Travels (26 page)

“Not really. But it crosses your mind. It has to.”

The accommodations at Kibo Hut are reminiscent of a Siberian prison camp. Triple-decker bunks line all four tin walls; in the middle of the room, a central pit for eating. The wind whines through the cracks in the walls; nobody removes any clothing indoors. We have dinner at 5:00 p.m., porridge and tea. Nobody can eat much. We are all thinking about the ascent. We must reach the top before ten the next morning, because after that the weather is likely to sock in, closing off the views and making the summit dangerous. If we climb too slowly, we risk being turned back from the summit because of the weather.

One of the guides tells us the plan: we will be awakened with tea (no coffee at these altitudes) at 2:00 a.m., and we will begin our ascent in darkness. One lantern for every two people. We will stay together, so as not to get lost in the darkness. It is six hours from here to the summit; after three hours, there is a cave where we can stop and rest, but otherwise there is no shelter until we reach the summit, and come back down to Kibo. It will be very cold. We should wear all the clothing we have.

I’m already wearing all the clothing I have. I’m wearing long Johns and three pairs of pants, two tee shirts, two shirts, a sweater, and a parka. I wear a wool balaclava on my head. I wear all these clothes to bed, removing only my boots before climbing into my sleeping bag. Everyone
else wears their clothes to bed, too. We’re in bed by 7:00 p.m., silent, listening to the wind whine.

Sleep is impossible. Every time I begin to drift off, I snap awake, suddenly fearful, convinced I am suffocating, only to realize that it is simply the altitude.

I am not the only one with this problem. Inside the darkened hut, I hear groans and curses in a half-dozen languages throughout the night. It is almost a relief when the guide shakes me, and hands me a plastic cup filled with smoky hot tea, and tells me to dress.

All around me, people are pulling on boots and gloves. Nobody speaks. The atmosphere is, if anything, even more grim than before. Paul stops by to wish us good luck on our ascent; he hopes we make it. I wonder if it’s some sort of mountaineering tradition, this last-minute wishing of luck. After all, we’ve come so far, there is so little left, who would turn back now? Nobody in his right mind. After all, I think, how bad can it be?

We take our lanterns and leave the tin hut, and climb the mountain in darkness.

Very quickly it becomes a nightmare. The lantern is useless; the wind blows it out; the darkness is total. I cannot see anything and continually stumble over rocks and small obstacles. I am sure this would be painful if I could feel anything in my feet at all, but they are numb with cold. Even when I wiggle my toes in the boots, I feel nothing. As I stumble up the mountain, the numb cold creeps up my legs, first to the shins, then the knees, then the mid-thigh. The trail upward is steep and exhausting, but the cold is so penetrating we stop for only a few moments at a time, just enough to catch our breath in the blackness, and stumble on. I feel rather than see the presence of the guides, the porters, the other hikers. Occasionally I hear a grunt or a voice, but for the most part everyone trudges along silently; I hear only the wind and my own labored breathing. As I walk along, I have plenty of time to wonder whether I am getting frostbite in my numb feet. It’s my own fault—I was completely unprepared for this trip, I didn’t bring the right equipment, including the right boots; it was a serious oversight; I may be penalized now. Anyway, frostbite or not, I am having real trouble. I frankly don’t think I’ll be able to make it. I can go on for a while, but I doubt I can last much longer.

Somewhere around me, I hear Loren. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” I say. “Can you feel your feet?”

“I haven’t been able to feel them for an hour,” she says. There is a pause. “
Listen: what are we doing here?
”

The question takes me by surprise. I don’t really have an answer. “We’re having an adventure,” I say, and laugh cheerfully.

She doesn’t laugh back.

“This is crazy,” she says. “Climbing this mountain is crazy.”

Her words enter my consciousness directly. I have no doubt in my mind she is right. It is crazy to be doing this. Yet I feel protective toward the decision to make the climb, as if it were a friend I don’t want criticized.

I am trudging onward in the darkness, tired, numb, gasping for air, freezing cold, a prisoner on a forced march. I put one foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. I try to set a rhythm, to keep moving forward in that rhythm.

