T GAMBLE: Fear of flying … roaches, monkeys, grasshoppers …

Human beings, in their most basic form, are very irrational creatures. A person might flee inside the moment they see lightning strike 10 miles away, even though the odds of being hit by lightning are well over 300,000 to one. At the same time, the same person thinks nothing of jumping in a car and traveling 200 miles to the beach, even though odds are much greater of being killed or maimed on the trip than the odds of being struck by lightning.

This same fear carries over into everyday life events. I am not one bit afraid of bugs, spiders or even snakes. I will pick up a non-poisonous snake in a heartbeat. I routinely take spiders out of my home and release them into the wild. But I am deathly afraid of large roaches. I know they cannot really harm me, but I can’t deal with them. Give me a flying roach and it is all over. I would turn my mother over to Isis if threatened with being placed in a roomful of flying roaches. The only thing that may be worse would be a roomful of the flying monkeys from “The Wizard of Oz.”

Those flying monkeys singlehandedly torpedoed my early childhood. After seeing them, I couldn’t even watch a Tarzan movie. Cheetah may as well have been Godzilla after seeing those things snatch poor Toto. I suppose this early experience just made me fearful of flying things. It’s a good thing I did not watch “Cujo” as a child, or I might be afraid of dogs now.

It’s not just monkeys and roaches either. As a young man, or more accurately, an older boy, driving a tractor I often drove a 4430 with a cab. Unfortunately the air conditioner quit working after a period of rough driving. Who was doing all this rough driving I have no idea, but it quit working.

So now, instead of cool air conditioned labor, I had the pleasure of driving around in a remote hot box like they had in the movie “Cool Hand Luke.” There was no choice but to take off the door that let you inside the cab to get some air flow. I’d then mow corn stalks at breakneck speeds, which may explain the aforementioned non-working air conditioner. Or they could have just been poorly made in Japan, who knows?

Invariably, giant flying grasshoppers would sling themselves inside the cab, and I’d panic like I do when a roach starts flying. I tell you, there is nothing like having your shirt off in 95-degree weather, sweat running down your back and everywhere else, too, pieces of corn shucks stuck all over you and then have a giant grasshopper dive bomb you like the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. I have come close to abandoning ship and letting the tractor just head on into the wild green yonder.

I am still working on this irrational fear to this day. A flying cockroach will still freeze me in my tracks. If I worked at a bank and you wanted to rob it, just open a bag of flying roaches and I would flee the bank with you. That’s why pest control comes to my house more often than the take-back man. I may miss a dental appointment or fail to get an annual physical, but I will not let flying roaches invade me. If you have any questions about that, talk to the Wizard of Oz.