attuans had intermarried with the Russians and converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. Their population was also dwindling. In 1880, there were 109 Attuans; there were only 41 in 1942, when the Japanese invaded, surprising them as they came out of church one Sunday morning. All communication to the island was cut.

It took a year for the Americans to marshal forces for an invasion. After the landing-craft debacle, the Army’s Seventh Infantry Division humped up Massacre Valley, slogging through knee-deep muskeg toward the Japanese positions high atop the fogged-in cliffs. The Seventh had trained in the Mojave Desert, expecting to fight Rommel in North Africa. When Rommel fell, the division changed plans and practiced an amphibious landing on San Clemente Island. Even as they left San Francisco, they thought they were headed for the South Pacific. It wasn’t until they swung north that the quartermaster clerks broke out foul-weather gear. But the new boots issued to the soldiers were leather, useless in the wet snow and mud of May.

Operation Landcrab was already well underway when the Seventh realized it couldn’t get its field artillery or tracked vehicles across the muskeg. The weather was too rough to call in air support. Foot soldiers alone would have to do the job. The troops trudged through the muck, their feet burning with cold. Above, dug in on Gilbert Ridge, the Japanese waited, wearing white so they couldn’t be seen in the snow. They lobbed mortars on the advancing troops, rolled grenades down the slopes while snipers opened fire. The Americans were stuck on the windy slopes for days. Offshore, the big guns of the battleships Nevada, Idaho, and Pennsylvania roared, and avalanches of rock came tumbling down the mountain, full of machinery and pieces of dead Japanese.

A second force advancing from the north took longer than expected to make its way through and ended up running out of battle rations. They ate no food for three days. With every drink of water — sometimes only melted snow — they’d throw up green bile. Risking booby traps, they frisked the dead Japanese they came upon for rice.

It was the Army’s first amphibious assault of the war. The soldiers were unprepared for the weather, the terrain, the will of the Japanese — everything. Even their maps were wrong. Landing craft collided in the fog. When the stretcher bearers dropped the wounded, the litters flew down the slopes like toboggans. On the beaches, supplies piled up so fast there was no place to put them. Finally the weather broke for a few hours, and the Army called in a flight of F4F Wildcats to attack. Just as they headed through Jarmin Pass, a williwaw blew in and slapped two of the planes against the mountain.

It took the Americans 20 days to dislodge the enemy. In the end, the badly outnumbered Japanese killed their own wounded with morphine, the doctor dosing them with a syringe, and then throwing a hand grenade into the medical tent. Those left made a banzai charge through the heart of the American base camp, killing patients in the field hospital and exploding the propane stove in the mess. Cornered by several units of engineers, 500 of them committed suicide with grenades, holding them to their stomachs and chests and foreheads.

The Japanese lost 2,622 men; only 28 surrendered. The Americans listed 549 killed, 1,148 wounded. Many of the injured were victims of frostbite and trench foot due to the leather boots; hundreds had to have their feet amputated.

For a full year, no one knew what became of the 41 resident Attuans. Eventually American intelligence found out that all of them had been shipped off to Japan in the hold of a freighter and then forced to work digging clay. Malnutrition swept their camp, and only 25 survived. After the surrender, they were flown over the ruins of Nagasaki to Okinawa, and then taken by boat to Manila, San Francisco, Seattle (where the Christmas decorations amazed them), and finally Atka, 600 miles east of Attu, where the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided the refugees would live — in houses built with government-surplus lumber. They would have to coexist with their former enemies, the Atkans, who had been repatriated after spending the war confined to an abandoned cannery at Killisnoo, near Ketchikan.

Today the last four Attuans live on Atka and work the fishing boats. The only reminder of the village that once stood on Attu’s Chichagof Harbor is a commemorative plaque, a list of casualties to the left of a sketch of the village as it appeared in 1942, a list of survivors to the right.

Massacre Valley is the first thing I want to see. I’ve imagined nothing but mud, snow, and rock, but now I find the valley is green and rich, overgrown with waist-high brush, the old road washboarded by rain. A black stream beside us seethes with fish — pink salmon and Dolly Varden trout so thick they shoulder one another, their fins thrashing in the riffle. Our driver, Electronic Technician First Class Kris Jensen, stops to inspect a bridge. The fish are even thicker here, swaying slowly in a foot of water. “A visitor last week jumped right in,” Kris says, pointing. “Netted some just to prove he could.”

Farther up the valley, on Hogback Ridge, the old Navy Quonsets have fallen in on themselves, their floors filled with water reflecting the mountains. Stop, and all you can hear is the wind. Maybe because the landscape is so big — or the battlefield is a solemn place, or ruin is all about — something silences us, makes words puny and untrue. Rusted oil tanks line the foothills far below, their circular berms imitating the bomb craters we will see elsewhere. And here on the ridge stand the only trees on Attu, a few scraggly, wind-whipped pines beside the sheet metal steeple of a collapsed chapel. The old Army joke was that there was a woman behind every tree on Attu; it was accurate back then, since there weren’t any trees, and it’s not far wrong now: Other than Cindi Horan (already answering to “Doc”), there are only two other women crew members.

We wind higher, through skewed telephone and power poles tilting in the fog like crosses, their dead black wires hanging limp. A ptarmigan bursts from the brush, its wings already taking on their winter camouflage.

