Dotsie,
Isn't it "ironic" that the very Chesapeake Bay bridge/tunne/bridge/tunnel bridge is featured in one of the diary entries in our book? I mean, of all the bridges in the world (to quote loosely from "Casablanca"), you had to (almost)cross that one...

It is strange that an experience can be "way cool" at one time and then a source of fear and anxiety at another time. And there is a sense in which fear is contagious. As Jeanne mentioned, it was hard to get people to talk and hard to ge them to listen - sometimes even to just a brief description. I think it all just brings home the fact that there is so much about fear, and about the human spirit, that we don't at present understand. Your innocent statement to your friend - how she feels when she gets air borne - set into motion an internal trigger that touched an invisible tendril of a buried root of fear. Even though you'd had a "way cool" bridge/tunnel etc experience under your belt, the phrase you said out loud must have stirred that fear, then opened it up to air and then, as we all know, once there, it can just get bigger and bigger and bigger. But how providential that your concern was taken care of by the goodness of the universe. About the particular bridge in question, I'd like to say - and point out about fears in general - that the Chesepeake Bay Bridge is one of the few bridges I know that have a full-time staff of state employees whose sole purpose is to "drive" people over the bridge - people who "get stuck" and can't do it themselves. Now the reason for this is that (I don't know what the language rules are on this site) that bridge IS REALLY FRIGGIN' SCARY. It seemed to me to soar like 3 miles in an impossible arch over the blinding water. My point is that SOME THINGS ARE SCARY and SOME THINGS ARE FRIGHTENING and hey, if there's a bridge that's got state employees there to drive the undriveable, then don't sweat the fear. It's natural to be afraid of frightening things. And it's okay to be grateful that a potentially fearful event was cleared off the table by the grace of the universe. The thing that's important to track is when the fear starts taking over. Like with OCD - there's a funny (I think it's funny ) criteria which is meant to guide diagnosticians. The criteria is this: if you spend an hour or more "obsessing" per day, then you have a definite OCD porblem. The reason I think this is funny is that I know some OCD people who are "borderline" and if they knew of this criteria, they would probably keep a detailed log of minutes per day and try to keep it at 59 minutes or under (but of course, they'd always exceed this time limit because of the time and energy devoted to "obsessing about obsession."
I suppose it makes sense to have some quantifiable measurement to guage whether something's a problem or "just a concern" as they sometimes say. I just find a good chuckle in the "hour or more" idea.
Like any other condition, the question comes down to how deeply it impacts your life. If your fear keeps you indoors for the summer, or, like the story we tell in the book about a woman who was so terrified of spiders, she duct-taped all her windows closed and simply could not leave her room - if it controls your daily life, then you should seek help, because there is help! The spider women - she went on to star in a National Geographic Documentary on a technique called "virtual exposure therapy" and she told her story with a tarantula in her hand!
-julie