“What Do You Say We Get the Hell Off This Rock?”
A very quick scan of the Internet reveals hundreds of mountain-climbing quotes, many heavy with metaphor. From the likes of Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest (“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves”) to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain”) and even Theodor Geisel—a.k.a. Dr. Seuss (“Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So . . . get on your way”), scaling a mountain has always been synonymous with man’s struggle and need to overcome obstacles, both physical and emotional.
My own struggle in coming to terms with this marriage has been long, my progress often elusive, traveling two steps forward, only to fall one step back—sometimes more. As Seve so astutely pointed out, I need to be able to “show up.” Yet there is a lingering doubt—one I wouldn’t even discuss with him—a doubt that’s easy to deflect and blame on circumstances, or a partner, or on work, a doubt that looks for blame anywhere but where it belongs. This insistent nagging is telling me I lack the internal strength required to make marriage work. Perhaps it’s the failure of my first marriage, and my inability to be fully present in it, that still hangs over me. Perhaps this doubt in my own strength stems from having too close a relationship with my mother when I was very young, or from being physically small for my age as a boy, or because I was late to enter puberty, or maybe the sensitivity I traded on in Hollywood somehow stunted me, or not knowing how to change the oil in a car engine—whatever the reason, it’s here, and it lingers, and I need to get over it.
While climbing a mountain may not solve all my issues, there is no denying that it takes a certain strength, both physical and mental, to get to the top. And I need to test myself, to prove myself; I need an achievement I can point to, something that reflects my abilities and willingness to persevere. I need something I can hold on to as I move forward toward the big day and beyond.
While Mount Kilimanjaro, at 19,336 feet, is no Everest, it is still the highest mountain in Africa. My pack is by the door; I’ll leave in the morning.
When D and I come home after dinner, my mother, who has been babysitting, walks in from the living room. She’s been watching the news.
“You know, there are thousands of refugees fleeing Libya and flooding into Tanzania. It’s very unstable,” she says. Then she drives her point home. “If you die, your children’s life will never be the same.”
“Actually, Mom, it’s Tunisia they’re flooding into, not Tanzania. But thanks for your concern, that’s very helpful. Come on, let me get you a cab. Do you have a coat?”
“No, it’s a hundred degrees. I don’t have a coat. And why is your air conditioner blowing hot air?”
When I return from putting my mother in a taxi, D is in the kitchen. The sight of my waiting backpack, coupled with my mother’s remarks, has triggered her anxiety. She’s a different person than she was just a few minutes ago.
“You’re always coming and going, leaving and coming, you have no time to love me,” she blurts out. “We can’t even get more than an hour. We never spend any real time together.” We have just returned from a long, romantic dinner, after having spent the afternoon together.
“Well it doesn’t seem as if you like me that much, that you’d even want to spend time with me anyway,” I say, trying to tease out a smile and counter this sudden mood shift.
“True,” she replies without a trace of a grin. And now the tears come.
We go back and forth and eventually I promise not to fall off the mountain and die. Like she always does, D responds instantly when I am able to pinpoint the fear that has been motivating her reactions, and her mood softens.
“And when I get back, we have to get our rings,” I remind her.
“I don’t think so, luv.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” And she’s back in charge of herself.
“No rings?”
“I don’t really want to wear one; you don’t want to wear a ring, do you? Although you’d look good in a ring.”
“Oh, well, okay, no rings. That was easy.”
“I was thinking we should tie the knot,” she says.
“What knot?”
“The old pagan tradition. That’s where the saying comes from. Our hands are tied together and then something happens, a blessing or something, I don’t remember what.”
“Sure, sounds good. We’ll tie the knot,” I say in agreement. “We need to figure out how we do it.”
“Yeah, yeah.” D dismisses my practical concern. She’s already on to the next topic. “Should we have some music?”
“Yeah, that would be helpful, I guess.”
“Not ‘Yeah, that would be helpful,’ like it’s some chore. We’re talking about our wedding. Where’s the romance?”
“That’s what I mean. Music will be good.”
“Uilleann pipes?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, they’re beautiful.”
“Aren’t they kind of shrill? Do you know someone who plays them?”
“I do. Although he’s a liar and a cheater,” D says.
“Not one of your exes?”
“No, not one of my exes. And my brother’s going to roast a lamb on a spit.”
“He is?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s going to dig a hole in the park and roast a lamb on a spit?” I ask.
“He’s not, but he’s going to get someone to do it.”
“Do we need an extra permit for that?”
“We don’t have a permit.”
“We don’t have a permit to get married in the park? What if they kick us out?”
“They’re not going to kick us out, they won’t even know we’re there.”
“There are going to be a few hundred people.”
“You’re right, maybe we should have a second lamb. He was going do a pig, but I’m not having pig at my wedding.”
“I thought everyone was just going to bring a picnic,” I remind her. “We weren’t going to feed them, remember?”
She continues, ignoring me. “I don’t know what the vegetarians are going to do.”
I open the refrigerator and swig some grapefruit juice. “Maybe I will fall off the mountain after all,” I say.
“Look, you shouldn’t even be going, not with your knee. What are you going to do if it gives out halfway up? Are they going to send a helicopter?”
“Don’t laugh, I think Martina Navratilova recently had to be carried off Kilimanjaro.”
“She’s in very good shape,” D warns.
“I know.”
“Seriously, luv. You’ve been hobbling around for six months. And how are you going to dance at our wedding? Because you are dancing at our wedding.”
I ignore this second threat and concentrate on the first. “It’s Kilimanjaro, not K2. I’ll be fine.”
But I have no idea if I’ll be fine. The thought of not making it to the top occupies a prominent place in my mind with every hobbling step I take. I tore my knee up over the winter while skiing—or rather, falling. I should have gone to an orthopedist right away, had the surgery, and been done. I didn’t. Instead I went to an osteopath, who had helped other injuries I’d had over the years. He made great progress with my knee over several months but admitted finally, “There’s no doubt you tore the meniscus, it’s just a matter of how little healing can you live with.” The knee is better, to a large degree; it’s just not the same as it was. And it’s not trustworthy.
