THE OREGONIAN (Portland, Oregon) 08 January 11 Feeding the crocodile phobia: The news out of the Congo shakes a Portlander (Peter Frick-Wright)
Did you know a crocodile brought down a plane last year?
Crocodiles’ natural habitat does not include duffel bags. So it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that when a passenger used one to smuggle a croc onto a flight in the Democratic Republic of Congo in April, it wanted out.
“It tore loose and ran amok,” wrote an Australian news site, sparking “an onboard stampede that caused the flight to crash, killing 19 passengers and crew.”
They found the croc unharmed atop the wreckage, with one human survivor left to tell the tale.
Natural habitat for kayakers, meanwhile, does not typically include a certain stretch of the Lukuga river, until recently a never-before explored waterway in Congo (the other one). But two American paddlers with an Oregon connection, including celebrated kayaker Ben Stookesberry, ran the river on an Eddie Bauer-sponsored expedition. The trip ended abruptly Dec. 7 when a massive crocodile snatched their guide — South African river runner Hendrik Coetzee — out of his boat and killed him.
Two incidents do not make the basis of a strong rational argument, but the part of my brain that catalogs crocodile attacks cares little for reason. I am not usually much of a phobic, but I am suchophobic. That is, I am irrationally afraid of crocodiles — with a rock in my gut and elevated heart rate just typing these words.
I am also planning a trip to Africa. I’ll be flying on a small commuter plane to kayak on a river not far from either Congo. “Keep out,” the crocs seem to be saying with their attacks. “Leave us alone.”
For a sense of what I’m going through as I dwell on the idea of being grabbed from my boat by a crocodile and death-rolled underwater, read slowly and give your mind time to picture the following:
Scorpions in your hiking boots. Rattlesnakes slithering up your sleeve. A misstep at great height. A grizzly that claws through your tent and your sleeping bag and your face. A mountain lion that leaps onto the back of your neck from a basalt outcrop in the gorge. Your arm trapped in a remote cliff crevice.
This is slightly more than a joke. Alligator fatalities (my phobia makes no distinction) are up in the U.S. in the last decade, and encounters with top predators are usually symptomatic of discounted respect and encroaching development. We’ve tamed so much of the wild, these reptiles are crash-landing planes now. They could be anywhere.
This is the fear instilled by crocodiles. It’s not the jaw-power or their ability to survive that’s frightening — though their bite can produce as much as 5,000 pounds of pressure per inch, and they can eat as little as once every two years — but their deception and trickery, their mimicking of submerged logs as they let prey wander close.
Like nature itself, they are not especially malevolent, but their attacks are unforgiving and irrevocable. With a brain the size of your little finger, there is no reasoning, bargaining or defending yourself once they strike; if eaten, you probably never knew it was there.
To psychoanalyze, fear of crocodiles is likely a fear of the unknown. But what to do about it? I tried desensitization first, which took me to the Wikipedia page, “List of fatal alligator attacks in the United States by decade.”
However, with stories like those of Robert Steele, who bled to death when his leg was bitten off below the knee in Sanibel, Fla., or Justo Padron, who jumped into a retention pond while fleeing police in Miami and was heard screaming before being dragged underwater, the page cured me only of my desire to visit Florida, which was not something that had ever kept me up at night.
Perhaps the only truly buoying piece of information I found was the fact that hippos and crocodiles do not typically coexist. Natural rivals, they compete for territory and will steal food from each other; sections of river with hippos are generally crocodile-free.
Although by most accounts hippos are ornery, more territorial and more dangerous than crocodiles, with 3 tons of lumbering mass on the move, I’ll probably know if anyone is trying to sneak one onto my flight.
Feeding the crocodile phobia

[ Reply To This Message ] [ Subscribe to this Thread ] [ Hide Replies ]