Dangerous places, by Elizabeth Kay

Advert in the tiny airport at Canaima, Venezuela, complete
with glorious spelling mistake.

With the world in turmoil, and shortly about to embark on a holiday to Cyprus we booked last year, it struck me as a subject worth discussing. We all write dramatic scenes from time to time, and as England isn’t the riskiest place in the world we frequently use faraway destinations. As always, I prefer to write from personal experience, as online research can only go so far. It’s the smells and tastes that often enliven writing. Although we may not recall them as well as we do the visual and the auditory, that’s why they are important and they can be very powerful memories. Woodsmoke always takes me back to my fist visit to Zakopane, in Poland, with my father in, 1965. The smell was everywhere, and not unpleasant. No central heating then, just tall wood-burning stoves that heated a room to perfection. The same stoves they had in Ukraine, where I’ve been three times, and is now one of the most dangerous destinations you can choose. The only place I’ve been robbed, as well, although I didn’t realise it until two hours later as Russian gypsies unzipped my bumbag, removed my purse, and then zipped it up again so that I didn’t notice. And I didn’t feel a thing. The other country you can’t visit these days is Venezuela, where I went in 2008. There were some pretty scary things there – huge caimans who leapt vertically out of the water when the guy piloting the canoe offered it some meat on a stick.  An anaconda as long as a bus slithering into the water,  almost within touching distance. And a terrifying canoe journey through the Devil's Canyon to the foot of the Angel Falls when we shot the rapids instead of rersorting to overland portage, like the other canoe. And tarantulas in the garden.

Fear is a natural response that triggers an adrenaline rush and results in the same fight-or-flight response that anger does: your heart rate and breathing quicken, your breathing becomes shallow, you feel flushed, your muscles tense up, you feel shaky, and weak at the knees. With fear, you might also find that you become dizzy or lightheaded, feel nauseous, and experience pain, tightness or heaviness in the chest. Fear causes specific behaviour patterns so that we can cope in adverse or unexpected situations that threaten our wellbeing or survival – like a fire or a physical attack. It’s a familiar emotion because it’s something everyone has experienced at one time or another, though the intensity is usually brief. Remembering how you felt is really important if you want to write about it; memories fade far too quickly. Jot it down as soon as you can.

The further from reality something is, the less scary it becomes. Daleks are so obviously a creation of an effects department that physically they are not terribly frightening – it’s when they speak that all this changes. They can speak, and although their voices are mechanical and emotionless the fact that they have voices at all suggests thought processes equally different from our own, but not so alien that they are beyond our comprehension. This may be why extra-terrestrials have so frequently been depicted as having an adapted human form – Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars, and the Vogons in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy both have vaguely human body plans, so that we can imagine their emotions from the expressions on their toad-like faces. The closer something is to something we know, the more disturbing slight changes become. In Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Coraline’s mother has been replaced by a mother with boot-button eyes, but she is otherwise the same, although her character is very different. Finding someone on whom you depend being subtly altered is terrifying, as it throws into doubt your own observations and memories, and re-frames the world.

          I have to admit I haven’t really been in many dangerous situations. There was the time there were 3 snakes in the toilet in India – they looked like kraits, which are deadly, but it was protective camouflage, and they were, in fact, harmless wolf snakes. There was the hyena sniffing outside my tiny tent in Kenya, and the tigress who came right up to the open-topped jeep in India and made eye contact.

These experiences do give me an an idea of what it’s like to be scared, but no episode lasted very long. I have encountered poison arrow frogs, eyelash vipers, a puff adder making its way along the edge of the road in that creepy way they have of moving in a straight line. The hippo attack in Botswana, that targeted the canoe behind me in the Okavango Delta, and the scorpions on the campsite in Morocco.

          I’ve been in potentially tricky situations. The Yugoslavian policemen who picked us up when we were hitch-hiking and drove us off the main road down a track until my five-foot-nothing friend hit the driver over and over again with her hat. The time we couldn’t get a lift, so reluctantly accepted a lift from five Turkish men who suggested things we didn’t fancy. We got out of the car with our rucksacks, and then remembered we’d left our passports on the dashboard when we’d crossed from Turkey to Bulgaria. That was really frightening. We raced off after the car down the track we were on (which was parallel to the main road) caught it up, opened the door retrieved our passports and then bedded down on the ground for the night in our sleeping bags. The road was really noisy, large vehicles passing by for hours, it seemed. The next day we got picked up by a couple of nice Italians. We kept encountering groups of cars pulled up by the side of the road, when the Italians would clasp both hands, wave them in the air, and toot the horn. After a while we realised that all the cars were Czech. The night time traffic had been the Bulgarian tanks heading for Prague; it would not have been a good time to be stuck behind the iron curtain without any ID. I suspect I may have been very lucky to come out of all these situations unscathed. Of course, I never told my parents when I was doing. My mother had never been abroad, and I simply told her the money was going further than we expected because everything was so cheap.

          So. How to adapt experiences you can describe in detail into something else?

         

I used the hippo attack pretty much as it happened, it didn’t really need any embellishing. But it became an important part of a plot, because when it really happened someone lost their camera underwater, and I lent her my spare one. In the fictional case, the camera that has been lent still has a memory card in it that some very nasty people want, and are prepared to do anything to get. But it was this incident that gave me that storyline.  Treasure those scary moments, as they may come in very useful later!