“But it’s very interesting,” my osteopath said, “that you hurt your left knee as you were about to get married. There are some people who would associate the knees with ego and commitment and relationships.”
“What are you trying to say, that I don’t have the flexibility and strength for the relationship?”
“I’m just pointing out the correlation, what some people say. It’s for you to decide what it means.”
Since my skiing accident, I’ve hiked over the tundra in Patagonia and through the jungle of Costa Rica without incident, but there is no way of knowing when my knee will go. Just a few weeks ago, in Baltimore with Seve, I stepped off a curb and heard a pop that set my healing progress back a few months. When he saw me limp down a steep incline, Seve asked, “What the hell happened to you? I’ve never seen you move like that. If you were a horse I’d shoot you.”
“Headaches are normal. So are gas, diarrhea, and nausea. Vomiting is common. And pulmonary edema can happen very quickly. The fluid can build up in your lungs and in twenty minutes, if you don’t descend, you could be dead.” The man telling me and five others this in a garden, under an African tulip tree at a hotel outside Arusha in Tanzania, is the one responsible for getting us to the top of Kilimanjaro and back down in one piece. His name is Zadock Mosha, and he’s thirty-three, with chocolate-brown skin and a round, shaved head. A member of the Chagga tribe, he grew up in the shadow of the “white mountain” and has been to its summit 161 times. So I guess he knows what he’s talking about.
Still, I think he’s overselling the danger. After all, thousands have gotten to the top of Kilimanjaro. I’ve always possessed a silent confidence in my physical agility that isn’t immediately obvious—I often adopt the position that I don’t really know how to do anything physically strenuous, only to step into whatever it is, from stunt fighting in movies to white-water kayaking, and manage fairly easily. But this knee worries me. And Zadock isn’t helping. His attitude is offhanded—almost hostile. He regards us with slight contempt as he pulls out what will become the bane of my hike up the mountain—his pulse oximeter, which measures pulse and oxygen-saturation levels in the blood.
“You want your blood oxygen level over ninety and your pulse below it,” Zadock tells us, and then he tosses me the small black contraption that clips onto the end of a finger. “Let’s just get a baseline on everyone.”
My blood oxygen level is ninety-five and my pulse is sixty-four. I announce my numbers to Zadock with detached casualness and pass the meter to the lone woman in our group, a neurosurgeon from India who now lives in Virginia. She’s in her mid to late thirties and has an open, fleshy face with a mole on her cheek and long black hair. Her name is Eila. She sits quietly and is motionless until Zadock removes the device from her finger and tosses it to the youngest member of our group, a soft-bodied, chatty college student named Tim, who is here through the largesse of a wealthy uncle. Then Roberto and Bob, a father-and-son team from Puerto Rico, each clip the pulse oximeter on for a minute. Finally, a hard-toned mortgage broker and Ironman triathlete named Hank knocks out a number right at a hundred and flips the oximeter back to our leader.
Zadock shows us our route up the mountain on a tourist map, but the red line on the paper means nothing to me. All the map really shows is that Kilimanjaro sits in north central Tanzania, not far from the border with Kenya. A visit—if not an attempt at the summit—is often included in itineraries to some of Tanzania’s other “greatest hits,” like the Serengeti or the Ngorongoro Crater. I first became aware of Kilimanjaro when I was a child. My oldest brother brought home a book from school, Hemingway’s famous The Snows of Kilimanjaro. On the cover was a painting of the famous, snowcapped conical mountain.
“Where’s that?” I asked my brother.
“Africa,” he told me.
“I’m going to go there,” I declared. I don’t know why I said it, and I don’t remember what my brother said in reply, but the idea stuck. Over the years, whenever I heard Kilimanjaro mentioned, I knew that one day I would go—this is a date I’ve had with myself since I was ten.
When the meeting breaks up, the itinerary says we’re to have a welcome dinner, but when no one mentions it, I slip off to the dining room at the hotel and eat alone.
While I’m finishing up, Eila comes in and sits across from me.
I ask if she found Zadock’s talk of all the potential dangers stressful.
“ ‘Stress.’ ‘Depression.’ I don’t understand these terms. I never heard them till I came to America. I don’t believe in them. Then you people take pills for it. You’re stressed about something, but why, what are you feeling? If you’re upset about something, do something about it. You people take pills for everything.”
What Eila says makes good sense, and I agree with her, but something in the way she says it is disquieting. She pours her tea and looks off dreamily. There’s a strange detachment to both her words and actions. Her lack of investment in what she’s saying makes me question her conviction, and her vague physicality makes me wonder if perhaps she’s not heavily medicated herself. I drink my tea.
“Do you do a lot of hiking?” I ask.
“One day before.”
“One day?”
“I was in Patagonia—in Chile—at a conference and I went hiking for a day. I liked it, so I came here next.” I’m glad she’s not operating on my brain.
The father-and-son team from Puerto Rico comes into the dining room. Roberto, an estate lawyer with rounded shoulders and a heavy walk, is close to sixty; his son, Bob, in his late twenties, works at a hedge fund in New York. He looks like his father must have before thirty extra years of life burdened him. They wave as they take seats in the corner and talk softly between themselves.
In the middle of the night, jet lag wakes me and I call D. When she answers, she is surrounded by so much noise I can hardly hear her.
“I’m at Dean’s birthday, in Brooklyn. I’m totally in the wrong outfit,” she shouts into the phone. “I should have borrowed one of your checked shirts and be wearing big disc earrings. But who knew?” She sounds happy, carefree. “And you, my love, I’m sure you’re probably dealing with something very similar in the heart of Africa.”
“Just talking brain hemorrhages and blisters.”
“See? I knew it.”
I tell her that Zadock said I should have cell service all the way up the mountain, so we’ll talk soon.
“Really? You’ll have cell service on Kilimanjaro? That’s weird.”
The next morning I have an e-mail from D suggesting we move to Williamsburg. “You’ll fit right in. You can wear plaid 24/7.”
