Unafraid ... except this ‘little’ skark phobia

Jeff Kaley

WAURIKA — Everyone experiences some degree of fear about something. In fact, psychiatrists, psychologists and fearologists tell us the fear emotion is one of our most vital responses.

Basically, a reasonable amount of doubt and dread keep us from getting into situations where we could become, well, dead. Being a little scared helps us make wise decisions, and a nice rush of fright is good for the cardiovascular system.

However, there’s a big difference between being scared of something and having an unrestricted, terror-driven phobia. And although this will come as a huge surprise, I'm the victim of one such unrestricted, terror-driven phobia.

It’s called selachophobia. It’s a fear of sharks.

Some of you familiar with my background are now thinking: “Uh, Kaley, you grew up in land-locked southeastern Illinois and you live in Oklahoma. Dude, it’s 350 miles to the nearest ocean — where sharks live.”

Easy for YOU to say.

You probably didn’t grow up watching every episode of Sea Hunt, a TV show starring Lloyd Bridges. And if you did watch the program, you probably don’t realize that 91.2 percent of Sea Hunt episodes ended with Mike Nelson going mano-a-sharko with a relative of Jaws. It made an imprint on me.

May psyche was also marked when I was in sixth grade, participating in a reading program sponsored by My Weekly Reader. There was a short essay about sharks, which said that of all the non-insects on Earth, sharks stopped evolving something like 300 million years ago.

Since the Paleozoic Era, the only thing that’s changed about sharks is — they’re smaller.

The resilience of these critters is frightening to ponder. Imagine: Sharks were so bad, so perfectly adapted to their environment and so good at their job — for all intents and purposes, to EAT THINGS, including HUMANS — they stopped evolving before 90 percent of animal species even existed.

The Lil’ Kaley was impressed by this fact, which indicated to me that the shark is one mean sucker.

If I needed more evidence of a shark’s random eating habits and veracity, every so often I’d see a picture of some fisherman off the coast of Cozumel or New Zealand, showing off a shark he’d caught. When they cut open the critter’s stomach, out poured a scuba tank, half an off-shore drilling rig, 12 Cuban boatpeople and a car license ... attached to a Cadillac Coupe DeVille.

If that weren’t enough to make the Lil’ Kaley VERY wary of an encounter with a shark, consider this:

In the 1950s and ’60s, my maternal grandfather had a camp on the Wabash River, which separates Illinois and Indiana. I learned to swim there and spent many sweet hours frolicking in that muddy water.

Anyway, I was 12 or 13 and was splashing around in the Wabash one day, when an interest in geography and my developing selachophobia merged. I got it in my head: If a shark entered the St. Lawrence River, it could cruise through the Great Lakes to Lake Michigan, find the headwaters of the Wabash River and swim all the way to my grandfather’s boat dock. The next time I ran off the dock to do a cannonball, I’d leap right into the gaping jaws of a Great White!

Those of you who aren’t selachophobic may chuckle at that scenario, and if you paid attention in school, you know sharks only live in sea water. But from the perspective of the Lil’ Kaley: Hey, IT COULD HAPPEN, and I never swam comfortably in the Wabash again.

However, thanks to therapy — 474 viewings of every Jaws movie and sitting with my eyes taped open through Shark Week on The Discovery Channel — I’ve made several ventures to the sea over the years, and I really dig it. I’ve dashed into the surf at beaches around the USofA and snorkeled amidst glorious reefs in the Caribbean.

As is common to creatures that are 66 percent water, I feel drawn to Mother Ocean. But thanks to selachophobia, I never feel completely at ease.

In fact, here’s my modus operandi: Every time I go underwater and then come back up, the nano-second my head breaks into the light, I do this 360-degree spin, making sure there’s not a dorsal fin in sight.

Silly? Maybe. But I think other selachophobics understand.

After all, with my luck, the shark beneath the dorsal fin is the one who swam through the Great Lakes and down the Wabash River to make me its afternoon snack — and now it’s found me!

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