I’m not talking about intellectual fear. I’m talking about the sort of visceral “oh shit I pushed my luck and now I’m going to die a violent death” kind of fear. About 3 years ago I took up rock climbing with a buddy outside of Las Vegas. This is at least 10 years beyond the point that men should consider these pursuits. One day we’re climbing the panty wall. REALLY wish it had more macho name. It’s a group of exercise climbs designed to test you and develop your skills as you go from easy to impossible. So I’m leading this 5.8 climb (look it up) and this wind slams me fom the southwest. I’m flagging on a friction step which means that I’m extended out and holding on by tips, one toe and God’s good grace when this wind blows my one hand and one foot completely off the mountain. I swing out like a fuckin’ barn door. Literally, back to the mountain. See my buddy on belay below, looks like he’s making his peace and ready to die on rope. Thanks, Cam. Swing in and claw. Fuck you you bastard. You can slap me dead but you can’t make me stop. Hit the top, belayed off. Asked for some time alone and bawling.
Almost has 3 guys steam cooked while firing a high pressure boiler.
On the Old (1st) Training Ship Golden Bear, the “Sky Pipe” was broken at the safety. That is the pipe leading from the safety outlet up the stack and outside. If the safety blows it lets the steam safely vent from the engine room to outside. With it broken it would vent inside the engineroom right behind the boiler where the Chief, 1st and 3rd were standing looking at a control problem. The boiler was at 440 PSI and 750 degree superheat. It will cook you right now.
We were having problems with the control line causing the fuel oil pressure to the burners to vary. I guess they did ssomething and the fueil oil pressure jumped up real high and the steam pressure began to approach the safety setting. I screamed for the 1st class midshipman and showed him the problem. He tried to get the officers to move NOW. I grab gloves and jumped onto the burnner table. If things did not sstop I was going to cut fires, even though we were steaming at a full bell.
That really rattled me. That was in 1969 and it still fells like just the other day.
Bunker. Vietnam. Mortar attack. Nuff said.
I once took a turn too fast in an ATV Quad, it turned over and pinned me. I was stuck for some time before my sister came back and helped get it off of me. My balls felt like they had been ripped clean off, honestly.
Luckily it wasn’t nearly all that bad, but for the longest time I even refused to look down and examine myself because I was afraid of what I might find. I was pretty shaken up and scared, that’s for sure.
On a regular basis, riding my motorcycle over the Hoan Bridge. The wind comes whipping up off of Lake Michigan and really tosses the bike around. It only lasts a minute and half or two minutes, but I really dread going over it. It’s windy on calm days it’s down right terrifying on windy days.
But most scared would be when my store got held up. I was lucky in that I was in an area where I could see the guy with the mask but since he was in and out in about 30 seconds and he didn’t stop to look around or do anything beyond clear out one register he never saw me. It was probably an hour or two before I calmed down. I’m sure my cashier was 100 times more freaked out then I was.
Went to a friend’s house in Cameroon for a holiday lunch. As we lounged on the patio, I felt a little tired and nodded off, which wasn’t an unusual thing to do considering the heat. When I woke up, I realized I was actually starting to get sick, and excused myself to go home and try to sleep off what I assumed was a budding cold.
A few hours later I woke up drench in sweat with a massive headache and one thought blaring out to me directly from the deepest, most primitive part of my brain, as clear as day. I knew, on a visceral level without a tiny bit of doubt, “I am fatally ill. I will not survive the night.” I’ve never known anything with that level of certainty.
Malaria.
(Luckily, I had access to medicine.)
Thanks for the shares. I’m curious, did anyone make it through to the other side of the fear? That temporary, fragile exalted time when it didn’t matter?
When I had my wisdom teeth out, they put me under using nitrous oxide. My arms were loosely restrained so they wouldn’t flop around while they were working. Once the nitrous started to work, things got very strange… I could move my arms, but I couldn’t talk. I noticed that when I moved my arm, it was like using an eraser on a blackboard… it would leave a swath of blackness behind it, and I knew that I was erasing something from existence. I couldn’t tell the nurse what was going on, and I kept trying to grab hold of something before it was destroyed, and the last thing I tried to touch was the nurse, and when I touched her, she was gone, and all I saw was darkness.
The most scared was when I lost control of my car going over the crest of a small hill on black ice in a residential area at the bottom of the hill there was a T-intersectio, and I couldn’t see if there was any traffic coming. I started going down, pump the breaks nothing, threw it in neutral nothing. From that point on for about the ten seconds it took to get through it . I remember thinking, I don’t care what happens to me, I don’t care what happens to the car. I just don’t want to kill anyone. Went zipping through the intersection slamming up against a sidewalk splitting the axle on my car. I was never so relieved.