We’ve been driving for over an hour and I’m in a jet-lagged daze, staring out the window. Tall men swing long machetes in high grass. Women stride along the side of the road carrying containers of water or baskets on their heads. Occasionally someone pedals by on a rusting bicycle, hauling charcoal.
Tim, the college student, has been pestering Zadock with questions, about people we see, trees, and weather cycles. Eila is listening to music on her headphones. Hank, the triathlete, is bouncing his knee up and down, while Bob and Roberto occasionally whisper to each other. The midmorning African light is bright but hazy. We come out of a bend in the road and suddenly there are murmurs from the front of the van.
“There it is,” I hear Tim say.
To my right, through the glare I see a sprawling expanse, covering much of the horizon. The iconic flattop, snowcapped summit is lost in the clouds. The sight is impressive, but not the awe-inspiring vista I have long imagined. Then something far above the clouds shimmers and catches my eye.
My focus shifts and perspective alters. The upper outline of the mountain comes clear—twice as high as I first perceived it to be. The glimmer I had seen was the sun reflecting off the dwindling glaciers at the summit, towering far above the clouds that hug the mountain’s midsection.
“Holy shit,” I whisper.
It’s a monster.
We drive on and turn onto a hard-packed dirt road where long yellow grass yields to a field of sunflowers. In the distance, across a vast expanse, a group of women in brightly colored clothes with long flowing skirts carry heavy loads. Where they are coming from or how far they’re going in this open savanna is impossible to say. We pass a truck loaded high with men clinging to the sides, sitting on top of the cabin, hanging off the back—thirty or forty of them holding on. In a field of corn a cart is piled high and a sagging beast of burden strains under a wooden yoke. Farther on, a tall man in a light blue shirt strides toward the road between rows in a well-ordered field, munching on a carrot. We pass into a forest of pine and then cypress. This land is not the parched and dusty Africa, it is a lush and generous earth created by Kilimanjaro, big enough and tall enough to form its own ecosystem, catching the rain and fertilizing rich soil.
The road narrows and then we’re in a trench so deep, the sides of the van are scraped by the thicket. We bounce through potholes and crevasses. There is nowhere to turn and as the road gets worse, we can only continue on. Around a bend a jeep comes in the other direction. The two vehicles pull forward and stop inches apart, headlamp to headlamp. The driver of the jeep gets out and climbs over the hood of his car to our driver’s window. The two exchange words in Swahili. Voices are raised. The other driver returns to his jeep and shuts off his engine. We sit.
I’m reminded once again of Dr. Seuss and a story I often read to my children. Two Zax, one walking north, one walking south, encounter each other—neither one yields. Ever. Highways and towns are built up around them as they remain stubbornly entrenched and life passes them by.
Eventually, Zadock gets out and goes to negotiate. Quickly, he and the other driver are shouting. Fingers are pointed, first down the road and then at each other. Zadock stomps back to our van and pokes his head through the window.
“We’re walking,” he says.
We all pile out into the thicket, scratching our arms and legs. As we hoist up our backpacks, suddenly the jeep in front of us starts up and reverses back around the bend. We pile back into our van. Fifty feet beyond the curve, the other jeep is parked off to the side at an easy pull out. Laughter and happy waves are exchanged between the vehicles and we bounce past.
I knew I wasn’t going to have a solitary man-vs.-mountain experience, but I’m in no way prepared for the scene at the trailhead. Fifty porters are packing our gear and tents and scrambling to assemble our provisions—to support six hikers. In addition, there are three other parties of equal size setting out at the same time. A not insubstantial village is mobilizing toward nineteen thousand feet.
“We’re going poli-poli—slowly-slowly,” Zadock says. “Stay in my tracks.” We set out and Bob falls in tight behind Zadock, Tim is next, then Roberto, Hank, Eila, and I bring up the rear. The pace is excruciatingly slow, a quarter my usual walking speed, and I find it impossible to find a rhythm. On the trail, porters wearing flip-flops and torn shorts, each lugging forty pounds of gear on his back or head, hurry past us in our hiking boots and polypro tops, carrying only small daypacks.
“It will take us four to six hours to get to the first camp,” Zadock tells us. Tim is asking Zadock the meaning of various words in Swahili and the names of plants. Hank quickly nicknames him “Timmy-pedia.” We climb through a forest of African rose and holly and brittle wood. Eila drops back and I close in behind Hank, who is very much the young hotshot. He asks Bob where he went to school.
“Harvard?” Bob answers, his voice rising to a question at the end of the word. It’s the first he has spoken to anyone other than his father all day.
“Harvard,” Hank says, “where’s that?”
Bob begins to answer.
“Joke, Bob. That was a joke.” Hank looks back at me and rolls his eyes.
After less than three hours we arrive at a level area swarming with tents under yellowwood trees. Day one of six on our way to the summit has been a simple stroll through the forest with a thousand-foot elevation gain. Our individual tents are already set up and we assemble for dinner. Zadock passes around the pulse oximeter, then he begins what will become a nightly ritual—telling us all the things that can go wrong and all the people who have failed in their attempt to reach the summit.
Before I climb into my tent I try to call D but have no cell reception. That night I dream that D and I get married, to each other, but on different days in separate ceremonies in different locations. The sensation during the dream is pleasant and makes complete sense while it is happening.
By midmorning on the second day we’re climbing through a forest of dense and gnarled trees covered in thick strands of hanging moss. The sun dapples through the trees, and the silver-gray moss takes on a bluish tinge. We stop for a rest on a fallen stump. Timmy-pedia has been bombarding Zadock on what kind of people make the trek to the top—who has the best success rate and who has the worst. Zadock laments taking honeymooners up Kilimanjaro.
“Do you get a lot of people on their honeymoon?” I ask. It seems a strange choice for newlyweds.
“Too many,” he replies. “And it’s always a problem. They don’t listen. The men think it’s just walking and always try to take care of the women and ignore their own problems, and the women want to listen to the men and then the guys are always the ones who get in trouble. Always. And then the women don’t know what to do about that, because often they’re able to get to the top and their husbands can’t and it’s a problem. We try to keep them separated on the trail.”
