My Year with Eleanor (32 page)

She smiled knowingly. “Well, you said it. Henri and
I both heard it.” She turned to him and he nodded in confirmation. Henri had
been a little pissy today. When we'd set off this morning, he'd slyly taken the
lead and gradually kept increasing our speed until we were approaching a light
jog. Dismas had to install the assistant guide in front to slow him down, and
Henri had been scowling since. Whenever Marie asked if he'd like one of her
energy bars or how he was feeling, he responded in clipped one-word replies. But
Marie, unfazed, either didn't notice or didn't care.

We passed a porter who was sitting on the side of
the road out of breath. Marie offered to pour half a liter of her water into his
empty thermos. He gladly accepted.

“I'm a nurse.” She shrugged as we continued on.
“I'm used to taking care of people.” A few minutes later Henri silently reached
across the dusty trail and grabbed Marie's hand. I smiled to myself.

Yesterday Marie confessed she'd originally thought
our guide's name was “Dismal” not Dismas. Now the whole day I kept almost
calling him Dismal and had to catch myself. We were wearing pants and T-shirts
but pulled on wool long-sleeved tops whenever the fog rolled in, which it did,
often, with astounding rapidity. One minute the air was clear; the next I was
staring at a wall of white and couldn't see more than twenty feet in front of
me.

Horombo was perched next to a cliff. The cabins
were A-frame like those at Mandara but painted an ominous coal black, a striking
contrast to white clouds that kicked up wispily over the cliff's edge like the
foamy waves of Big Sur. At twelve thousand feet, we were above the cloud line.
The sunset turned the clouds pink, making them look girlish and slightly
ridiculous. I took a walk after dinner, wandering over to the porters' side of
the camp. Half of them grinned and greeted me with “jambo,” but many treated me
as an invader and glared. This was the tension of Kilimanjaro tourism. They knew
they needed us for their livelihood and some of them resented us for it. I
didn't blame them, frankly.

Every morning we stuffed our sleeping bags into
small sacks, which had a strap for easy transport. Getting a fluffy
six-foot-long sleeping bag into a two-foot-by-two-foot satchel was always a
comedy of errors. I would smoosh one part down, only to have another part boing
out. Then I'd shove that part back in and the opposite end would gleefully pop
out. So I felt a sense of relief as I rolled my sleeping bag, knowing I wouldn't
have to repack it tomorrow morning. We'd be staying here two nights to better
acclimate us to the altitude before attempting the summit. When Marie stepped
out of our cabin to brush her teeth before bed, Henri and I descended into
awkward silence, as we always did when we were left alone. He busied himself
with fixing our broken door using my Swiss Army knife, which I'd packed
primarily because it had a nail file. I lay down on my bunk and considered the
graffiti etched into the wood overhead. Horombo was the halfway point of the
climb. Hikers stayed here on the way up, but they also spent a night here on the
way down from the summit. Therefore, it could accommodate 120 hikers, twice as
many as Mandara and Kibo. All over our cabin walls, hikers had carved for us
their impressions of the climb. One anonymous hiker pronounced the hike to the
summit “miserable” but added that “the view is worth it.” Shana Theobald in
7/20/2007 wrote: “The pain lasts for a little while, but the pride lasts
forever. It's mind over matter—you can do it!” Less sentimentally, “JM + BK”
instructed me to “go hard, or go home.” Marie and Henri had brought along a
digital thermometer, and it had become a ritual to take the temperature inside
our cabin each night. Tonight it read three degrees Celsius, or a little over
thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. As Marie and Henri got ready for bed, the
hikers in the cabin next to us gabbed about the day, occasionally giggling at
some mutual joke.

“Well, I hope those party animals next door quiet
down soon,” Marie huffed, climbing into her sleeping bag. I checked my watch. It
was 7:00
P.M.
I felt like a prisoner at bedtime
again. I lay awake for six and a half hours. On my third trip to pee, I creaked
open our broken cabin door that even Henri couldn't fix and waddled toward the
ladies' bathroom. The terrain was more uneven here than at Mandara, so I walked
with wide-set legs to better maintain balance. I continued on to the bathroom
where someone had been battling (and losing, it appeared) a war with
dysentery.