On Engineer Hill, at the head of the valley, the Japanese have erected a 25-foot-tall titanium starburst monument to their dead and, the inscription reads, to world peace. In Japanese military history, the banzai charge and mass suicide on Attu is referred to reverently as an instance of gyokusai, an honorable sacrifice, the participants venerated like the defenders of the Alamo. There are also four smaller Japanese memorials on Engineer Hill; despite the fact that the battlefield was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1985, the only two American memorials are modest stones down by the station, one of which isn’t engraved yet.

In clear light, the starburst looks ridiculous and ugly, like a child’s futuristic toy, a weapon plucked from a Megazord. In the fog, it seems regal, mournful, an apt remembrance of sacrifice. Nearby, housed in a Plexiglas box, lies a picture of Colonel Yasuyo Yamasaki, the leader of the banzai charge, and a facsimile of the final page of his diary. Two-man bunkers dot the hillside, overgrown and filled with water, but nothing else betrays the battle fought here; the only relics left are from the Navy’s occupation from 1945 to 1958: tanks leaching diesel fuel into streams, rusting mounds of 55-gallon drums.

On foot we hit the beach at Massacre Bay, following fresh fox tracks across the black volcanic sand to Alexai Point and the abandoned airfield there. Out in the water an otter floats on its back, a few harbor seals bob around the mouth of a stream, poaching some easy salmon. Caught under the timbers of a washed-out bridge, sunk in the sediment and chunky with clots of mud and rust, rests what is either a runaway buoy or a 500-pound bomb. We walk on.

The cliffs here are strictly Hawaiian, horsetail falls dropping from sheer black rock, walls mossy. It’s low tide, and the piles of seaweed stink. A vee of cormorants wings over, and on some distant rocks an arctic fox pops his head up, on guard. He turns in circles, agitated, then, when we get close, ducks into his den.

Alexai Point was once a major installation, with two runways, quarters, and support buildings. Now it’s a plateau of rusting Marston mats, perforated steel plate overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. The shores of the bay are heaped with machinery wheels and engine blocks and whole bulldozers fused into rusty tidal pools. Beyond the far runway is one of three restricted areas on the island, colored yellow on the map, where the military has sequestered its aging ordnance. Rumors of other, uncharted minefields and random, unexploded shells don’t stop us from searching the point or the valleys, but we step carefully, holding our breath when our feet drop into unseen holes, which seem to be everywhere. Also hidden by the lushness are a toxic combination of DDT, unused fuel, and solvents. Some reports say chemical weapons were once buried here. In 1976, ’89, and ’91, Navy ordnance disposal teams destroyed some live ammuniton, but the overall cleanup proved too costly, and finally they decided it would be easier — and maybe safer — to leave the rest where it was.

We pass the flat where the hospital used to be, only the cement arch of a door still standing, speckled with bristly lichen the color of tar. A few hundred yards beyond is the former site of Little Falls Military Cemetery, where the American dead were buried en masse, dog tags screwed to the center of simple wooden crosses or Stars of David, and where the Japanese were interred eight to a grave. In 1946, the bodies were exhumed and shipped to the military cemetery at Fort Richardson in Anchorage, the crosses and Stars of David stacked in a Quonset that has long since fallen. We trudge for hours through waist-high brush, sweating in our parkas, occasionally plunging into chest-deep holes, but we never find the outlines of Little Falls, only cotton grass and barbed wire. The maps are old and of no help. Like the battlefield, the cemetery has disappeared.

For all the abuse the island has taken, Attu is so wild, the weather so overwhelming, that it defies any attempt at domestication. Of the hundreds of Quonsets and stick-frame barracks the Navy built in the ’40s and ’50s, only the old loran station and its mess hall on Murder Point are still inhabitable. They’re used by birders who charter regular trips to add windblown Asian vagrants to their life lists.

The rooms in the old station (one lovingly dubbed the Rat Hole) are crammed with rusty bunk beds and milk crates, the floors stinking of mildew. On the walls, a patchwork of peeling plasterboard, the birders have posted their names and the number of species they’ve seen so far, both their American Birding Association total and that for Alaska. All of it’s scrawled in Magic Marker, Manson-family style. Most of the birders are regulars, it seems, their totals inching up over the years. “1st N. American record,” an asterisked note crows, “yellow-throated bunting!”

In the mess, two dry-erase boards list the spring sightings like a menu. From the ceiling a rubber rat hangs among stuffed gulls. Reeve Aleutian Airways flies out groups for a private firm called Attour, which charges $5,000 for a three-week stay. The birders have been coming for as long as anyone at the station remembers, but rumor has it that Attour, worried that the Coast Guard is pulling out, may fold soon, leaving only the German tour boat World Discoverer to bring birders and veterans out twice a summer.

How long the Coast Guard will stay is a mystery. Over the years, as GPS has slowly replaced long range aid to navigation, the station has been slated repeatedly for decommissioning — first in 1994, then 1998, 2000, and now again in 2006. It’s my constant question — when will it actually happen? — but everyone I ask just shrugs. Who knows? By then, they’ll be long gone.

Back at the station, the weekend has started with a morale-building jambalaya supper on the rec deck. Beers and popcorn, a movie. There’s no hard alcohol allowed out here, but every once in a while the commander authorizes a party at the Whoopie Hut, a cabin up on Mount Terrible, and the crew members indulge themselves in more than a few beers. Otherwise, the days are the same, except for Saturday and Sunday, which are even slower, everyone off-duty except those few keeping the signal going out.