I try to consider what this metaphor might mean for my own life and settle for knowing that D would never want to climb Kilimanjaro anyway.
Zadock continues. “Old women are the best to guide. They listen, they go slow, and they nearly always make it to the top. I had an eighty-two-year-old last year. She was great.”
At just below ten thousand feet we crest a rise, break out of the forest, and drop into one of the three calderas that make up the mountain, entering into what is called the heather zone. Low scrub for as far as we can see. Around a bend in the trail we get our first full view of the iconic conical and glacier-clad flattop peak—although the last few decades have seen nearly 90 percent of the snow vanish. The mountain looks strangely bare.
Our pace is still painfully slow. The younger guys in the group can’t slow down, so they’re forced to stop every few strides for a beat before marching a few more steps and then stop again. I hang back and begin to count my steps in a rhythm of four. One-two-three-four. Left-right-left-right. Then again. One-two-three-four. Left-right-left-right. And again. My breathing slows. Then I’m playing a game with myself, keeping score, trying to lift my foot only enough off the ground to move it in front of me, and then the next. When I scuff the dirt I lose points. A long time passes in this way as we walk through waist-high heather. At close to eleven thousand feet, the air has a coolness just beneath the sun’s efforts.
Eila begins to lag behind and when we get into camp I hear her complaining to Zadock about the distances we have to walk.
“What the hell did she think this was?” Hank says as we settle into the dinner tent. I resist telling him about her one previous day of hiking experience.
They stuff us with pasta again and Zadock launches into his nightly harrowing tales of people who died trying to summit, and then he passes around his torture device—the pulse oximeter. Immediately Timmy-pedia closes his eyes and begins a type of late-stage Lamaze breathing. His blood oxygen level has been low and Zadock has warned that anyone who cannot maintain a level of at least ninety will not be allowed to attempt the summit.
My blood oxygen is ninety-three and I toss the device back to Zadock. I have begun to resent this testing, the way I resent anyone having power over me. Eila’s rate is in the low eighties and her pulse is high. Zadock makes her breathe deeply until she gets her number up. The stress that she doesn’t believe in has begun to show on her face. Roberto’s chin has sunk to his chest, like it does each night at dinner. I gently nudge his arm and rouse him awake to clip the device on his finger.
“I hate this thing, Andy,” he whispers to me. I generally don’t like it when people call me Andy, but there’s something in Roberto that is so benign and his attempt to reach the summit feels so fragile that I don’t want to set him back in any way by challenging him.
Hank never has any issues with the pulse oximeter. He knocks out a number in the high nineties consistently and as he lofts the monitor across the tent to Bob—who has been quietly breathing with his hands placed on his knees, eyes closed—Hank tells us how the American people should be grateful to his company because they have paid back the government’s loan with 50 percent interest. They were, in fact, the good guys in the financial crisis.
Though I’ve come to like him—Hank reminds me of the uncomplicated, athletics-based male friendships I have drifted away from and would be well served to rekindle—I’m infuriated by his hubris.
“You’re still the devil, though. You know that, right?” I tell him.
“Oh, yeah.” He shrugs.
I wake up in the middle of the night—I’ve stopped breathing. A disturbance to the rhythm of oxygen and carbon dioxide entering and exiting the blood that occurs at this altitude can cause breathing to temporarily cease. It’s a harmless occurrence but the first time it happens it’s an odd sensation. I lie awake, and anxious thoughts fill my oxygen-challenged brain.
I wonder if my knee will hold out. I wonder if my son’s recent difficulty at school is symptomatic of a larger problem. I wonder if my father will die soon. And I wonder if I really am at peace with him, or at least as much as I can be, before he passes. After all my fear of his anger in my youth, and the resentment, and the judgment and disapproval of him in my twenties, and the subsequent dissolution of our relationship, and then the amicable distance that now defines it, what remains—in the middle of the night in my tent on the side of Kilimanjaro—is simply a feeling of disappointment and one of waste.
Because of both my desire for independence and my natural tendencies toward separation, more than most people I know, I would have benefited from the wisdom of a mentor. Since I have allowed myself little access to any kind of group consciousness, or the benefit of its shared experience, a single trusted person who had come before would have been ideal for me and might have saved me a great deal of trouble along the way—someone to offer up occasional insights or act as a fallback when I needed respite. In my few experiences with some form of limited mentorship, I have felt relief from a void that has long yearned to be filled. Perhaps it is one of the reasons I often seek the “bodyguards” D talks about. The self-reliance that was born of my lack of camaraderie has created a justification for a solitary way of living that is not useful in partnership. It is what D has most struggled with over the years; “I’m right here, I need you to come to me,” she’s often said. It has taken me a long time to even understand what she means by that.
If I can offer mentorship to my children, so they feel its presence and avail themselves of it if they wish to, I will consider myself a success as a parent.
I unzip my tent and go out to stare up at the hulking black mass of Kilimanjaro’s peak, the nearly full moon shining down on the glaciers, and my thoughts are brought back to the present and the task ahead. There is something in the challenge—no matter how difficult it might be to reach the summit—that is a relief in its simplicity. The night is cold. I shiver and hurry back in, but as I zipper into my sleeping bag my anxious thoughts return.
I wonder what would happen if D were unfaithful to me. I try to shake the image from my mind and pick up my book. Unimaginatively, I have brought along Hemingway’s collection of stories The Snows of Kilimanjaro—the book that first inspired this trip, so many years ago. I open it to a tale called “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” In it, a wife is cheating on her ineffectual husband with their game-hunter guide while on safari. When the husband discovers her infidelity, she mocks him and he withers. Then, in the course of a hunt, he steps into his manhood, and when the wife sees this she knows that her husband will leave her. In a moment of panic she shoots and kills her husband, perhaps accidentally.
I should have brought a different book.
