Fear
Recent events have had me wondering about the nature of fear and how we tend to either judge or affirm fear, but rarely to just accept it or use it productively.
For a few months, my son has had a strong fear of wind; in particularly, he has been afraid of a tornado looming. No amount of reassurance would help. Even if it were just ordinary wind, he would start to panic. He would explain, in what we viewed as a paranoid way, that it didn’t matter if it was sunny out - if we were getting wind, there could be a tornado right behind it, and we were not as protected as we thought by the mountains. Although (or perhaps because) he had watched Storm Chasers, it felt like he was taking things a bit over the top.
It got to the point that he requested we find him help with this fear, as it felt out of control even to him. (His words were that it was ruining 20% of his life). Finally, appealing to his scientist side, we pulled up a national tornado database, and showed him that in 56 years, out of more than 49,000 tornadoes recorded in the US, there had been only one that was quite close, and it was an F0 in 2000. There had also been an F2 (capable of significant damage but not severe) out on the plains, but we explained again that tornadoes generally just don’t come into the foothills. And we got him the requested therapy as well.
So today is the day I turned 40 and it dawned as a drizzly but ordinary day. (And I mean this fairly literally, as I actually was up around dawn walking in prep for the Bolder Boulder). The sun even came out for quite a while before noon. And then, a friend called and said, “There is a tornado watch in effect; you might want to go down to the basement and keep the TV off so he doesn’t get scared.” When my husband reported that all of his large company had been herded into the middle of the buildings, I realized I couldn’t keep it secret. Our son, rather calmly, collected up his guinea pigs, Web kin z, and trading cards, and we went to the basement. Every time we came up it would get scary again and we would go back down. We kept hearing of a huge, 1 mile wide tornado that might be coming our way (it ended up traveling 35 miles). The clouds were moving as if in timelapse and the sound when we opened a door was almost screeching. We weren’t even all that close to any of the tornadoes, but no thanks to the mountains. The largest inflicted damage in towns around us (primarily Windsor, about 15 miles southeast) and even touched down in the northern part of our own, then continued north into WY. A second, even larger but not as strong, touched down in the town 10 miles south. There ended up being 6 tornadoes reported, the largest causing horrible damage and one fatality. Tentative reports guess it as an F3. It was reported on CNN and declared a disaster. My friend has almost baseball-sized hail in her freezer as a keepsake.
Given my relief that we weren’t in the path, I have no problem saying we were wrong and our son was right. A tornado could hit anywhere, and did. It could be a strong one, and was.
I’m a strong believer in fear as a valuable indicator that we shouldn’t ignore or dismiss, though that is exactly what we told him to do, and I’m not sure how we got away from that or what we might have done instead. However, in one fell swoop (so to speak) a missing part of my faith (in children) was restored and yet my bedrock of knowing what is real and what is not was severely shaken.
It was eery having it happen on my birthday. I’ll never know if our son was paranoid, or precognitive. Some things you just can’t know, I guess. Like when a tornado might hit.
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