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Have you ever had a day where the gravity feels heavy? I am a man of anxiety and phobia. Days when I am down, the gravity actually feels heavy, this is called barophobia, the fear of gravity. I am also claustrophobic, afraid of tight or small places, and lately, I am becoming afraid of heights.


About once a month I will wake up in the middle of the night, and the darkness closes in on me. I pop out of bed and I turn on as many lights as I possibly can. Sometimes it is so bad that I have to run outside of the house. If people were to go by my house, they would think I was trying to light all of the Chatham area.

I can trace this back to my years at Camp Courageous, my roommate and I were responsible for leading staff and clients through Picture Rock Cave, we were the lead spelunkers. When we would train the other counselors we would lead them through it, and when groups were taken we were usually asked to lead them.

A little bit about Picture Rock Cave; it is a half-a-mile into the bluffs overlooking the Maquoketa River outside of Monticello, Iowa. The first 100 yards are like crawling through a 100 yard barrel. The next 250 yards are about five feet tall and two feet wide, the final fifty yards are a series of small rooms. Enough, it is starting to freak me out just writing about it.

Any how one night, the second fall I worked there, at three in the morning, my roommate awoke screaming. He was under his blankets and he was dreaming he was trapped in the cave. That was both of our beginning of the end of going spelunking.

The last long trip I took was to Africa. It was about 15 hours of sitting on a plane. I almost ran down the isle of the plane screaming “momma” I felt so confined. Then to make matters worse we sat on the tarmac in Paris for three hours. As I sat in the middle seat, there were two gentlemen, one on each side of me, about my size. I do not know if I will ever fly again.

As the old song says “can I get a witness?”

"Some Kind of Wonderful"

Grand Funk Railroad