We set out across moorland scattered with volcanic rock that yields to an alpine-like desert. We’re working our way east to west around the mountain, slowly gaining some of the twelve thousand feet we’ll climb while covering a little more than forty-two miles in the six days to the summit. My legs feel heavy today. To distract my weary mind, I play a game with Hank. We pick a spot in the far distance over the lunar-like landscape and guess how long it will take us to reach it. At first our estimates are hugely exaggerated. What we suspect will take us two hours ends up taking twenty minutes—but soon we’re judging distances within a minute or two. Porters hurry past us in an endless stream, their loads on their heads or shoulders.
“How come some of the porters carry stuff on their heads and some don’t?” Timmy-pedia asks Zadock.
“It depends where they grew up,” Zadock tells him. “How far they were from the water source. Kids who grew up in the city didn’t need to carry water so they use their shoulders to carry things, but if you lived in a village you were maybe a long way from water. It’s the women who fetch the water, and the little kids are always chasing behind their mothers and want to carry water too.”
“How much do they carry?” Timmy-pedia presses.
“When you’re about five you can carry a three-liter can on your head, then at ten you can carry ten liters, and then at twelve, twenty liters. Then you are a teenager and don’t want to do it anymore.”
We camp above thirteen thousand feet. I still have no cell service on my phone. Timmy-pedia has a satellite messaging device that allows single letters to be scrolled and typed from a center joystick. At the dinner table it takes me twenty minutes to scroll and type a few words to D—“no cell service. halfway up mountain. knee is holding. X.”
“God,” Hank says from across the table, “I’m trying to think who I’d even e-mail. My father maybe.”
I look over at him and am brought up short. Trying to carve out space for myself, often traveling to the ends of the earth to achieve it, wishing I had no responsibility, yearning for total freedom, and here is someone with just that, unattached, with endless space surrounding him, and my feeling isn’t one of envy or even wistfulness. I don’t yearn for what he doesn’t have—and the realization shocks me.
Outside the mess tent, fog has shrouded our campsite.
The Lava Tower sits at just over fifteen thousand feet. It’s a large outcrop jutting three hundred and fifty feet up into the sky, and we can see it from far off across the relentlessly rocky trail. Hank and I both judge it to be forty minutes away—it takes us nearly an hour and a half. By the time we arrive I have a ferocious headache. It is my first serious effect of the altitude. It feels as if a metal band has been placed around my skull beneath the skin at my temples and is being ratcheted tighter and tighter. I try to breathe, slowly and deeply. I can feel my heart racing while I’m at rest. My chest is very, very tight. Panic rises. This is only fifteen thousand feet; the summit is at nearly twenty. The stagnant air inside our red mess tent makes me nauseous and I can’t eat the zucchini soup on offer. Then Zadock goes to retrieve his pulse oximeter, and while he’s gone, I lose it.
“This is bullshit. This is a total misuse of technology. This constant testing and judging. It’s totally screwed up. All it does is add stress and pressure and ruins the trip. It doesn’t prove anything. I’m not fucking doing it anymore.”
My rant wakes Roberto. His chin rises from his chest and he looks at me with weary eyes from under his Yankees baseball cap.
“Why would you let this stress you?” the Indian neurosurgeon asks softly.
The others stare at their soup. Zadock returns and tosses the meter to Timmy-pedia, who doesn’t see it because his eyes are closed and his heavy breathing indicates that he is in the late stages of giving birth. The contraption falls to the ground and I storm out of the tent.
Once we drop off the ridge after lunch my headache quickly vanishes. Clouds hang low and engulf us; we can’t see more than a few feet in any direction as we walk. A stream rolls down to our left and supports life like we haven’t seen in a few days. Strange cactus-palm-like plants jut up, small yellow flowers clustered at their trunks. We have come farther around to the south side of the mountain and the snow above us is thicker now. We camp below a high cliff and the next day Zadock issues a new walking order. Eila will go first, behind him. Roberto will be second, “and then the rest of you,” he explains.
There is one tense moment beside a precarious drop on the Great Barranco Wall and then the landscape opens out into the strangely soothing desolate expanse of the Western Breach. The air now is thin and cool under the bright sun. There is a feeling of gathering expectation as several of the trails up the mountain converge and the path becomes more crowded. I have strength in my legs today and my eyes keep lifting to the summit directly above us. I’m relaxed in a way I haven’t been until now. My thoughts are light, and the day feels full of possibility. There is a lot of banter on the trail, even as Eila falls back.
At one point I hear a porter up ahead shout. He’s listening to a radio and for an instant I fear he’s heard news of a tragedy coming over the airwaves. Images of a disaster like September 11 flash into my mind. The first moment of real relaxation I experience on the hike has left me open for panic to come flooding in. It turns out the porter was simply shouting to his friend farther down on the trail. Perhaps D is right when she says that I’m just not comfortable when things are too good.
Farther on, Hank blows his nose and blood begins to rush out. At the high altitude and with the blood-thinning Diamox that he’s taking to prevent altitude sickness, the flow is not easy to quell. We stop and sit beside mounds of shirred rock next to a dozen porters on a break, all smoking.
“Do many porters smoke?” Timmy-pedia asks.
“I’d say about seventy-five percent,” Zadock answers.
Once the Ironman’s nose stops bleeding and he reties his Merrell boots, the porters squish their cigarette butts under their flip-flops and we all march on.
Roberto drops back and I slow to walk with him. His head is hanging low, his eyes on his shoes.
“You okay, Roberto?”
“I’m tired, Andy,” he says.
“We’re almost there, just up on that ridge ahead.”
Roberto lifts his head, registers the distance to where the tents are visible, then drops his chin again.
“Whose idea was it to do this, yours or Bob’s?” I ask, hoping to distract him.
“His.” Roberto lifts his head toward his son before dropping it again.
We say very little, and once our movement stops each day, there is an awkwardness to our silence, yet I enjoy his company—my affection for him is an unexpected pleasure.
When we arrive at camp, the tents are up, crowded along an uneven, rocky ledge. The last four-thousand-foot push to the summit will begin here before dawn. The clouds below clear and Mount Meru, Kilimanjaro’s “sister” mountain, is visible; farther off is Mount Longido and the flat top of Kitumbeine. To the west, the active volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai rises from the Great Rift Valley. I can see far into Kenya to the north.