On the way back to the cabin, my left foot slipped
on a rock and I fell backward, landing palms and ass down on the ground, looking
straight up at the sky. I gasped. Then I leaned back on my elbows and stared.
The sky was radiant in its blackness, the stars bright and crisp. I remembered
how the New York skyline had glittered that night, almost a year ago, when I'd
swung out on the trapeze; how those tiny squares of light had stood out against
the sky. But this! This looked like a photo of outer space. Light travels
through space in a straight line. It's the atmosphere that causes it to bend and
scatters the light, creating the blurry stars and hazy blue-black color that
sea-level dwellers think of as the night sky. Up here the atmosphere was
thinner, with fewer dust particles and gas molecules to spoil the view. We were
closer to the light, yet more enveloped in darkness.

E
very
morning I waited for Henri and Marie to leave for breakfast. Then I stripped
naked in my thirty-seven-degree cabin air and, gritting my teeth, wiped myself
down with moist toilettes. This was my “shower.” A person has to maintain some
civility, even while dry shaving your armpits. Which brings me to another matter
of hygiene. Catherine Deneuve once famously remarked, “A thirty-year-old woman
must choose between her ass and her face.” She had been referring to aging. As
you get older, the theory goes, you can either have a thin body or a
youthful-looking face—but you can't have both. One month away from age thirty, I
was already choosing between my ass and my face. My nose, thinking that it was
winter, had been running nonstop since we'd exited the rain forest. My toilet
paper supply was dwindling fast. There was no way four rolls would last the
entire trip if I kept using it to blow my nose. As an alternative, I turned to
the travel face towel I'd bought especially for the trip, renowned for its
absorbency. On principle handkerchiefs disgusted me, but so did the idea of
wiping my ass with tree leaves.

Just because we were bunking at Horombo two nights
didn't mean we got to rest during the day. No, today we were going on a day hike
to Zebra Rock, a some fourteen-thousand-foot affair that was supposed to help
prepare our lungs for the low oxygen levels we'd encounter on our summit hike.
It was a struggle. No matter how slowly I walked, I couldn't catch my breath. I
was panting as though I'd just finished a really long sprint, but the feeling
never went away. Frustration built until I was angry at everyone and everything
that had ever existed since the beginning of time. I was even annoyed at the
United States for not using the metric system, because every time Dismas told us
how many meters high we were or how many kilometers we'd hiked, I had no idea
what he was talking about because I was too fuzzy-headed to calculate the
conversion rate.

Mountain climbing is a love affair on fast-forward.
The things you once found charming about your partners quickly become the things
you loathe. On the first day I'd been delighted in the way Henri pronounced his
name, with that uniquely French uptick that sounded like the word should have an
exclamation point at the end (On
–REE!
). Now it was
so grating that every time someone said it, my shoulders actually shrunk up and
my head twisted slightly to the side. It only underscored the fussiness of his
personality, the way he was always messing with his camera, his shirt tucked in
(tucked in!) just so. Marie, meanwhile, was relentlessly inquisitive. Always
with the questions! But mostly I resented their need to get ahead of everyone
else. I thought that was an American thing. And who hiked a
fourteen-thousand-foot mountain to
practice
to hike
a nineteen-thousand-foot mountain the next day? Freaks.

Now my irrepressible Canadian cohikers were
practically running up the trail, and by the afternoon I hated them with the
fire of a thousand burning suns. As the space between us widened, their backs
grew smaller and smaller until I could crush them between my thumb and
forefinger. Dismas hung back with me. “Just poly-poly. That is the best way to
reach my main office.” He winked. Dismas referred to the peak of Kilimanjaro as
his main office. Mount Kili, by the way, was a tease. One moment the peak was
visible, standing naked before us. The next she was wrapping herself in clouds,
a bashful woman cloaking herself in a bedsheet after a one-night stand.

“Kili is sleeping,” Dismas said whenever she was
obscured behind clouds.
That must be nice,
I thought
grouchily.
At least someone got to sleep in
today
.

