One thing that time teaches everyone is that trauma doesn’t heal, not fully. Wounds will scar, and with time scars fade, but the skin isn’t the same as it was before. It’s thin and taut, prone to being ripped back open from the slightest cuts. As years pass and scars accumulate, I’m continuously surprised by the ways my oldest traumas still resonate.
I had a charmed childhood by any standard. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. My little traumas were mere whispers compared to the difficulties that an overwhelming majority of the human population must endure. Still, I was an anxious and sometimes fearful child. The agitations that triggered my fears, though rare, still managed to echo across decades.
Fear is the dominant emotion in my earliest memories. I can recall these events with startling clarity, although like all early childhood memories, the details remain suspect. Some images could have been a dream or something I saw on television, but no, these memories are too visceral to not be real. I was able to confirm some details with my mother, but since she wasn’t nearly so affected, her own recollections are vague.
My first and likely oldest memory is set in Sesame Place, a Sesame Street theme park in the Dallas-Fort Worth region that was open for only a couple of years from 1982 to 1984. That timeline matches the short period that my family lived in Texas; we moved to Utah before my fourth birthday. I was probably about 3 years old and an avid Sesame Street fan when we visited the park. No doubt I loved most of it, but all I remember is my trip through the ominously named “Amazing Mumford’s Water Maze.”
The Water Maze was diabolical in its simplicity. There were a series of plastic tubes that children could crawl through as they searched for the exit. Each tube was lined with tiny spigots that would spray streams of water. The spigots turned on and off at random and were positioned to blast you directly in the face as you squirmed and thrashed and slipped. The interior was disconcertingly dark and crammed with the immovable bodies of older, much larger children. It’s the type of attraction that would probably just not exist in 2020s America — too much liability and too many suffocation hazards. At the very least it would have an age limit that would not include 3-year-olds, but hell, it was the 1980s and we were the latchkey generation. Let them all come in!
I remember climbing up the ladder and crawling inside a blue tube, excited because I probably thought I was going on a water slide. But the flat tube kept going, and I kept crawling deeper into the endless cave. Suddenly streams of water were blasting my face. Water pooled around my hands. I slipped onto my stomach, tried to get up, and slipped again. More water pummeled my face and I began to slither, as fast as I could. I was drowning. I had to get out. There was no way out. Big kids were blocking the path. Crushing darkness closed around my vision. I erupted in a blood-curdling wail. My screams were so long and loud that the big kids in front of me panicked. They grabbed me by my swimsuit straps and shoved me forward. More kids were grabbing me and pushing me to the front of the line, where I finally emerged into daylight.
Decades later, when I asked my mom about Sesame Place, she said she was waiting outside and could hear screaming. She was pretty sure the cries were coming from me, but there wasn’t much she could do but wait for me to find my way out. She hadn’t been worried and didn’t think it was a big deal. Of course, it wasn’t a big deal. I was never in danger. But my supple young mind had been primed to associate water with terror.
In my second memory, I was a bit older, maybe 4 years old. It was likely shortly after my family moved to Utah. I was with my dad and a few other men at a fish pond. I was wandering along the grassy bank, looking for trout in the amber-colored water. There was a deeper pool near a rocky outcropping. I thought I saw a fish so I knelt down to reach for it, lost my balance, and tumbled into the pond. Then I was under the water, gazing up at the sky. I remember I could see clouds rippling above the water thought that was a strange thing to see. This brief moment of amusement collapsed into a visceral panic when I realized I was underwater and couldn’t find my way to the surface. Some moments of terror passed before my dad’s long arms appeared in front of the rippling blue background, reached in, and yanked me skyward. For years, even after I learned to swim and relished my time in the pool, the image of my dad’s arms reaching out for me would slice through my psyche whenever I opened my eyes underwater.
Of course, those incidents weren’t my only bad experiences with water, but they set an irreversible precedent. If we simply fast-forward 35 years, we’ll land on a particularly embarrassing incident. I was attending a large reunion with friends from college near Moab, Utah. The group brought river rafts and everyone was preparing to float the Moab Daily, an objectively mellow stretch of the Colorado River. I lingered in my tent, hoping I would simply be forgotten, but someone walked up and asked whether I was coming.
“I probably shouldn’t come. I’m scared of water, remember?” I explained. Most of my friends understood because many of them were there during my true near-drowning experiences, now 20 years ago. But my friend Craig pointed out that even the toddlers were joining for this fun float trip, the youngest barely 2. Thus I was “baby-shamed” into finding my own place on a boat.
As soon as I was positioned over the rippling current, anxiety gurgled in my gut. The raft lurched forward, immediately ripping the fragile scabs from decades-old scars and slicing into a state of terror that I rarely experience even when I embark on objectively dangerous activities. The 2-year-old on the next boat over was no doubt giggling and having a great time. Meanwhile, I was counting to 100, 200, 300, in a futile effort to calm my hyperventilation. As the boat bucked over small riffles, I froze in a rigid panic and secretly hoped that if the raft did somehow flip, maybe I could just drown this time and get it over with because there was no way I could endure another experience of this sort.
I live with a debilitating fear of water. It’s both funny and not so funny, in that I really do stand to become a liability to myself and others during the most innocuous situations. In 2011 I received a once-in-a-lifetime invitation to join a group of friends on a private float trip down the Grand Canyon and I turned it down. There’s just not enough Xanax in the world to numb that level of fear; it’s like The Amazing Mumford’s Water Maze turned up to not to 10 or 11 but 1,111. Still, the Grand Canyon is hardly the only incredible opportunity that I missed because I fear my own fear.
I think about my comparatively silly water phobia in the context of today’s children and the collective traumas they have been accumulating. The pandemic and the massive disruptions to their educations and family lives. Global competition for attention and cyber-bullying. The omnipresent threat of school shootings, active shooter drills, and the increasingly amplified message that nothing will be done to prevent horrific violence. Kids are resilient, but how much can they take? Today I read the New York Times article, “Anxiety is Filling Our Kids” and it broke my heart a little bit more.
Traumas don’t heal. We learn to live with them, learn to navigate the world through them, but what will we do when the entire world becomes trauma? How do we cope when we discover that no one is coming to save us, there are no older kids to shove us toward the light, and maybe there’s just no way through?
Now I understand your fear of water that you've mentioned previously a number of times in your writings. Your talk of fear made me reflect back on some past events from my childhood and teen years that caused emotional scars and, to this day, if I begin to talk about them, tears well up uncontrollably. So true, what you wrote at the end about trauma.
Wow, I didn't realize you had so many misadventures with water at such a young age. No wonder you feel how you do. Thanks for sharing another story from your youth.