Timmy-pedia finds me. “You have an e-mail.”
I take his satellite device. D has replied to my e-mail of the other day. “I can feel you from here, big style.”
I have a friend who climbed Kilimanjaro once and described it as “several pleasant days of walking uphill, followed by one day of hell.” Other than the looming question of whether the summit will be achieved, the hike to this point has been a fine amble in an exotic locale—altitude sickness and my wobbly knee being the only question marks. My knee is holding up, although with every step I take I am careful not to twist in midstride but keep it pivoting forward and back in a straight and clean arc. If someone calls me or I want to look off toward a far peak to my left, I stop and turn my entire body. It is a level of vigilance that wears on my mind and creates constant low-level stress—whatever Eila might say. As for altitude sickness, it seems that apart from taking Diamox, there is nothing else to do but take the time to acclimatize on the way up. Physical condition appears to have little or no relationship to how altitude affects you, and apart from my panic at Lava Tower, I have been largely spared.
But everything up to now has been merely getting to the starting line.
A light shines through my tent at three A.M. “It’s time,” Zadock says.
He didn’t need to wake me. I’ve been staring at my watch every twenty minutes since twelve thirty, when I went out to look up at the summit under the bright moon, one day on the wane and reflecting light off the glaciers above.
I’m happy to get out of my summer-weight sleeping bag. At 15,091 feet, I slept cold during the little sleep I did get. We straggle into the mess tent and are presented with yet another bowl of runny porridge. I choke down a piece of stale white bread with peanut butter and go put on another layer of clothing. At four fifteen we organize at the trailhead. I can see a thin, speckled trail of the headlamps of hikers who left before us, dotting a curving line, like glowing gnats.
“The first hour is the most difficult,” Zadock explains. “There is a lot of tight, steep scrambling over jagged rock. Eila, you’re behind me, Roberto, you’re next. Let’s go.”
There is no sound except our breathing and boots hitting, scuffing, scraping the rocks as we climb. My headlamp shines down on Hank’s heels in front of me. I need to use my hands on the cold stone to pull myself up in a few steep sections. In some places footholds have been worn into the stone. We need to squeeze into the face of a rock wall as we inch past a man on his way back down from his aborted attempt, doubled over and vomiting, the altitude having gotten the best of him.
Eila’s pace is even slower than the one that Zadock has set. Behind her, every few steps we stop, wait, and then start again. I begin to get angry at this herky-jerky progress. Then I’m nauseous. For a second time on the trip, panic rises. My anger swells. My fear-induced rage won’t help me, and I let Hank get several strides in front of me and slow my already crawling pace further so I can keep a consistent speed.
I begin to count my strides again, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. My anger begins to soften and my nausea abates. I gather myself and keep climbing.
We reach a level plateau where the trail opens out and then the incline begins again over loose rock that slides underfoot. We pass several more people being led back down in the dark—the altitude or the steep grade too much for them.
For another hour we climb in silence. Again I feel nausea coming on but quickly breathe through it. Then off to our right the horizon begins to soften, first to violet, then pink, and then a thin blue. And the sun is up and we’re taking photos, laughing, swilling water. Zadock hands out chocolate. I take a seat on a large volcanic rock and eat a Three Musketeers bar. I’m reminded of a camping trip I took my son on to the Catskills. For breakfast he ate sardines and M&M’s—he still describes it as his favorite meal.
I peel off a layer of clothing and we continue up. We break single-file formation and fan out. Our long shadows spread across the rocky terrain, bathed in a golden early light. Soon Eila has fallen behind; two porters flank her. Zadock looks back every few strides. When I turn, Eila is sitting on a rock far below us, staring off into the distance, her hands on her knees.
Zadock whispers over the walkie-talkie to the porters with her. He nods at something he hears in return. “Okay,” he says.
Eila will climb no farther. For days we had all doubted whether she would make it, but no one mentioned it aloud, not wanting to jinx their own attempts.
There’s greater confidence in the group now, and we climb on. I peel off another layer of clothing. There is playfully boasting conversation, then talk of the receding glaciers we walk beside, and then suddenly Roberto is struggling; his movements are heavy. He leans hard into his walking poles with each step. His son whispers encouragement, and Roberto nods. After another hour we can feel we’re close. Just above, the sky becomes vast. We reach Stella Point, on the rim of the crater, nineteen thousand feet above sea level. It’s as if the mountaintop has been waiting for us all this time, wondering where we were. The air here is cold and hard under a cloudless sky. A natural bench is carved into the side of the rim, and several porters are sitting, smoking, laughing. Roberto falls onto the bench as porters make room. The receding glaciers are scattered on the caldera floor before us.
Bob is digging for something in his pack when his father tries to get up. I’m closer so I lean down and grab Roberto’s arm to pull him to his feet. “Push me, Andy,” he murmurs, “help me get there.” He says this with such unguarded vulnerability that tears burn into my eyes.
“We’ll make it, Roberto,” I say. “We’re there now.”
We set out and the trail from here is a gentle amble, sweeping around and up another forty minutes toward the top. The Decken and Kersten glaciers are off to our left. Ahead, a wooden sign is silhouetted again the sun—Uhuru Peak, the top of one of the world’s Seven Summits.
Before Zadock implemented a different set order, Bob, Roberto’s son, was always in first position behind Zadock since we first set out six days earlier. He’s there again now. I slide up next to him from my usual position in the back.
“Bob,” I whisper, “why don’t you let your dad be the first to get to the top?”
Bob turns to me. He seems confused for an instant, then nods and calls out.
“Pop,” he says, turning back toward his father. “Come on, lead us to the top.”
Roberto lifts his eyes from his shoelaces and the beginning of a smile passes over his exhausted face. He gives it all he has left and marches to the front of the group. Zadock hangs back and Roberto strides the last fifty yards to the top, and he may as well be the first man ever to reach the summit of Kilimanjaro. He leans his weight against the post holding the sign welcoming us to the highest point in Africa, pumps his fist, and falls into his son’s embrace.
Watching them, I miss my own father—and realize that I always have.
