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Episode 23: Irrational Fears (Part One)
One time my Dad took my sibling and I down to the beach for the afternoon to go fishing. I remember we were a little older, I was probably like 13 which would have made my younger sibling like 10, and we went to the same beach we grew up next to, called Surf Beach. Surf Beach is about ten minutes outside of Lompoc, on the central coast of California, and it’s right next to some government owned land and an air force base called Vandenburg. Sometimes, they launch rockets from Vandenburg Air Force Base, and when you drive out to Surf Beach you see lines of people camping out waiting to watch the rockets fly into space.
Today though, the roads were clear and the sun was overcast, and the only goal I really had for the day was to play in the sand and try to make a really nice sand castle. I was kind of obsessed with sand castles and had recently discovered there were sand castle competitions where people made castles taller than a kid and carved all sorts of interesting shapes out of them – I wanted to make a sculpture. My sibling and I had shovels and buckets and hand trowels and popsicle sticks, we were ready. We started by digging a giant hole in the sand, and about a foot and a half into the hole, which was starting to fill with water, I saw something I’d never seen before.
I’d been coming to Surf Beach consistently for 13 years before that – I’d always dug in the sand every single time, looking for sand crabs to hook on the end of fishing lines to catch fish with, or to hold and watch them move around with their dozens of tiny arms. But today what I saw in the sand completely horrified me – I felt a flip in the bottom of my stomach that made my heart thud in my chest. All the hairs on the back of my neck and arms stood up on end.
“Get out of the sand!” I yelled at my sibling who was likely knee deep in the puddle that was forming at the bottom of our hole. “There’s… BLOOD WORMS!”
My sibling hopped up out of the hole and we started quickly on a new one, convinced that the blood red wriggling worm with thousands of tiny bright red legs and probably, we thought, teeth, was just a one-time occurrence. There was no way the monsters had always been there, beneath the sand that we had dug into and play in and buried each other up to the neck in for a decade.
But there were worms in the next whole, and the next, until finally I gave up my dream of becoming pro level sand castle builders because I just couldn’t stop the urge to shudder and be sick that the thought of blood worms gives me, even to this day. The only things I have ever encountered that produce the same uncontrollable irrational physical response that makes my skin crawl are plants growing in unexpected places, and balloons. Surf beach was never the same after the blood worms, it just seemed kind of dirty, and scary now, and I guess the feeling of my skin crawling is a lot like the feeling when you realize that as you grow up, things change, and there’s not really much you can do about it.