"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself…" –Franklin Delano Roosevelt

have never understood why people say that children are fearless. I was scared of everything as a kid. The dark, loud noises, strange dogs, getting lost, zombies, fires, electricity, water in my face. My niece Erin used to get scared of a particular cow on Sesame Street. Face it, when you’re that small, the world is full of things that can seriously kill you. Eventually, one of two things happens. Most fears, you realize were silly in the first place. Then there are those fears that you must ultimately face head-on.

The first fear I can remember facing was an old hunters lookout. As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in the sticks of rural Maine. The people who owned our house before had apparently been deer hunters because they had erected a twenty-foot tall platform to spot and shoot game from. It was a simple four-legged structure with a ladder leading up to a partially enclosed shelter. We had a big back yard and the lookout was at the far end of it, about fifty feet into the woods. Obviously built many years earlier, the wood had started to decay and it was in just enough shadow to appear to me as an evil haunted tower. Every time I saw it, I shivered, feeling as though there was a troll looking at me from the gloom.

Sometimes, I would run away. Other times, I went to that end of the yard intentionally just to look at it. Sometimes I even yelled at the tower, "I’m not afraid of you!" though I never crossed the tree-line into the woods. Not until I was five years old did I decide that enough was enough. I was not afraid, monsters were not real, and I was going to prove it by climbing the tower.

Oh, how it scowled at me that day. I only hesitated for a second before plunging into that part of the woods for the first time. I covered the fifty feet to the tower in seconds, not giving myself time to reconsider. I didn’t even look up at it lest I lose my nerve – or lest the troll be glaring down at me. But, I only got one foot onto the first ladder rung when the old, dead wood snapped under the weight of my body.

The sound was like a gunshot in my ear. First I screamed. Then, I sprinted the shortest straight line out of the woods, then the shortest straight line back to the house. That was the last time I approached the evil tower. I knew it had gotten the better of me. A couple years later, the tower disappeared. Consumed by its own evil maybe. Or collapsed under the weight of snow from a particularly heavy winter.

In Stephen King’s book, It, the shape-changing title monster feeds on humans "salted with fear." It fed mostly on children because "the fears of children were simpler and… could often be summoned up in a single face." "[Adult] fears were mostly too complex." Indeed, once I got old enough to know monsters weren’t real, my fears turned to those of rejection, loneliness, lack of money, disappointment, loss of face. Occasionally, I’d be scared that a serial killer was going to jump out and attack me, or that a bear would eat me while camping, but that was about as tangible as the fears got. Grownup fears are not nearly as scary as primal childhood fears, which are almost always a matter of life and death. Yet grownup fears are harder to face. Probably because they’re so abstract. There is nothing you can see, hear or touch. Simply put, there is no actual fear to face.

By October of 2000, I had a lot to be afraid of. Living in Los Angeles, I was about to drop everything and move 3000 miles away. I was falling hardcore in love with a girl I had barely spent more than five days with. I was buried in a mountain of debt with no job prospects back east. I tried to be brave, but these abstract fears kept pulling at me and there was nothing I could do about it.

One week before I left L.A., my friend Laura and I took a night trip out to the desert, our favorite place in the world. Around two in the morning, we were cruising along a no-name, hundred-mile, two-lane road, which connected highway 62 to I-40 – with exactly one town in between (Population: 20). At one point, we pulled over so Laura could get a closer look at some flowers growing wild on the side of the road. By this point, the moon had completely set and the valley we were in was lit only by the stars. As Laura examined her flowers, I waved my flashlight around to see how far the beam would go with no humidity blocking it. Suddenly, the light reflected.

Something was out there. About 500 yards away and off the road. I couldn’t figure out what, but the light was definitely hitting something. Some kind of structure. Not a telephone pole. Those were on the other side of the road. It was too dark to say for sure. I started shaking. I asked Laura, "Wanna go see what it is?" What was I saying? I couldn’t believe it, but I was really and truly scared. Laura said, "I don’t know. Do you?" She was scared too. I made the decision before I could talk myself out of it. We started walking.

The structure seemed farther away than I had anticipated. And there wasn’t enough light to make out what it was. It was definitely some kind of metal-skeleton tower about fifty feet tall. Maybe a power relay station or something. But with four white conical pieces on top it didn’t look like any relay station I had ever seen. The silence and the darkness were ominous as we approached the tower. It was surrounded by a fence, upon which hung a warning sign. I don’t remember what it said exactly, but the gist of it was "RADIO WAVES. The FCC has declared that coming any closer puts you at risk of cancer." That’s when I remembered that there was a military base nestled in the mountains somewhere out this way. This was a military radio tower, and it was giving us cancer. We turned around immediately and followed the tower’s service road back to the highway.

We drove on, through the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it town of Amboy, where we parked the car and laid in the middle of the road watching shooting stars. We talked for over an hour until Laura suddenly realized that her wallet was missing. We looked on the ground where we were laying. We looked in the car. Then Laura realized instantly the only place where it could be. The tower. While we had been reading the warning sign, she had taken off her jacket and tied it around her waist. The wallet must have fallen out of her pocket there. I groaned. I did not want to go back. In that moment, I was more afraid than I had been in a long long time. This fear wasn’t abstract. I was afraid of that tower.

The drive back to what we were now referring to as "the cancer tower" seemed so much longer than the drive to Amboy. I felt an overwhelming sense of dread at what we were going to encounter. It wasn’t just cancer I was worried about. It was… evil. There was something not right about that tower and I didn’t want to look at it. And I didn’t want it to know we were coming back. I fully knew how silly these thoughts were, but I couldn’t shake them. Doing ninety, my heart jumped as we blew passed the service road. We were back… and it was out there. I backed up reluctantly and drove down the dirt road to the cancer tower. Lit by the headlights of my Geo Metro, the tower looked eerier than ever. It was slate gray, the color of ash with weird shadows forming behind it.

We got out of the car and approached the tower. Sure enough, there was Laura’s wallet, on the ground right in front of the warning sign. Being the gentleman that I am, I stood at a distance while Laura retrieved it. Then we both just stood back, looking up at what had been consuming us for the last hour or two. And we laughed. Once before, I had tried to face my fear of an evil tower, and had been foiled by a breaking piece of wood. Here, on this night (if only in my own over-dramatic imagination) I had been given a second chance, and succeeded where once I had failed.

A fear is always as legitimate as you make it. Did this night change me? No. My other abstract fears – money, love, failure – they were all still there when the sun came up. Facing the cancer tower did not empower me or inspire me to realize how silly my other fears were. I still struggle with my grownup fears and I’m sure I always will. But for a short time, I was given the chance to stare my kid fears in the face. It was something physical and tangible that I could proclaim to in a loud clear voice, "I’m not afraid of you!" If only for a moment, I had conquered fear itself.