Sunday the wind is up, the windchill in the 30s, and we stay inside and listen to the windowpanes shake. All three hours of Titanic drag by, seeming to emphasize rather than speed the passage of time. Two younger crew members fight an escalating war that involves toilet paper and shaving cream, the contents of a vacuum cleaner, and a dozen eggs smashed on the carpet. In a way, it’s like summer camp or life in a frat house, the same aimless horseplay and boredom. It will all have to be cleaned up by tomorrow; the place needs to be spic and span for the arrival of officers from the Ironwood, a Coast Guard buoy-tender. Up on the rec deck, Bruce Willis is mugging through another Die Hard sequel in a dirty undershirt.

“Fuck,” someone laughs whenever something blows up.

I find I’m savoring Tom Drury’s new novel a few pages at a time, saving it as if afraid it will run out too soon. Maybe the working week will rescue us, the comfort of routine eating up the hours. And the Ironwood brings the promise of a basketball game, possibly volleyball, too. By 10:00 the rec deck’s clear, everyone hitting the hay before the sun’s down, getting ready for the big day tomorrow — all except crewwoman Sarah Hess, who stays up buffing the hallways with a whirring machine.

The next morning the weather turns — fog on the mountains, spitting rain — but the Ironwood has put in, and the captain, Lieutenant Commander Bruce Toney, says he’ll try to take us out to see the grounded P-38. We tug on blaze-orange Mustang survival suits to keep warm and climb into the launch. Stubby puffins flee from us, wings slapping at the waves.

The P-38 is just east of the Temnac River, about a mile inland. As we come ashore, a seal surfing around the mouth breaks off for some rocks. Dollies but no pinks in the channel, the water a milky gray-blue. Slogging through the spongy muskeg is like walking across an endless succession of overstuffed couches, and the Mustang suits heat up quickly. Mike Eisemann, our guide, says the valley’s grown over since he was here last, but the plane’s right where it’s always been, its twin tailbooms intact, aluminum skin punctured by random potshots, scored with initials. After so many hours and miles searching fruitlessly for proof of the war, I’m surprised at how easily we’ve found this. Days later, though, we’ll find a box of Japanese hand grenades and cartridges in a rain-filled foundation just beside what we believe was Little Falls Cemetery — ammunition taken from the dead, we figure — immediately creating another no-go zone on the island.

The rain comes down harder on the hike back, and out on the water the wind is pounding out five-foot waves. The launch bucks through the chop. Chief Warrant Officer Chuck Bush pilots us through a kelp field and the prop fouls, the motor overheats. We’re dead in the water while Chief Rob Duprau fixes things. Captain Tony asks Chuck to turn on his GPS and hails the Ironwood. I wonder how far I can reasonably swim and realize my estimate assumes a water temperature of 70 degrees and that I’m wearing only a swimsuit. Toward Murder Point a whale breaches and blows. The engine finally kicks over, the prop grabs, and, lurching, we leave the kelp and surf the crests into Casco Bay, where the Ironwood sits at anchor.

At the station, Max says he’s collected 10 olive-backed pipits so far, double the existing total for the state; even through the plastic bag the bones stink of rotten meat.

The wind doesn’t stop, so that night we pop The Thing into the VCR and laugh at the parallels — the remoteness, the wretched weather, even the Ping-Pong table and bar.

The clouds are still sitting on us in the morning, keeping us from going out. In a week we’ve been everywhere you can get to reasonably. Anywhere else on the island requires a Zodiac, a long day’s hike, and an overnight, a gamble even in this, the mild season. Much of Attu is inaccessible, trackless, parts uncharted, the interior a maze of blind draws and sheer cliffs. A western section of the 1959 Army Corps of Engineers map is bare of topographic lines and reads merely Obscured By Clouds. Beyond that patch lies Cape Wrangell, the westernmost point in the United States — at 172 degrees, 27 minutes east, actually in the next hemisphere. Fly another 400 miles and you hit the Russian peninsula.

There’s everything out here, and there’s nothing. The arctic fox and the Norwegian rat are the only land mammals on Attu, and just possibly the house mouse. None of the three, biologists claim, is native. Neither were the Attuans or the Russians or the Japanese, or the Army or the Navy or, today, the Coast Guard, though all have had their uses for Attu. Now it appears that humans may finally quit the island, hand it back to the birds and salmon. Even the dead have left.

It’s inevitable, and yet the Coast Guard’s termination date continues to move back. Until then, the station sends out its signal, the 20 crew members police the galley, play all-night poker and Nintendo, giddily TP one another’s rooms, and in-line skate on the runway to relieve the boredom. The birders arrive, and the occasional veteran, the occasional curious tourist. The rain comes, the wind comes, the plane, with luck, comes.

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The 13 Biggest Outdoor Phobias

Sure, fear itself has plenty of fans—people with the good sense to be terrified when the rope snaps, the elephant charges, or the boat capsizes. But what about PHOBIAS, those singular, irrational, often inexplicable anxieties that lurk even in nature’s happiest scenes, waiting to creep you out and propel you into the panic zone? In the confessions that follow, our 13 unlucky writers reveal the things that give them the waking nightmares—from time-tested classics like snakes and vertigo to oddities like engorged ticks and beady-eyed armadillos. But don’t fret! There’s nothing like the shivery pinprick of dread to make you feel truly alive.