Three hours after leaving Horombo, Dismas and I
arrived at Zebra Rock. It had once been just a black lava cliff, but years of
mineral-rich rain had stripped the color so that it was now covered in white
stripes. I had to admit, Zebra Rock was striking to behold. Emphasis on the
behold
. While I was admiring the view, I noticed
an arrestingly steep hiking trail winding up the mountain next to Zebra Rock. I
pulled my sunglasses down the bridge of my nose to stare at it over the tops of
the lenses. Then I looked at Dismas.

“Wait, we're not actually climbing up that thing,
are we? It's practically vertical. Is that even legal?”

“It's like a narrow stairway to heaven, no?” Dismas
answered dreamily.

“It's the road to Hell, Dismas,” I said flatly.

“Poly-poly, Noelley. Poly-poly.”

“Slowness is not a problem for me, in case you
haven't noticed. If I were to go any slower, I'd be standing still.” He
responded with a grin.

Despite its steepness, it was not as bad as I
anticipated. I settled into a groove and my breathing relaxed. Groups of other
hikers were gathered at the top, snacking on various provisions. A guy from the
church group offered some pieces of dried mango that looked about the way that I
felt.

By the time I returned to Horombo, the hikers who
had climbed the summit that morning were staggering in looking like the back-up
zombies from the “Thriller” video. They were wild eyed and stiff limbed, not to
mention completely filthy. During dinner a fourteen-year-old boy rose from the
table next to ours and, without a word to his family, walked outside the dining
hall. Through the window we saw him double over and vomit three times. A few
minutes later we saw a dusty woman being helped to her cabin in the posture of
an injured football star, each arm slung over the neck of a porter. Marie and I
exchanged worried glances. Henri asked the German couple next to us with
telltale sunburned noses whether there had been any snow at the peak. “No, but
there was hail on the way down,” the man answered.

Hail? No one had said anything about hail! A helmet
was the one thing I
didn't
bring. There was no way I
was going to make it to the top. How could I climb seven thousand more feet
tomorrow? I'd barely made it two thousand feet today. I felt my eyes welling up.
I couldn't do this here. I had to get back to my cabin, but first I had to
finish my dinner or I wouldn't have enough energy tomorrow. I started cramming
great forkfuls of pasta into my mouth. I was chewing fast, trying to get it over
with as quickly as possible. I bit my tongue hard. I kept going, chasing the
pasta with a slice of fried bread. I bit my tongue again, drawing blood this
time. I let my fork clatter to my plate. Then, to my horror, I buried my face in
my hands and started to cry. Marie and Henri fell silent, the way you do when
someone you don't know very well is crying and you're unsure whether to ask
what's wrong or let the person be. I whisked the tears off my cheeks with my
fingers, composed my facial expression, and stood up.

“I am finished with dinner,” I announced and
hurried out of the dining hall back to my cabin. A few minutes, when I had a
really good cathartic cry going, there was a knock at the door. Being
interrupted at the start of your cry is like being interrupted masturbating or
accidentally ripping your headphones out of your ears during a good song. I felt
a flashing irritation. I opened the door expecting to find Marie and Henri, but
instead Dismas was standing there. They must have said something.

“Miss Noelley, are you sick?” His forehead was
furrowed in concern.

“No, I'm not sick.”

“No headache? Throwing up?”

“I'm fine, really. Please, I just need to be
alone.”

“I see you tomorrow morning then.” He tipped his
cap and walked away. I closed the door and felt my face contorting again, lips
pushed out, chin quivering, eyebrows drawn together. I bent over into a
gutteral, full-body sob. When I'd signed up for this trip, I'd known that it was
important to come alone so I couldn't use my boyfriend or friends as a crutch.
But I was suddenly overcome with homesickness. I missed Matt and Jessica and
Chris and Con Edison, the gas company that supplied my heat.
I will never take any of you for granted again!
But
most of all I missed sleep. I'd been gone for six days, and I couldn't believe
it was going to be five more days before I was home again. Then I remembered
something Chris had said last week.