A confession: I lived in the same house in the western Catskills for 15 years, and I never went up into the attic. I wasn’t afraid that my lovely spouse had a secret wife hidden away up there, and it wasn’t because I wasn’t tempted to explore—I watch Antiques Roadshow, and I know that some guy bought a painting at a flea market a few years ago, and he found an original printing of the Declaration of Independence taped to its back. He’s a millionaire now. I could be set for life if only I’d had the guts to go up to the attic (ok, probably not, but you never know).
It was the bats. I don’t know for sure that there were any bats living in our attic, but our neighbors had bats in their attic. And once, when the 200-year-old ceiling in one of our closets collapsed, we had a couple of bats in the house. They likely came from above the ceiling, I’m thinking, which is another way of saying they came from the attic.
Yes, I know that bats and eat upwards of 1000 mosquitoes an hour. I know that they pollinate and distribute seeds similarly to bees and birds. I know that some of you will probably say that they’re more afraid of me than I am of them (but how do you know, really, how afraid an afraid bat is?). I also know that they’re really truly creepy, and I hope never again to wake up and spot a bat’s soft bulging belly right above my face. So, no attics.
I’m afraid of a few other places, mostly high up places, places even higher up than attics. Those big Ferris wheels that cities like Niagara Falls promote to tourists, the London Eye, balconies at the tops of lighthouses—I’m afraid of them. But I ride or climb up because my desire to see all that can be seen exceeds my terror. I usually convince myself that I’m camouflaging my panic effectively, but the last time I walked down the open spiral staircase of a lighthouse, a woman on her way up stepped side and said to her companions, “I think we better get out of her way.” So, I’m phobic and it shows.
What is fear, I usually think, but something to be pushed through? In January, 2015, I spent a few weeks in India, visiting sites sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains. In the village of Pushkar, my companions and I had reserved a “sunset camel ride”—it didn’t involve any interfaith dialogue, the purpose of the trip, but it certainly involved some interspecies dialogue. I’d been imagining myself atop a camel for months. Up close, camels are bigger than you’d think. They kneel down, and you climb up upon a saddle, and then they rise, front legs first. You feel like you’re going to tumble right off the back. Then they raise their hind legs, and that feels slightly more stable, but their pace has a very different rhythm than a horse’s, and it took about half an hour before I felt I myself relax. Actually, that’s a lie. I never felt relaxed; I just felt slightly less terrified. But during those first few minutes, as my stomach lurched and my head whirled, I grew determined—I was not going to be controlled by my fear. I was not going to relinquish something I’d been looking forward to just because I was afraid.
I loved Pushkar. I loved seeing cows mosey down the road, nuzzling motor scooters and pedestrians. I loved the breakfast porridge and the marketplace with its vibrant fabrics and the 2000-year-old temple where we had our yoga class, overseen by monkeys. I loved the people and all of their warmth and hospitality. I’ve been trying to write about Pushkar ever since. My notebook is filled with failed poems, with isolated lines and stanzas, references to sand and camels. Someday, I think, I will capture the meaning of that trip, but not yet.
I will get on a plane and fly half way around the world to a country that requires a typhoid vaccination and malaria pills, but I will not climb up to my own attic. There’s undoubtedly a poem in that, too.