Swimming

After one traumatic day at the pool, a lifelong dread

HYDROPHOBIA NAMES NOT ONLY A FEAR but a disease—a generally fatal one, rabies, whose agonies of swallowing are stimulated by the sight of water, hence the name. Of course most phobias have at their root a fear of death, and my fear of water began, I believe, when my father, treading water in a swimming pool, invited me to jump from the tile edge into his arms; I did, and slipped from his grasp, and sank, and inhaled water for a few seconds. It felt, when I gasped, as if a fist had been shoved into my throat; I saw bubbles rising in front of my face as I sank down into a blue-green darkness.

Then my father seized me and lifted me back into the air. I coughed up water for some minutes, and my mother was very angry with my father for his mistake. Even then, it seems to me in the wavery warps of this memory, I took my father’s side; he was, after all, trying to teach me to swim, a paternal duty, and it was just bad luck, a second’s slip-up, that in fact he delayed my learning for several decades. Part of our problem, that traumatic summer day, was that we had little experience of swimming pools; not only did we have no pool ourselves, but no one in our neighborhood or circle of acquaintance did, in that blue-collar Depression world. We were not country-club people. It is a mystery to me how we found ourselves at that particular pool, in bathing suits. Nor do I know exactly how old I was—small enough to be trusting but big enough to surprise my father with my sudden weight.

Henceforth I knew what it was like to look through a chain-link fence at a public pool, its seethe of naked bodies in the sunshine, and inhale its sharp scent of chlorine, but not to swim in one. At the local , the pool was a roofed-in monster whose chlorinated dragon-breath, amplified by the same acoustics that made voices echo, nearly asphyxiated me with fear. Aged twelve or thirteen now, I tried to immerse my face in the water as the instructor directed, but it was like sticking my hand into fire; nothing could override my knowledge that water was not my element and would kill me if it could. At college five years later, where one had to pass a swimming test to graduate, I managed a froggy backstroke the length of the pool, my face straining upward out of the water while a worried-looking instructor kept pace at the poolside with a pole for me to grab in case I started to sink. I think I did sink, once or twice, but eventually passed the test, and stayed dry for years.

In the movies of my adolescence, smiled through the hateful element, using it to display her rotating body, but other movies, glorifying our wartime navy, showed sinking ships and sputtering submarines. One of my nightmares was of being trapped belowdecks and needing to force myself through adamant darkness toward air and light. My lungs felt flooded at the thought; my hydrophobia extended to a fear of choking, of breathlessness. Life seemed a tight passageway, a slippery path between volumes of unbreathable earth and water.

And yet, graduating from college, I took the Coronia to England, and contemplated the ocean calmly from the height of the deck, and slept behind a sealed porthole. Adulthood strives to right the imbalance of childhood, and to soothe its terrors. My fear of water eased as, in my mid-twenties, I moved with my wife and children to a seaside town. Paternity itself, with its vicarious dip into the amniotic fluids, made me braver, and the salty buoyance and the shoreward push of seawater were marked improvements over perilously thin fresh water. We bought a house by a saltwater creek in the marshes, and that was better yet; I plunged into our private piece of creek as if I were one with the grasses, the muddy banks, the drifting current, the overhead vapory clouds—one with the water, my body mostly water. By middle age I had learned to swim and take pleasure in it, but still tended to float on my back, and to keep my face averted from the murky, suffocating depths beneath me.

Freezing

First comes uncontrollable shaking, then a numb, frosty doom

BECAUSE I WAS THE GOALIE, when I fell through the ice it wasn’t simple. My homemade foam rubber pads became two huge sponges. That it happened in a cemetery didn’t help, or that I was at an age when I pointedly ignored things even if they could hurt me. We were there because we didn’t fear death, nonchalantly tromping between the headstones and over the snowy hills into the far heart of the place and down into the bowl that held the pond. In summer, fat goldfish slid under the lily pads, but now it was solid—or so we thought.

I screamed before I realized I was standing on the bottom. The water barely came to my waist. I still needed help getting out, and then the wind hit my wet clothes and skin and I began to shiver.

I had to get inside and get dry, but first I had to take my skates off. The laces seemed tighter now that they were wet, and my fingers didn’t work. A friend had to help. I didn’t think to peel my wet tube socks off (cotton, worthless), just jammed on my Pumas and ran.

The running was uncool, and if I’d been out in the middle of nowhere it would have been dumb. Fortunately, my friend Smedley’s house was only a couple blocks away, and I made it easily.

But in my worst nightmare, I don’t. I’m out in the woods by myself. The shivering turns to even larger involuntary contractions as my body tries to create heat through muscle friction. I lose control of my hands. I stumble like a drunk, my speech slurred, muscles stiffening. The initial pain gives way to numbness. I get foggy and make poor decisions, like walking the wrong way or sitting down at the base of a tree and going to sleep. In the end, I pass out and die in the snow without a struggle, frozen solid, my skin hard as wood.

It didn’t happen—it couldn’t have—but I still have trouble walking on ponds, and forget about hauling a bobhouse out and then sitting in it waiting for a nibble. On shore, I can hear the ice creak, and know that someone’s going in. Not me, I’ll think. No way.