“O! The Joy!” I scroll into Timmy-pedia’s satellite contraption and send the message to D. It’s a quote from Captain William Clark’s diary describing his feelings when he and his partner Meriwether Lewis and their Corps of Discovery laid eyes on the Pacific Ocean in 1805. I read it first years ago, and since, D and I have co-opted the phrase and made it our own, employing it more often than not in sarcasm—usually to capture the utter and constant joy of parenthood.
“How are the kids doing?” I’ve often asked over the phone from a distant shore.
“O! The Joy!” frequently comes as the weary reply, letting me know that the day has been long and selfless, filled with scattershot moments of resenting my absence, interspersed with a few laughs and ultimately enough good spirits to make it okay. But I send this message now with nothing but complete sincerity.
My unqualified joy is short-lived. After the hugs, and the photos, and taking in the vista, we slide down a steep slope of scree, four hundred feet to the floor of the crater. Here we are scheduled to camp, at 18,832 feet.
The crater is stark, desolate. After the thrill of the summit subsides, it is cold, even under the hanging sun.
“Most people have had enough by now,” Zadock informs us, “and want to head back down.”
My head has begun to feel the contraction and intense pressure again.
“How cold does it get at night?” Timmy-pedia asks.
“The second that sun drops, it is very, very cold,” Zadock warns him.
“I got what I came for,” Hank says.
“Let’s get out of here,” I agree.
“Good.” Zadock nods.
We go to rehoist our packs.
“I want to stay,” Timmy-pedia announces.
We all turn to him.
“The itinerary says we get to camp in the crater,” he says insistently. “I want to stay.”
We all look at Zadock. He shrugs. “It’s in the trip description, and if someone wants to stay, and no one is injured . . .”
“Do people usually stay?” I ask.
“Only once.”
“Can whoever wants to go back down to the camp below?” I ask.
“I’ll go down, too,” Hank says. “Bob? Roberto?”
Bob shrugs; Roberto has fallen asleep by a rock.
“There is no one to lead you down,” Zadock says. “The others are with Eila.”
We stand, slack-jawed.
“Lunch will be ready in a few minutes,” Zadock says.
Inside the mess tent the air is stagnant; an artificial heat burns through the nylon. It is oppressive. Hank and I work on Timmy-pedia to try to change his mind. He sits, staring at his hands in his lap.
“You have no idea how cold it’s going to get here, Tim. People die from exposure.”
“That’s okay, I want to camp in the crater,” he retorts.
“We have warm clothes, but the porters are in T-shirts,” Hank says.
“They do it all the time,” Timmy-pedia says in protest.
“No.” I correct him. “Everyone always goes back down. You heard Zadock.” Nearly every year there are accounts of porters dying from exposure on Kilimanjaro.
“Well, I want to stay,” he says.
My head is searing through with pain and anger. I step outside and walk off toward the glaciers that until a few years ago covered this land. The knifing in my skull abates only slightly in the fresh air. My fury grows.
When the sun goes below the rim of the volcano, it is noticeably colder, and when darkness falls the temperature plummets. I can’t eat dinner for the pain in my head and my simmering anger. The joy of the morning is long gone.
I put on literally every piece of clothing I have, seven layers on top and three below, and climb into my summer-weight sleeping bag. I’m screaming at Timmy-pedia in my mind. My anger consumes me. I’m aware, even in the midst of my fury, that I’m trying to regain some of the power that was plucked from me the instant Timmy-pedia stamped his foot and dictated our movements. After the satisfying feeling of strength I experienced upon reaching the summit, the sting of emasculation and disempowerment cuts deep.
My anger is also a way of whistling in the dark, giving me a sense of control in a situation that is so completely beyond my ability to alter, namely, the caprice of nature.
Years ago, I participated in an outdoor education course in the Absaroka Mountains in northwest Wyoming because I wanted to learn to take care of myself in the wilderness: to read a topographical map and find my way, to be comfortable building a fire in the outdoors, to know how and where to pitch a tent.
We were twenty-six days into the month-long course when a student pressured a young girl on the course into doing something we had all advised them not to do. Instead of hiking a few hours to a safe crossing, this one student convinced the others to bend to his will and cross a raging river at the very spot we had warned against. The result was fatal, the young girl died. We spent several days and nights guarding her body from grizzly bears, until a helicopter could get in to take her out. Sitting beside the girl alongside the river, I remember thinking that the worst thing in the world that could have happened just happened, and yet everything went on: the water still raced past, the sky was still full of stars, everything was the same, even as it was now entirely different for us. A strange feeling of gratitude descended on me as I sat beside her body in the dark. I felt lucky to be there; I had never felt so distinctly alive. But I also knew that none of it was necessary. It should never have happened. Someone unfamiliar with the disinterested ways of nature had made an ill-informed, youthful decision. Timmy-pedia’s choice at the frigid summit feels the same.
To soften my mind, I pick up my Hemingway book and read the title story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” In it, a man waits for a plane to rescue him as he lies dying from an infection in the African bush. He laments not using his talents to the fullest. As the end is near, he has a dream that the plane arrives and carries him up and over the snowcapped peak of Kilimanjaro to redemption. I feel no such redemption on the icy summit. I regret my anger and my inability, or unwillingness, to release it. I regret that I feel so strongly the need to be heard. Why is it that I need so much to be right? I regret my lack of compassion for someone I can identify with, namely Tim. I can understand his youthful desire to have this notch on his belt—yet my identification does nothing to diminish my fury.
My anger is not something to which I’ve always had easy access. Perhaps because I was familiar with the effects of rage growing up with a father who had a “short fuse,” as my mother called it, I rarely lost my temper. A few years after I stopped drinking, all that changed, and my long-suppressed anger rose up and found voice. My temper has never ruled me the way my father’s presided over him, but when I get angry at my children and see that look of shock on their faces, I imagine my own youthful image looking back at me and both curse myself and understand my father in equal measure.
Sleep is difficult to come by, and I wake every half hour through the night, always covered in goose bumps. Then I begin to shiver in earnest. When dawn is near and I reach for my water bottle, it is frozen solid.