To consider whether or not this is crazy does not help my rhythm right now. I ignore her statement and concentrate on walking in my rhythm. How long I continue in this way I am not sure; it is too much trouble to look at my watch: clumsily peeling away layers of clothing to expose a glowing green dial that is hard to read through chilled, tearing eyes. After a while the time doesn’t matter any more; I just keep walking.

The arrival at the cave at the halfway point is a surprise. The cave isn’t warm, but it’s out of the wind and so seems warmer. We are all able to light our lanterns, so we have light. We can look at one another. People huddle together, talking quietly. I see the shock on many faces. I am not the only one who finds this climb a nightmare.

Loren sits next to me, whispers, “I hear the English couple is going back.”

“Oh?”

“She’s sick. She’s throwing up from the altitude.”

“Oh.” I don’t know who she is talking about. I don’t really care.

“How do you feel?” she says.

“Terrible.”

“How’re your feet?”

“Blocks of ice.”

A pause, and then she says, “Listen, let’s go back.”

I am shocked. This woman who has so much energy, is so much in control of her body, now wants to quit. She’s had it. She wants to quit.

“Listen,” she says, “I’m not embarrassed to say we got to seventeen thousand feet and then quit. We’re not in shape. Seventeen thousand is damned good.”

I don’t know what to say. She’s right. I think it over.

Loren continues quickly, “It’s insane to be doing this. There’s no reason to be doing this. It’s some kind of crazy proving of ourselves—for what? Who cares? Really. Let’s go back. We’ll tell everyone we climbed it. Who will know? It won’t matter. Nobody will ever know.”

All I can think is:
I’ll know
.

And I think a lot of other things, about not being a quitter, and how I think that quitting is contagious, that once you start to quit it spreads through your life—but that’s sports talk, coaching talk, I’m not sure I believe it.

What I believe is,
I’ll know
. I feel trapped by an inner honesty I didn’t know I had.

“I want to keep going,” I say.

“Why?” she says. “Why is it so important to you to get to the top of some stupid mountain?”

“I’m here now, I might as well do it,” I say. It sounds evasive. The fact is, I have no better answer. I have put up with a lot of pain and a lot of anxiety to get this far, and now I am in a cave in predawn darkness within a few hours of the summit, and there is no way I am going to quit now.

“Michael, this is crazy,” she says.

The others are filing out of the cave, resuming their ascent. I get to my feet.

“Just go one more hour,” I say. “You can make it another hour. Then, if you still want to go back, we will.” I figure in another hour it will be dawn, and everything will seem better to her, and she will be encouraged to go on. I figure she’ll never quit if she knows that I am continuing.

And I am continuing. I surprise myself with my own strength and conviction.

Dawn is a beautiful prismatic band that throws the jagged peak of Mawenzi into relief. I tell myself I should pause for a moment to enjoy it. I can’t. I tell myself I should pause and take a picture of it, so I can enjoy the picture later. I can’t even take a picture. I have lost the ability to do anything that some animal part of my brain judges to be nonessential energetic movement. It is not necessary to take a picture. I don’t take one.

A few thoughts enter my awareness anyway. I have never seen a sky so indigo-black. It looks like the sky from space pictures—and I realize that it should, that I am now more than three miles above the surface of the earth, and the normal blue sky, created by atmosphere and suspended dust, is gone.

The other thing is that the horizon is curved. There is no doubt about it. Sunrise is an arc that bends down at the sides. I can see with my own eyes that I am standing on a spherical planet. But the actual sensation is uncomfortable, as if I am viewing the world through one of those curving wide-angle lenses. I look away.

I put one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other. I lean on my walking stick and breathe and keep my rhythm. I wait for the air to warm; eventually it does, a little. At least I can see where I am walking. But when I look up, the summit seems far away. Most of the other climbers are farther along, and their bright jackets contrast with the beige scree of the volcano.

“Scree” is a geological term for small cinders of volcanic origin. We are walking up, ankle-deep in scree. It is like walking on a vertical beach. You take two steps up, and slide one step back. Two steps up, one back. The destination never comes any nearer.