Sleeping Bags

There’s a reason they’re called mummy sacks

ON THE WHOLE, I love sleeping bags. When I got my first, a slippery orange thing lined with images of ducks and shotguns, I quickly discovered that no matter where I slept—the haymow, the back forty, the living room—I felt like I was lighting out for the territory. I took immediately to that snug, toasty, flannelly embryo feeling. You know the one: After a long day of hiking, you crawl in the bag and give out an involuntary little happy-shiver and hug yourself. And yet, a claustrophobic bugaboo lurks in the coziness. As a child, I once wound up head-down in my sleeping bag and went frantic, crazy-ape bonkers trying to escape. Later, I slid from the top bunk in my orange bag, panicked because I was unable to throw out my arms. Even now, I find myself opening the bag before I push my legs in, just to check for teensy wolverines hidden in the toe end. I think of bears arriving, and me unable to escape. Freud would draw conclusions based on the male preoccupation with issues of zippers and entrapment.

After years of cheapo bags, I treated myself to a military-issue mummy sack. “FOR EMERGENCY EXIT,” read a tag sewn inside, “grasp each side of the opening above the slider and spread apart quickly, forcing the slider downward.” Sweet reassurance for the claustrophobe. That night I slept in a farmhouse owned by a pair of photographers. Not wanting to muss the vintage quilts, I unrolled my new sleeping bag, slid in, zipped to chin level, hugged myself with the happy-shiver, and dozed off. It was July, and I woke up 15 minutes later drenched in sweat. Grasped each side of the opening above the slider and spread apart quickly. Nothing. The zipper was jammed. Be calm, I thought, and commenced thrashing on the bed like a prodigious eel. I jammed an arm out the face hole and, with one particularly contorted bounce, wrenched into a sitting position. Deep breath. Think. With one hand waving uselessly at the sky, I grabbed the interior zipper pull with the other. Bit down hard on the liner. Yanked and yanked. When the zipper finally gave way, cool air rushed across my skin.

Love your sleeping bag, I say, but do not trust it.

Lightning

Here’s hoping it never strikes twice

I HAVE A DEEP, incapacitating fear of lightning. On occasions too numerous to count I’ve actually, involuntarily, shrieked aloud at the terror of being struck down by a shimmering electric bolt from the sky.

The first such instance occurred the summer I was eight. My sister, grandmother, and I were alone at our cottage on a lake in Ontario. It’s a great old wooden barn of a place, a hundred years old and drafty, surrounded by pines and junipers and blueberry bushes. It could burn down easily—the cottage and the whole island with it.

One night it decided to storm. My sister and I crawled into bed with Granny while long, terrible spears of lightning lit up the sky like daylight, one after another. The thunder was deafening and constant. Through a screen door that opened onto a veranda, we watched a boathouse on the opposite shore take a bolt to the roof and catch fire. I was speechless with horror, envisioning our doomed evacuation should our cottage go up in flames. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, a solid crash of thunder shook the house. Then someone screamed, a long, fearsome howl. It was me.

In the morning, we inspected the damage. A 60-foot white pine, with a fresh smoldering scar through the bark, lay wedged between the kitchen and the laundry shed, having barely missed both.

Twenty-two years later, lightning no longer scares me when I’m safe inside four walls (cars count), but catch me outside as a storm moves in and the reflexive terror is always the same. With the first fork comes a silent dread, then a panicky, futile attempt to plot my getaway, followed by the grand finale: my scream.

Jumping

Sometimes the scariest thing isn’t out there, it’s inside you

IT’S NOT THAT I’M AFRAID OF FALLING; it’s that I’m tempted—unbearably, almost irresistibly, tempted—to take a leap. I don’t know how or where this developed, but at some point I realized that, whenever I was on a rooftop, all I wanted to do was take a run and then a jump, and feel myself sailing through empty space. I’m not afraid of the emptiness below; I’m afraid of my lack of fear. Some necessary inhibition that most children acquire never seemed to take hold in me.

Fear is, of course, the most irrational, even unreasonable of impulses: Heights and depths are what I tell myself I crave. I grew up in a house on a lonely mountain ridge. I drive, by choice, along ill-paved mountain roads in Ethiopia, Bhutan, Big Sur—a huge drop, and certain death, on one side of me. Yet none of that unnerves me like a hotel room with a terrace, which invites me to go out and look over the wall, see the cars down below, and imagine how I could turn my life around (and the lives of those around me) with a single radical act.

It’s bewildering to me that what I fear is entirely within my control. A few months ago, I gave myself up to fate by driving through the pitch-black mountains of Yemen, a precipice on one side, the man at the wheel furiously chewing qat to keep himself awake. Kidnappers prey on foreigners in those peaks, and teenagers waving large guns occasionally loomed out of the dark to flaunt their power at us. I was ready to surrender. But put me on a rock, a ledge, and all I want to do is act, irreversibly. I’m torn the way you are torn when drawn to a woman you know will undo you. I don’t want to get too close because I want to get close too much. I feel, I suppose, something of what an addict feels.

My phobia of heights is inherently different from the fear of spiders, or of cats or crowds, because what I’m afraid of is not what some malign outside threat will do to me; it’s what I will do to it. What fear can be so abject, and so impossible to cure, as the fear of who you really are, deep down?

Armadillos

Some say they’re cute. I say they’re evil.