At the mess tent, still shivering, I’m forcing down tepid porridge beside Hank, Bob, and Roberto when Timmy-pedia enters.
“Boy, two pairs of socks weren’t enough last night, were they?” It takes all my strength not to turn the table over on him and pummel his face. Everyone gets up and exits the tent, leaving him alone.
It’s the first morning the porters rush us to pack, and we’re out.
“How cold was it last night?” Timmy-pedia asks as we walk, oblivious to everyone’s rage and misery.
“Minus twenty-three degrees,” Zadock barks over his shoulder.
“Fahrenheit or Celsius?” Timmy-pedia asks.
Zadock stops, turns, and for an instant I think he may actually punch him. “Celsius.”
Within a half hour we are at Stella Point again. Without ceremony or a glance back, we drop off the ridge and then we’re skidding, sliding, giant-stepping down the scree, peeling off layers of clothing as we go. Hank rockets far ahead. I struggle to stay close. Timmy-pedia tries to keep up and when he takes a tumble, no one goes to his aid. It takes us an hour to cover what took seven hours to climb and we’re back at the lower camp. Eila is waiting, sheepish.
I slide up to Hank, who is untying his boots. “What do you say we get the hell off this rock?”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve only got two or three more hours down to Mweka Camp, where we’re sleeping tonight. Then it’s only another three hours tomorrow and we’re out.”
He looks at me. Suddenly there is an urgency to get clear off the mountain we fought so hard to get up.
“Let’s get out of here today,” he says in agreement.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
We bring the idea to Zadock and he tells us that everyone in the party has to agree. They quickly do. We retie our boots and continue down. Instead of the gradual traverse around the mountain and incremental elevation gain that took us six days, we head directly down, through the dense montane forest. Six hours and twelve thousand feet later, my thighs are seizing up, both my knees are aching, and my toenails are coming off.
At the trailhead, the truck to take us back to Arusha is waiting. A bottle of champagne is opened and paper cups are filled on the hood. I toast with the others and hand my full cup back to Zadock.
“Do you not drink?”
“I’ve had my share,” I say, and we load in and bounce over the dirt track, down the southern slope of Kilimanjaro. Soon we pass through the village of Mweka, where many of our porters live with their families. There is a workaday bustle to the village of mud huts and cement shacks with corrugated metal roofs. The village has no running water. Children run free in the dirt road. A filthy sign adverting beer (IT’S KILI TIME—MAKE THE MOST OF IT) hangs in front of a bar made of simple wood and mud construction.
In Hemingway’s story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” there is an epigraph that reads in part:
Close to the western summit [of Kilimanjaro] there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
The same lack of explanation may apply to my own journey to the top. I came to Africa to see if I could, as Seve said, “show up” for myself, to try to capture something I felt was missing. I had hoped to come down with a sense of completeness, but instead I’m left with a feeling of detachment. What was all that about? What was the point? Nothing was really achieved. No good was created. Nothing changed. Yes, I have a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. I am glad I made it to the top—having to deal with the irrational metaphors associated with failure would have been an obstacle I’m grateful I don’t need to work through. Yet I feel no great change or release, no greater strength or feelings of manliness I previously lacked.
The acute sense of longing I felt toward my father at the summit and the realization of the place that longing has always occupied in my body is a discovery not to be minimized, and in some ways, it is a relief. In acknowledging that emptiness, I’m released further into my own life. What more can we ask of our parents than that they teach us what they have to teach and then release us into the world?
The village gives way to rolling hills and then flattens out. A cluster of activity crowds a crossroads where a large mound of scrap metal is piled out in front of a small shack. An old woman sits beside mounds of figs spread out on a dirty sheet while a man is sanding a coffin as three men watch—half a dozen other coffins are stacked nearby. We drive on. The time capsule of the last week releases me back into the world and thoughts of unattended errands, calls that need to be made and e-mails sent, flood into my mind. I wonder what further wedding plans D has hatched in my absence.
A river joins our progress by the side of the road, and something about it reminds me of the Catherine River in Patagonia, which ran through the property at Estancia Cristina. I felt so comfortable there in my solitude and wondered how I might ever move from that place of contented isolation to this forward-leaning desire I feel right now toward getting to Ireland and the wedding.
How many people will make the trip to Dublin, how much of D’s family will be there? I find myself hoping many more will come than I previously admitted. The idea of welcoming a large number of people is a long way from my trying to escape the mere dozen on the bow of a riverboat in the Amazon.
And as the wind rips in through the open windows of the van, it occurs to me that I desire no secret life; I have no need to flee to Costa Rica, to leave my past behind and live out some idea of an existence. I want to be close to my children, to D, and feel that sense of inclusion I felt in Vienna.
Maybe a lot more happened on that mountain—and along the way during these last months—than I first thought.
Far off, across a field of long and golden grass, I see a lone Masai, tall and thin, wearing the traditional red shuka of his tribe. He carries a long walking stick. It’s miles from the last settlement of any kind, and there are no buildings on the horizon. He is erect; his stride has purpose. Suddenly I have the sensation of being out in that field, of the hard cracked earth under my feet, of the late-day sun over my shoulder, of the slight breeze blowing across my arms. My walk also has purpose and my stride has rhythm and power and grace. And then I’m back in the van. I crane my head and look off until the Masai is out of sight.
Around me, the others are chatting, but their words go past me. My thoughts are now with D. I picture her face, her eyes squinting at me—suppressing a grin and shaking her head as I protest her ever-growing wedding agenda. I can’t wait to be with her, to get to Ireland. Over the thousands of miles that separate us I feel a closeness to her and an excitement about our future, together. I realize that in this sensation, in this desire for unity, I feel like myself—and it’s all I ever wanted.
On the outskirts of Arusha, I pull out my phone. It finally has service. I text D—“Off the Mtn. Remember me?”
A few minutes later, my phone pings. “Who are you, anyway?”
I’m reminded of her first e-mail to me, years ago, when she asked the same question. Now I have the answer. I text back:
“The man coming to marry you.”