Musings as Hallowe'en Approaches

"Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head ;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread."
~ From "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I attended elementary school at Lunenburg Academy, a massive, brooding, castlesque pile completed in 1895 on a windswept

hilltop in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. The school grounds are bordered on two sides by the Hillcrest Cemetery, and my walk to and from school passed first in front of the local funeral home before following another two blocks along the border of the oldest portion of the town's largest burial ground. Once at school, for a child with a powerful imagination, a simple trip to the bathroom was an adventure rivaling anything Tolkein wrote about taking place in the Mines of Moria, the washrooms lying as they did deep in the lonely creaking bowels of the Academy's basement so far from any hope of salvation.

Lunenburg is an old town officially settled in 1753, and from such age is born much mystery and superstition. My father was a beneficiary of this and, with no disrespect to him, I will reveal that I came to know his faith in the old stories held more power in his life than anything his attendance of the Presbyterian Church could ever provide. He believed in witchcraft and malevolent magick. That bad luck could be simply bad luck, but persistent or exceptionally ill fortune could be the result of a spell cast by a witch on behalf of an envious or malicious rival. That warts could be "charmed" away. That a suspected witch could be tricked into identifying her or himself by constraining the suspect to enter or exit a premises by means of a doorway across which a broomstick had been secretly laid because a witch would make every desperate excuse possible to avoid stepping over it. That if you knew who cast it, a spell against you could be defeated by peeing in a bottle while thinking of the suspected witch, then corking it tightly and hiding it in a secure place. This would cause urination to become impossible for the witch requiring him or her to either find and uncork the bottle or, in final desperation, lift the spell from their intended victim.

From an early age I was acutely aware of the perpetual tug of war between reason and primal fear of the unknown. While as a child I was very religious in the Christan sense, something I have since been cured of, I somehow grasped that there were things and forces sharing the universe with me that I could not yet understand or even detect, and that became progressively more obviously beyond the ken of my available stable of adult authority figures the more of them I consulted. Asking a question along these lines always met with an answer lying between a patronizing reply embracing the "we are not meant to know" philosophy on the one hand, and the making of the secret sign to ward off evil on the other. In fact I'm not completely certain that my paternal grandfather wasn't advocating driving a stake through my heart while there was still time.

Every child understands fear. But fear of an identifiable danger or threat makes sense while fear of the ambiguous does not. As I worked my way though this, and still at a very young age, I was acutely aware of the fact that I felt different going into the old hoary basement of my own home in the day time than I did at night. That I felt better being there with the lights on than with the lights off, regardless of the time of day. That I walked along the border with the cemetery, could in fact enter it, without a qualm in the day time but felt a rising sense of dread just being near it if the walk was after dark. This fear of something I had never seen, heard, smelled, or could otherwise describe; a thing that had never actually harmed anyone I knew or had ever heard of, bothered me. It bothered me a lot.

My age could still be written with a single digit (and I'm not referring to Roman numerals) when I came to the realization that I needed to confront my fear. I was not going to be afraid simply because others were afraid. I began with sneaking into the century old basement of the house I grew up in, during the day but without turning on the lights. I would pass down the stairs and traverse the circular route that passed around the massive and ancient slate bake oven that marked the center of the foundation, forcing myself to a steady pace no matter how hard my heart throbbed, the dark gaping maw of the bake oven and the strange square opening in the stone foundation that led under the porch notwithstanding. When this became easy I did the same thing at night, and my stealth grew so my parents were never the wiser.

At last, one summer night in the full flower of my bravery, I waited until my parents were asleep before executing my tour de force. At 11:40 PM, to the accompaniment of my father's snores, and having earlier loosened the latch on the back door to facilitate silence, I made my way out of the house on a mission to face my greatest fear. By 11:45 I was at the edge of the Hillcrest Cemetery. Taking a deep breath, and drawing on the power I had cultivated, I stepped fearlessly into the dark expanse of monuments and shadows, making my way without hesitation into the deepest part of my heart of darkness. When I reached my goal, I sat with my back against a tombstone and calmly waited through the "witching hour", not rising until the treasured old watch my father had given me read fifteen minutes past midnight. When it did, I rose and walked with a slow, powerful, triumphant tread through the cemetery and back to my bed.

A little boy slew irrational fear that night and his parents never knew how it happened.