THEY COME IN THE NIGHT, up from their burrows, out of prehistory, little sinister dinosaurs from South America. Across Mexican arroyo and Louisiana swamp they’ve traveled, out of the woods and into our Florida backyard, where they dig divots in the lawn, scuffing, snuffling, poking, as if looking for lost change. Genetic freaks—all born in sets of identical quadruplets, and highly susceptible to leprosy—they look half insect, half humanoid. Body of a pill bug, head of one of those poor kids who age too fast. They give my wife, H.B., the creeps.

For me the repugnance is more personal. Back in my single days as a nightlife reporter in Tallahassee I was “Barmadillo,” my byline appearing under a cartoon rendering of an inebriated armadillo. Now I’m just a totem assassin. A typical armadillo whack goes like this: I’m in my pj’s and rubber boots, down on my hands and knees under our deck. My right arm is thrust to the shoulder into a freshly dug burrow. I have a nine-banded armadillo by the tail.

It chirrups and grunts—”Nyuck nyuck, nyuck nyuck“—ratcheting itself deeper into the earth. In its element, the beast is immensely strong, like a rototiller run amok, headed for China.

“Golf club!” I say to H.B., who’s standing by with varmint tools.

I shove the club blade underneath the ‘dillo, then twist and pull. Out it comes like a bad tooth.

And it is hideous, writhing in the flashlight beam, a wizened Piglet far gone into leather and S&M. It scrabbles at my arm with its claws—the horror!—and I let go.

Breaking cover, it corners the house at a gallop, then cowers under H.B.’s car in the gravel drive. H.B. fetches her keys, starts the car, and begins to back up. Alas for Dasypus novemcinctus, its tendency to leap straight up when startled makes it synonymous with roadkill. There’s a clunk and a crunch, and the stricken ‘dillo makes one last dash, trailing viscera.

Suddenly one of our four dogs swoops in and snatches it up in a great mouthful and lopes off into the woods. Silence, and then the terrible scraping of tooth on nubby bone. In the morning, cranky with lack of sleep, we find the armadillo half buried atop a heaped-up ziggurat of dirt like a Lord of the Flies idol, the dogs arrayed in attitudes of worship. Damn. It didn’t have to go down like that.

Lima Beans

Is there anything more sinister than this hateful legume?

IT’S EASY TO BE TERRIFIED OF SPIDERS and dizzying heights and getting lost in a guano-filled cave, but it takes a certain neurotic genius, I submit, to be brought to clammy fear by the genus Phaseolus, that leguminous plant species commonly known as the lima bean.

My lima bean phobia dates back to a family dinner in my very early youth. That greasy little veggie looked to me like some slippery bivalve from under the sea, of an unhealthy gray-green color at that, and was therefore almost certain to be just as strange-tasting.

Still, I might have managed to choke my portion down as I obediently did the fried liver and other disgusting substances that every kid must learn to live with, were it not for the emotional vortex in which I was first forced to deal with the challenge of the lima bean. That dinner was presided over by my father, just home for the weekend from his job a hundred miles away in Toronto. Our attendance was mandatory, in the way of a roll call. But as we kids dutifully assembled in our places at the dining table, my oldest brother, Mike, was missing.

This threw my father, never exactly serene, into a rage. Half an hour later Mike finally straggled in from whatever diversion had warped his sense of time. Dad banished him from the dinner table amid a fusillade of threats and general contumely, followed by the sickening silence that always settles over the scene of a public execution. I stared down, head bowed, at my plate, and sublimated my roiling emotions onto my lima beans.

Mastodons in the root cellar, fire, heartburn 40,000 years before Pepto-Bismol—primitive man had much to be afraid of. But primitive man probably never came face to face with an ominous kidney-shaped legume. If he had, I bet he’d have developed a fluttery stomach and a desire to flee the vicinity, like me. After all these decades, a lima bean has never passed my lips. But I know what they taste like, without ever having tasted one. They taste like fear.

Ticks

They’ve come to suck your blood—and that’s not the worst of it

NOT TOO LONG AGO, I picked an engorged tick up off the floor of my kitchen, thinking it was a stray chocolate chip. It only took a moment for me to see more clearly the minuscule legs and the hideous crease down the underside, but the idea that I had mistaken a tick for something edible freaked me out for days. Because now that I’ve had my midlife mortality crisis and come to terms with just about every fear I used to have (and they were legion), the only one left is ticks.

I have dogs, the best of which is, unfortunately, a golden retriever. A golden retriever is a paradise for ticks—lots of hair to hide in. During tick season here in California, sometimes we see two or three dark-brown ticks crawling around the top of the dog’s head looking for a place to attach. That’s repulsive enough, but it’s the ones who found a spot, ate their fill, and dropped off that I worry about, lying there in the pattern of an oriental rug, waiting to be stepped on.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to find anyone who defends ticks. Spiders and houseflies and rattlesnakes and killer bees and even maggots and leeches have their fans, who inform the rest of us about how useful, well adapted, or beautifully designed their preferred creature actually is—but the only thing you ever hear about ticks is that they carry Lyme disease. It is typical of the malevolence of ticks that the carrier is too small to notice until after she has delivered her insidious message.

