Finally, a name for what ails me. Not near as bad as when it started, sometime in the early 80s, but still, occasionally, impressive enough even on the Highway 183 overpasses to force me to keep my eyes on the road ahead of the vehicle and not dare to look to either side.
That’s the only way I used to be able to get over the steep bridge from Aransas Pass to the ferry across the Corpus Christi Ship Channel to Port Aransas. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge, on an early 90s visit with Mrs. Charm, put me into a cold sweat. I was shaking the whole, long, four miles of it.
The short, steep bridge from Portland to Corpus Christi? I saw it coming and pulled over to sit and decide whether I could do it. I decided I couldn’t and made a U-turn when the traffic permitted and took the long way around.
Nice to know it’s not a problem unique to me, though its origin is a mystery.
Via Instapundit
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
Nope, you ain’t the only one. My sister has always had the same phobia, though I didn’t know it had a name. Suspension bridges, for her. Not the newer types that are used on smaller crossings, where it just looks like a road. But any of those with the structure over your head that actually does the holding up…
Give her my regards, please. I don’t think I’ve ever driven over a suspension bridge. It’s when they’re steep in the middle that bothers me most, though the CB one is flat most of the way.
Well, that one is new to me, but with me it’s a general fear of heights. Remind me to tell you a story about trying once to get to the middle of a bridge over the Colorado (river)… and oh, yes, that Sagrada Família thing in Barcelona, where I had to be led by hand to the elevator with eyes shut…
Speaking of elevators, I never have nightmares about bridges but plenty about elevators: the floor coming apart, the whole thing tilting to one side, etc. Bizzaro, the human mind at play.
Phobias are interesting phenomena. As a child I had hydrophobia (fear of water, not rabies) but a combination of help from my brothers (pointing out how so many others were having fun) and later determination and practice, I effectively overcame it to the extent that I was a professional swimmer for a while in the military.
But scuba was always a job and I never really enjoyed it, as opposed to swimming laps in a pool (not so much anymore – pools are rare up here). But to this day, if I haven’t swum in a while, some distant little voice in my head will start ramping up the fear factor as I approach the pool, until I get in and everything is all right. It’s all a matter of forging layers of memories overlying the phobia so that the fear becomes attenuated, but it never really goes away, just gets buried deeper. Unless you give in to it, then it just gets worse.
Practice makes perfect, I suppose, though I still break into a sweat approaching a really steep bridge. Even as I forge ahead, applying my stare-at-the-road-ahead and don’t-look-to-either-side solution.
Scuba was just fun for me, mainly in the Gulf Stream off Palm Beach (when I worked in West Palm 74-75) and also off the Bahamas, until one day I went to 120 feet off PB with the instructor and a few others. I had to come back up alone and staging to get rid of excess nitrogen I was joined on the anchor line by a 10-foot tiger shark. He circled the line a few feet below me for what seemed forever while I debated whether the bends would be worth getting up quicker. I stayed the required time and he didn’t come closer but that was the last time I dove below 30 feet.
I had a similar experience at Guantanamo. I thought a school of fish was swimming toward me until I saw that it was a shark, who likely appeared to me much larger than it actually was. I stayed stock still until it ambled on past, then called it a day.
I’m not saying that I disliked diving, it just wasn’t the thrill that some people have. I wonder if my attitude wasn’t colored by my dark passenger.
It was a thrill for me when I began diving shortly after getting out of the Army in ’71, until I began to fully understand how easy it would be to drown or just be seriously injured. Little sand sharks a few feet long can ruin your day, not to mention Moray eels if you stick your hand in the wrong place. Even a terrier-sized Trigger fish can take a big chunk out of your leg. Coral is razor-sharp, etc. It can be beautiful but it’s also a dangerous place, the underwater ocean, hardly the fun-n-games that diving resorts promote.