Two hours after sunrise is the worst time for me. I am utterly exhausted, and I am suddenly aware, looking at the climbers farther up the slopes, that they are walking like mountaineers in a
National Geographic
special. One of those movies where the intrepid climbers plod through the snow, head down, with a dogged, deliberate rhythm. Step, breathe, breathe. Step, breathe, breathe.

The hikers above me are moving like that. And so am I. I have become a character in a television special. I am totally out of my element. Loren is right—I never expected it would be this hard. I’m not cut out for this. I’m not in shape for this. I’m not interested in doing this, now or ever again. Who cares about this climbing business anyway? A million people have already climbed Kilimanjaro, there’s nothing special to it. There’s no real accomplishment. It’s no big deal.

My guide, Julius, sees that I am fatigued. He offers to push me. I tell him no. He offers to push Loren, and she agrees, and he stands behind her with his arms on her waist and pushes her up the slope. But it doesn’t seem to me that he helps Loren. It seems to me that you have to do this one alone.

Pretty soon Loren tells Julius to stop pushing her, and she continues by herself. She doesn’t seem to be aware of me any more, although we are only a few feet apart. She is lost in some private world of focused effort.

I am trying to figure out what is going on inside my head. I have begun to understand that climbing at altitude is a mental process, an exercise in concentration and will. I notice that some thoughts sap my energy, but others allow me to continue for five or ten minutes without stopping. I am trying to figure out which thoughts work best.

To my surprise, the mental pep talks (“You can do it, you’re doing great, keep up the good work”) don’t help. They just provoke the counter-thought that I am kidding myself and will ultimately fail.

Nor does focusing on my rhythm, my pace, counting my steps or my breathing, going for a kind of mindlessness. That just puts everything into mental neutrality, which is not bad, but not particularly good, either.

Equally surprising, to focus on my exhaustion is not deleterious. I can think, God, my legs ache, I don’t think I can lift them another step, and it doesn’t slow me down. It’s the truth, and my legs don’t feel worse just because I think the truth.

In the end, what seems to work is to think of a nice warm swimming pool in California. Or the nice beer and curry dinner I will have when I get back to civilization. Hawaiian palm trees and surf. Scuba diving. Something far from my present surroundings. A pleasant fantasy or daydream.

So I think about swimming pools and palm trees as I plod up the gritty scree. Around 8:00 a.m. Julius begins to show concern. Already people are coming down from the summit—I resent them deeply—and Julius wants to make sure we reach the top before any bad weather closes in. I ask him how far away the summit is. He says forty-five minutes.

He has been saying forty-five minutes for the last two hours.

In a way, it’s not his fault. The higher slopes of Kilimanjaro provide a bizarrely undramatic perspective. It’s like the view an ant would have on the outside of an overturned salad bowl—all you see is a curved surface that gets narrower as you approach the top, but otherwise looks pretty much the same all the time.

It’s very dramatic to
be
there, because your body can feel the steepness of the ascent, and it is dizzying to look up to climbers above you. But it doesn’t
look
like much at all.

Julius begins to urge us onward, bribing us with chocolate bars, threatening us with clouds. He needn’t bother. We are going as fast as we possibly can, and finally, around 9:00 a.m., we arrive at Gillman’s Point, marked by a small concrete plaque at 18,700 feet. Although the actual summit, Uhuru Point, is at 19,340 feet, most hikers stop at Gillman’s Point and consider honor satisfied. I certainly do.

I stand on the summit, pose for pictures, read the plaque, and look at the flags and mementos left by previous climbing groups. I stare indifferently at the views. I’m not elated, I’m not self-satisfied, I’m not anything. I’m just here at the summit. I have gotten here after all, and now I’m here.

Loren tells me I have gotten her to the top, and I tell her she did it
herself. We take pictures of each other. And all the while I keep thinking one thing: I am here. I got here.

I am at the summit of Kilimanjaro.

Shrieking at the top of our lungs, we ski down the scree in our boots, sometimes falling, laughing, then sliding on the seat of our pants. It has taken us seven hours to make the ascent from Kibo Hut; we’re back down in an hour. From Kibo, we walk another ten miles across the saddle. The threatened bad weather finally arrives, with intermittent snow and sleet. Finally we reach Horombo Hut, where we spend the night. All together we have walked eighteen miles since 2:00 a.m. that morning.