No. 634 – Tonight’s the Night

Performer: Neil Young

Songwriter: Neil Young

Original Release: Tonight’s the Night

Year: 1975

Definitive Version: Live Rust, 1979

Some fears that are existential and universal—the fear of dying. Some fears are pathological and somewhat childish, such as my fear of spiders, which I more or less ridded myself of while I was a homeowner. Then there are fears that are primal. This story is about that last one.

I wasn’t always afraid of heights, and to a certain extent I’m still not. For example, one of my favorite places in Chicago is the observation deck atop the Hancock Tower. I love sitting by the window and looking out over my city. It’s not taller than that of the Sears Tower, of course, but I prefer the vantage point.

However, I work on the fifth floor of a six-story office building that has an open atrium to the lobby, and if I walk too close to the railing, the feeling begins. It’s entirely visceral, a creeping dread that forms in the pit of my groin. It gets worse the closer I get to the railing, spreading to my stomach. If I get too close, I’d start to have trouble breathing. I have no idea how or when this started, other than I’m certain that it didn’t start until I was in my 30s.

It’s most definitely an anxiety born of the fear of falling. In other words, I never approach the railing. I barely acknowledge its presence as I walk to and from the bathroom or elevators. That’s why I’m OK in the Hancock, even when I look straight down—there’s no chance of falling.

That’s all prologue. Immediately after I began this here list, Laurie and I took a vacation to northern California—places I hadn’t been in more than a decade since I went with Debbie. Laurie had never been, and I wanted to see Yosemite and Napa again.

The second leg of our trip would take us from Yosemite to Lake Tahoe. I planned to take Laurie up to Glacier Peak, for the commanding view of the valley, and then we’d take the back way, the Tioga Pass Road, out the East exit of the park and travel up the California-Nevada border to Tahoe. Years before, Debbie and I made the same journey. Debbie drove, and I remember that it afforded interesting vistas that were unlike those you typically saw of Yosemite; i.e., they weren’t inside or even of the canyon. This time I was driving.

Now, for those of you who have never been, driving around Yosemite can be hairy. The roads are on the side of mountains that go up several thousand feet, and for the most part, the only guardrails are trees. Worse, there are no berms either—just two lanes of road. One wrong turn, and your next stop was going to be until you hit the next tree, assuming you did, hundreds of feet down.

This had been no problem for me when I went with Debbie 16 years before, but things were different now, and on the first few turns as we wound our way out of the park to our bed and breakfast in Oakhurst, I felt that familiar feeling between my legs. (It was never a problem on the inside lane, which was the lane going from Oakhurst into Yosemite, because you had a margin of error there.)

By the third day—the day we left—I was fine going in and out of the canyon. But going up Glacier Peak was rougher. One sharp turn had a wide open view of the canyon—no trees whatsoever—and it was at the bottom of a long hill. That was going to be a bit dicey coming down.

When you get to the top of Glacier Peak, before you get to the parking area, you come around a turn, and the world just … opens up. You’re looking almost down on Half Dome as well as the rest of the valley. It’s a stunning view, except it’s literally right at the bend of a hairpin turn that you have to slow to 10 mph to negotiate—while you’re on the outside lane of the road, of course. It’s insane.

I made it OK, and I had no problem taking the turn at the bottom of the hill coming down the road. I just slowed as much as I could and kept my eyes as firmly on the road while fighting down the butterflies in my gut. It turns out, that was a mere warmup. The Tioga Pass Road is pretty much like that the whole way around the valley. Several hairpin turns, not as sharp, put you right on the edge of the abyss. By the time we hit Tuolumme Meadows, where the road and land flatten out, my nerves were about fried.

The Tioga Pass entrance of Yosemite is marked 9,945 feet elevation, and we stopped at the gate. I wanted to hike up the side of the hill enough so I would be more than 10,000 feet up, but the lighter air was getting to Laurie, so she stayed in the car while I hiked around blissfully unaware of what I was about to face.

Soon after we began our descent, we came around a corner to the other side of the pass. The road drops about 3,000 feet in 12 miles, and you can see the entire descent as it snakes along the side of a completely barren mountain of solid black rock: a yawning void. Apparently, guardrails typically run along this section of road, but the road was under construction, and the guardrails were gone. Drizzle began to hit the windshield.

I had but one thought, crystal clear and bathed in cold sweat: We’re about to die.

I mean I knew I wasn’t going to make it. The visceral creeping feeling that I had driving around Yosemite overwhelmed me in one massive wave. Dread became sheer panic. The obvious solution was to pull over and have Laurie take us down, but when absolute fear has you in its grip, reason is elusive.

OK, I will not acknowledge the ledge. Doing so would mean certain doom. I’ll take this as easy and as slow as I can and stop at the few meager turnouts as much as I need to. This isn’t an easy thing to do when you’re gripping the wheel so tightly that a coroner would need a crowbar to pry your hand from it and you’re whimpering like a cornered rabbit surrounded by hungry wolves. And of course, when the speed limit is 50 and you’re going 25 and you have traffic bearing down on you, that’s unnecessary extra pressure.

And the song on my iPod as we began what I was certain would be our fatal descent? Yup, this one. Tonight’s the Night, about Neil’s best friend OD’ing alone in the bleak of night. The black humor of life doesn’t get any richer.

Well, as you know, because you’re reading this entry, I made it. I stopped a half-dozen times to let others pass or to merely breathe, and Laurie said the stopping was worse than the drive, because the turnouts were so small so if the brakes failed at all, we’d go over the side. We were both a mess—I literally was shaking from terror—by the time we arrived in Lee Vining, where we took a long break at the side of Mono Lake. The drive from there to Tahoe was mostly in silence.

When we got to where we would drive over the mountains to Tahoe, Laurie and I got into a bit of a fight. She wanted to follow the map, and I said, no way. I wasn’t about to take another two-lane road over any mountain range. This was nonnegotiable. I saw on the map that if we drove 20 miles out of our way, we’d get to the outskirts of Carson City, where we could catch I-80. I was certain that it, being an interstate, would be a well-paved, four-lane road that had plenty of guardrails. My assumption was correct, and the drive was worry-free.

And right when we got over the peak to where we could see Tahoe for the first time, the sun had just set, throwing up a brilliant pallet of pink, red, orange and purple in the cloud-filled sky that framed the blue of the lake and the black of the distant mountains. What an incredible payoff.

So, yes, we survived the Drive of Death, and if I live to be 150, I will never, ever, EVER again take the Tioga Pass Road.

(Life can be full of regrets. One that I have is that I didn’t take a picture of Tioga Pass from the bottom after I successfully transversed it to document the ordeal. I found this picture, though. Scroll down through the stunning photos of Yosemite to the one of Tioga Pass and imagine that road minus the green guardrail. That’s what I, who suffers from serious vertigo when faced with a high precipice, had to deal with that fateful day.)