What we do when we are afraid
60 Days Beyond The Wall: Part 2
This is the second part in a multipart series, 60 Days Beyond The Wall. If you haven’t yet, check out Part 1. I’ll reference things from that post. If that seems daunting, feel free to just read this — it should stand alone.
The Skeleton Coast, Namibia, 3/18/2018, I think I may get kidnapped
Driving out of Swakopmund, a beach town of German influence on the coast of Namibia, we came to a closed gate in the road. Decorated with elephant skulls and the ribcage of a whale, this gate marked the entrance to a road that would allow us to cross north along the infamous Skeleton Coast or what Portuguese sailors once called The Gates of Hell. The region gets its names from the countless shipwrecks that line its beaches.
As we could not pass north, we drove off road to the ocean looking for a place to camp before the sun set. I scanned the horizon looking for any sign of human existence and found none. The place was utter, endless desolation in hues of grey and brown. As the sun began to set, we dug a hole and built a fire out of semi-petrified wood, a log of which made up what appeared to be an entire petrified forest. In fact, most of this wood came to the Skeleton coast from the Congo in an ancient flood. We made a stew and I watched as tomatoes and sausage simmered over a growing bed of coals.
As night grew dark, smoke climbed into the sky from our fire becoming indistinguishable from the great cloud of the milky way. I periodically scanned our surroundings, looking for the reflective eyes of a predator. Earlier, I had noticed hyena tracks leading to a bed of large bones not more than 50 feet from our fire. I could feel my anxiety coming in waves. I feared that I might soon join this former victim.
On one such scan, I noticed two moving lights on the horizon. I observed patiently, trying to discern distance, subconsciously assessing the likelihood of threat.
It’s quite amazing how brain architecture is revealed in our response to fear. All sensory information from our eyes and ears initially goes through the thalamus, a sort of central switching station for the brain. From there, after some dedicated processing in other regions, information is routed to the frontal cortex where we become consciously aware of the information and decide what to do with it. This process is relatively slow, taking up to 2 seconds between input and physical response.
The amygdala, an integrated region of our brain dedicated to emotions and emotional behavior, is ultimately the one responsible for our feeling of fear. It has a direct line into the thalamus and can pull from the stream of unprocessed information. The amygdala can then directly reach into the region of our brainstem responsible for our fight-or-flight response and trigger reactions long before we are even aware of what we’ve seen. In layman’s terms, we typically don’t stop to think about how we are going to respond when we are frightened. Our arteries dilate with epinephrine, our heart rate increases, our palms moisten, and we run.
I ran to my friends, yelling at them to turn off all lights that could signal our location and climbed on top of the car roof to get a better vantage point. The lights were getting closer. My mind looped through the various scenarios — kidnapping, robbery, murder, hostage, you name it. I had heard the stories and was fairly uneducated about the safety of the region so my mind assumed the worst. We were going to be found and harmed and there was nothing we could do about it.
I sat in the darkness watching, waiting.
I couldn’t find anything more than a bread knife to arm myself, so I took it into my tent and held it as I stared through the window, closely observing the lights that now seemed less than half a mile away. My eyes grew heavy and despite all my efforts, I repeatedly dozed off.
Sleep has this paradox. No matter how hard you try or how tired you are, when you are trying to to fall asleep, you simply never can. And yet, all of us know the battle of trying to stay awake while driving at night, forcefully holding our eyelids open at times. When we try to stay awake, we cannot resist falling asleep.
In these moments, dozing in and out, from my enclosure of perceived safety, I thought about the wall.
When we are afraid, we return to old walls.
Check out part 3.