Ticks seem to exist for themselves alone. They are ugly as nymphs and grossly disgusting as engorged adults. They live only to reproduce, which females do by dropping thousands of larvae and then dying. They don’t take a meal and move on, like mosquitoes; they dangle by their mouths and get intimate. When feeding, they are motionless and passive. The worst thought when you find a tick in your hair is that it’s been there awhile, that it drank your blood without your even realizing it. You have to ask, in the parade of extinctions, why can’t we trade ticks for something we prefer, like black rhinos or snow leopards?

It happens to be summer now in California, too dry for ticks. I have some breathing room. I might even go for a walk one of these days. While I’m out there, I will visualize a world without ticks. It will be just like our world, only better.

Whitewater

Just because the boat floats doesn’t mean you will

AFTER YEARS OF TAKING FAST WATER FOR GRANTED, I learned to fear the ironic power of river rapids early last spring. The red inflatable kayak I was paddling caught a sharp rock at the top of a sizable and noisy chute coursing through the middle of an Oregon stretch of the Owyhee River, and began to sink.

In an instant I was sucked under the rock and shot over the waterfall, well beneath the surface. The shock of being pulled so quickly under the water precluded taking a decent breath, so by the time I felt the bottom of the Owyhee beneath my feet, I was already hurting for air. I looked around and realized that I was actually standing on the bottom of the river, surrounded by a surreal volume of luminous and silvery fat bubbles. I looked up to see the surface and the churning whitewater five feet above my head. I was being pummeled by a variety of powerful hits from each side and felt a consistent downward pressure on my helmet. Though I was wearing a life preserver and trying to swim, I realized that I was not rising to the surface.

Everything about the experience was dreamlike. The situation conjured no panic, and even the realization that the air-fat kayak was also being held down beside me, even the strange recall of interviews with people who’d come back from near-drowning episodes to report that the experience was not unlike going to sleep, caused a sensation beyond an abiding wonderment. I just stood there, thinking that here, beneath a river in Oregon most people had never heard of, a hundred miles from anything much more than a few earmarked steers—surrounded by the irony of gigantic white balls full of air—I would die.

I was egested from the hole as powerfully as I’d been swallowed. I bounced off six or seven rocks as I rode the rapids on my back, and I began to hear calls of concern from the others. I eventually found a conical rock I could hug downriver, and I remember thinking that no matter what, I would never let it go.

After I was helped onto the bank, I tried to imagine getting back into the red kayak. The thought sent a reverberating sensation that rattled the backs of my shaking legs. I’d once considered river whitewater no more treacherous than a roller coaster—but that had all changed now: I was afraid.

Bats

They may be worth protecting, but they can still creep you out

MAYBE YOU’RE ONE OF THOSE bat-loving types who lectures people that bats are actually very clean animals and they eat half their weight in insects every sundown and it’s a false slander that they get tangled in women’s hair. Batophilia is not that uncommon these days, as evidenced by all the people heading into the flying mammals’ very lairs: high-tech cavers armed with headlamps, special caving ropes, and the ability to use the word spelunk without laughing.

But back in that stone age when all outdoor equipment was bought at the store, caving was an amateur’s game. I was introduced to it in the late sixties by my friend Donald, whose grandmother had a house in Sewanee, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau. T-ma, as the grand dame was known, was happy to share her equipment, mostly a pile of old dented lanterns that dated, probably, from the Civil War. You filled the lantern’s bottom with carbide and added water, and once it began to make a certain unmistakable sizzle, the resulting gas—as redolent as boiling ore—was flammable.

In most Tennessee caves there are several fairly unavoidable features—the big cathedral space, the mud room, the fat man’s squeeze. On one occasion, Donald’s father, a noted heart surgeon, was struggling through a fat man’s squeeze. Dr. Eddie was also bald, and every time he’d lift his head, he’d howl as a tiny stalactite dart punctured his scalp. He exited looking like a middle-aged messiah who’d just removed a crown of thorns.

I was next in the squeeze, grinding on my elbows across a gravel floor made more comfortable by a freezing stream of cave water trickling through. The spare plastic bag of carbide I kept in my pants pocket had rubbed open from all the wiggling, and my hip began to sizzle, then to warm up, and finally to burn hot as fire. I’d begun to hump pretty damn fast, squirming in a panic, as my mind foresaw a suffocating gas buildup—or, more likely, a Jerry Bruckheimer-like explosion—when a concerned Dr. Eddie bent down to shine his flame into the tunnel. “Hey, Jack, are you having any—” Boom!

Turns out there was a lot more air in the tunnel than I thought, because right then and there, ten cave bats decided to flutter through on their way out. The sudden chaos of fur—when I think about it, there must have been a hundred bats—encouraged me to discover the virgin pleasure of pressing one’s face into frigid gravel water. Fortunately, bats have that radar thing, so all one thousand of them easily found the space above my prostrate body, although it must have been difficult scrambling down my back given the vibrations caused by all the subaqueous screaming.

When I finally got out, everyone was tending to his own suffering. Dr. Eddie was stanching his head with a rag. No one cared about my encounter with ten thousand bats. Donald’s brother accused me of exaggerating. He said he’d seen only a couple of bats. I don’t know. In my mind—then and now—my ordeal resembled that encyclopedia picture of Carlsbad Caverns at dusk when a million bats roar out like demonic nuncios in a funnel of black terror.

And yet, I still cave. Because even though I fear bats, mine is an exquisitely nuanced phobia. It’s not truly activated unless I’m in a cave and I see a bunch of bats, and then my pants catch on fire.