Being lost in the woods for six hours, and tipping my canoe in a large lake was another unnerving moment but not as scary as the car incident. I knew what I had to do I just kept calm and do it.
The closest I ever came was overdosing on pain meds. I was just so out of my head and in pain I took eight of what I should have only taken one of. I really wasn’t close to death but my daughter and I thought I was. And I was so out of my head I just didn’t even care.
1993 - Former Yugoslavia, the Tigers (paramilitary group) were going house to house looking for Muslims. Bullets, breaking glass, and screams were on all sides of us. There was a knock at the door. Our host got up, openned the door, and shouted, “What the fuck are you doing here? We’re listening to the game. Come in and drink with us or go fuck yourself!” Five guys with AK47s came inside. They had a few shots then left.
15yo, I was walking a canoe through some rapids, slipped and got my chest pinned to a rock when the canoe turned broadside to the water-flow. My head was above water & the lifejacket took most of the impact but the pressure was making it hard to breathe. Because of my position I couln’t get enough leverage with my arms to shift it. Another guy in the party was able to get to a rock and kick the front end around enough for it to rotate off me.
My teenage son was learning how to drive so one afternoon I stopped at the foot of our long driveway and told him he could drive up to the back of the house. I was standing next to the driver’s door instead of getting in the passenger’s seat. For some reason he didn’t quite get the car into gear and started gunning it because it wasn’t moving, revving the motor up to a scream. Directly behind us, across the road, was a neighbor’s house with a big picture window in the front room. I could just see the car reversing into flight thru their window and killing I don’t who. My heart went into defibrillation (?) and he finally heard me yelling Stop! I managed to get back in the car and pull it up to the house, tho my hands were shaking so badly I could hardly steer.
Aged three or four me and a neighbour’s kid got into trouble together. We we both yelled at by our mums. Some time later his four older siblings decided it had all been my fault and tried to get me to go into the shed in their garden so they could punish me. I was sure they were going to do something really really dreadful and became so hysterical that they thought better of it and let me go. More scary than times I have been in life threatening situations.
Back in the 60s, I spent about a year living with an odd assortment of other college-age people in a large, run-down house off-campus. There was a lot of drug use/dealing going on. Occasionally some bikers crashed there, and I usually just stayed clear of them. One of them was named Tiny. Of course he was about seven feet tall and, well, just HUGE. He always carried a gun. One day Tiny had dropped acid. I have no idea what was going on in his head, but something told him it was a good idea to take out his gun and blow my brains out. He put the muzzle against my forehead and said, “Better start to say your prayers.” I knew he meant it. At that moment his chick came in and very cautiously got him to put his gun away.
Yes, I peed in my pants.
When I walked into my garage holding my newborn and found my husband with a gun nestled under his chin. And then when he pulled the trigger. And I shut my eyes and I felt wet and coldand it took me a minute to realize I wasn’t dead.
OMG. This is terrible. I’m so, so sorry.
The day after my wedding, a group of 10 of us went 4 wheeling (my 2nd time). We went up a HUGE rocky hill, almost 90 degrees, and my step son got to the top and stopped, causing my daughter and friend who were behind him to start tumbling, then me who was behind them. I got pummeled all the way down, ran over twice by the machine which then pinned me. My first thought was that I had just witnessed my daughter and friend die, then realized I could NOT move. Not like when you get the wind knocked out of you, but unable to move. I thought for sure I was paralyzed. We all turned out to be fine, and learned later that you NEVER follow someone closely up a hill, you wait for them to get there first. Never so scared in my life!!
That is so hilarious!
I was once driving in the early morning with my sister in San Diego in her old Honda Accord and she stopped at a red light on a random street downtown with large buildings on both sides of the street. She looked around, not realizing there were trolley tracks on the ground because this intersection didn’t have any bars that came down and said “fuck it” and went through the red light. That happened 15 years ago and I can still see the trolley bearing down on us on the track from a few feet away out my passenger window, including the engineer’s face with giant-as-saucer eyes as he blasted his horn. Had my sister hesitated even a half second longer, we would have been T-boned by the trolley, and I’d probably be dead, as I would have received the full brunt of that impact on the passenger door. It gives me chills just thinking about it now. We must have cleared the track with just inches to spare…