Being Buried Alive

A convincing case that it’s the worst way to go

VIVISEPULTUROPHOBIA—the fear of being buried alive—is more sophisticated, more existentially bleak, than claustrophobia. It nullifies the most basic human egocentrism—that the universe gives a damn about our whereabouts. Rest assured: You will never be found, certainly not in this lifetime.

As a 15-year-old, camping near the Dead Sea, I blithely explored a series of caves, some natural, some clandestine cisterns carved out by Israelite zealots 2,000 years ago. More than two decades later, my throat closes up in panic at the memory of crawling on my stomach through lightless, birth-canal-narrow sandstone tunnels.

A cave is all well and good, but it still gives you room to flail, scream, and claw with bloody fingers on the rock walls. How much worse to be immobilized? Hemmed in by rock or sand—or even ice. Apparently, glaciologists in Norway have come up with a novel way to gather data: They carve tunnels into the core of a glacier using hot water, then climb through this frigid warren—hundreds and hundreds of feet down—amassing information. They have to work fast; in short order, the enormous pressure of the glacial mass overhead reduces each capacious passage to walkway to crawl space to eventually nothing at all.

Pressure is the force that separates the men from the boys, phobiawise. Think about the cumulative weight of that sand, earth, ice, what have you. It only starts with suffocation: the slow, inexorable squeezing of air from your lungs. Take it to the next level by contemplating the uncomfortable constriction of the thorax, the rush of blood out to the extremities, your hands and feet swollen and full to bursting. And what is that sound? Why, it’s the groan of your pelvis buckling under. See it all clearly as your eyes emerge -like from their sockets, the lids pried open like the gaps in a fat man’s shirt. And there you are, marking each torment as it comes. A martyrdom too gruesome even for the most devout saints.

But that’s just me.

Snakes

They lurk, they bite, they haunt your picnics forever

IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1972, rural Illinois. A picnic along the banks of the Mississippi. My friend Elizabeth and I, both 17, were forced to attend as a disciplinary measure. We were wearing gauzy peasant shirts and sullen expressions, and were nursing stupendous, temple-clutching hangovers. While the rest of my family bustled around lighting grills and slapping hamburger into patties, Elizabeth and I winced our way barefoot down to the water’s edge to plunk stones into the current and say scathing things about my mother.

“She ought to try drinking a pint of lime vodka,” Elizabeth said darkly, “and see how it feels.” Behind her, at head height, something shifted on the low-hanging branch of a desiccated tree.

One of the worst sounds a person can hear is the heavy thump of a big snake dropping to the ground at her feet. One of the worst sights? Same snake, churning around in a wide circle, opening its mouth to reveal a pale-white interior, vaguely plush, like upholstery.

Our loyalty to each other was such that we engaged in a brief but violent shoving match, cartoon characters trying to get through a doorway. The cottonmouth unfurled itself and wound past us—four feet long and stout as a man’s wrist, but oddly flattened, like something molded out of clay and pressed into the ground. It slithered down the bank and into the river, lickety-split, like a strand of spaghetti pulled into a mouth.

Thirty years later, I experience startle responses not only to snakes but to lengths of rope, suspicious-looking sticks, and garden hoses, especially black ones draped over a fence or log. I am also spooked by snakish areas, including but not limited to grass, warm roads, stone walls, dirt paths, fields, old barns, sidewalks (trust me), tree branches, and, of course, water.

Being vigilant has worked pretty well, although not perfectly. Once I picked up a garden hose, after carefully making sure it actually was a garden hose, and there was a snake underneath. Elizabeth, on the other hand, recovered just fine and even went on to touch some kind of constrictor with a forefinger during a college biology class. Her professor said we couldn’t have seen a cottonmouth that day; too far north.

That’s what my father said, too, when we came racing up to the picnic table, hysterical and shuddering.

“Oh, boy,” he said agreeably. “Water snakes are big buggers. Scare a guy half to death.”

My mother, squinting as she flipped the burgers, cigarette corked in her mouth, turned to consider us, green-gilled and sweaty.

“People who drink too much see snakes,” she said.

Stars

There’s nothing like the universe to make you feel puny and afraid

INSIDE THE CITY, the night sky is more or less a backdrop, benign and one-dimensional. It comes on predictably, like the streetlights, and I pretty much ignore it. There is the moon. Some planets. That spread-eagled hunter who likes to show off his “belt.”

Then I go backpacking. Without warning, the stars go thick as gnats and the blackness has ominous depth. You can see the other side of our galaxy. The sudden hugeness overhead unhinges me. I’ll look up and practically drop my ramen. It’s The Universe. What frightens me, I think, is the abrupt, mind-slamming shift in scale. Like Alice after the “EAT ME” cake, I am instantly, alarmingly diminished—tiny to the point of disappearing. The longer I look up, the smaller and more vulnerable I feel, dwarfed by something huge and unknowable: God, the evil in men’s hearts, infinity. I suppose, on some level, that the fear I feel is a fear of death, of insignificance and nonexistence. Or else I’m just a sissy.

Falling stars in particular unnerve me. Forces are at work out there, and they are not human. If there’s that kind of weirdness in space, God only knows what’s in the woods ten feet away. I spook easily in the wilderness, and I blame the stars.

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