Moody kept repeating, “Pole, pole,” which means “Slow, slow.” (My first thought was, I’m using my damn poles!)
With the sun now bright and high in the sky, it became hot, and for some relief I zipped off the lower half of my cargo pants, revealing the braces on my feet. I felt the eyes of the others on me, same as I had when the doctors put in me casts up to my hips decades before to fix my gait. Back then, I hated the spotlight the casts put on me, and I even mastered ambling around without crutches to support me. Now on the mountain, braces exposed, I acted the same, making sure to straighten my walk and to level my breathing, so that my climbing companions weren’t reminded of who they were accompanying up this mountain.
Whenever we stopped for a drink or a snack, Paul came up to me and asked, “How are you feeling, brother?” or “How’re the feet?”
Each time I said that everything was fine, and he would give me a fist bump or a “Good to hear.”
As we crossed the plateau, we hiked up and down several ravines and canyons—same as the day before. I only knew the time of the day by the position of the sun. I didn’t want a watch; I didn’t want to know how slowly time was passing. From what Tim had said, we were rising roughly 2,500 feet in elevation over the five-hour hike, but it quickly became clear to me that I had no idea what this meant in terms of the ravines and the valleys in between, in terms of what was ahead. The uncertainty was unsettling, but as with the time element, it was probably for the best. Sometimes knowing too much of what lies ahead makes a challenge doubly difficult.
On the side of the trail at the base of a steep canyon was an old rusted gurney with straps and a single rickety wheel under its center. It looked like a backboard nailed to a unicycle.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Tim explained there were several of these gurneys on the mountain, and they were used to carry people down if they couldn’t make it on their own. I imagined how it would feel to be locked down onto that torture machine, hurtling down the mountain. The picture in my head was not a pretty one.
We weaved our way through a sloping field of black volcanic rocks and emerged from the canyon, finding ourselves above the clouds at 12,600 feet. Our campsite was on the ridge, just up ahead.
Before we went into our tents, we marked the end of day two with, “That’s a wrap!” followed by a clasp of hands, chest bumps, and finally a guttural roar. Silly ritual, I know, but it was ours.
I sat down on a ledge at the edge of the camp, looking out at the valley floor, now far below. As the sun descended, the clouds rose over me and across the mountain. The sky was on fire, with streaks of oranges and reds and yellows that deepened in color with every passing minute. Try as I did to not be too religious, there was a touch of God in that sunset.
In the mess tent, we gobbled down dinner and, seeing that we did not want to head to our lonely beds in the dark just yet, Paul brought out a deck of UNO cards. At first only our team was playing, peering at our cards by the light of our headlamps, but then Moody and Bariki came over and started following the game over our shoulders. Pretty soon we had a contest in the works; our guides counted in Swahili each card they had to draw and loved sticking each other with Draw Fours, Reverses, and Skips. They thought the game was the greatest thing ever, and the tent was loud with cheers, exasperated sighs, and laughter.
An hour later, I returned to my tent, promising myself not to drink so much water during the night that I had to make twenty grandpa visits to nature’s toilet. The fact that we were camped on a bluff and the fact that the night was pitch-black were two reasons for just taking sips from my CamelBak.
I stared up at the dark roof of my tent, thinking of the climb the next day. Tim had advised us it would be the first tough day of our expedition: steep zigzagging trails reaching to over 15,000 feet of elevation. It would be the highest I had ever been in my life, and I wondered how the altitude would hit me. While the scream of the wind coming over the ridge continued, I finally fell into an uneasy sleep.
“Maji moto.” Yawns, grumbles, new deodorant slathered onto old deodorant. The rustle of sleeping bags, the stagger of steps to the mess tent. More yawns, a clap on a back here, a “Man, was it bitter cold last night” there, the gathering at the trail head. Grabbing my poles and thinking of Jake, and then Moody setting off. “Pole, pole.” The routine was becoming familiar. But this was only day three. There were still many mornings to go.
We set off up a terrible slope that I might have managed better if I had been scrambling on my hands and knees. Instead, I leaned heavily on my poles and forced my feet onward. Just fifty steps into the climb my feet were not feeling good. They were stiff, sensitive, and throbbing. Two days of hiking had slowly taken their toll, mostly because of the uneven ground. Each step was just a bit awkward, my feet rolling inward a little more to the left than usual, a little more to the right, causing flashes of pain in my arches each time. My big flippers couldn’t take it—particularly since they were already in recovery because of what had happened on Mt. Whitney.
We were nowhere near the crest of this first challenge of the day, and I was slowing and getting very quiet inside of myself. Dilly and Paul tried to joke with me, but I remained silent. There was no room for distraction or banter. My focus had to be on a single purpose: watching each movement of Moody’s boots ahead, following them with my own. The others swept past me on the side of the trail. I didn’t care. I needed to keep a slow pace.
A couple of hundred yards up the slope, I came upon a Dutch climber; his backpack sported a flag with the characteristic red, white, and blue horizontal sections on it. He was sitting on a rock, his head between his legs. He was middle-aged and seemed fit, but he was in terrible shape. His face was white, and he struggled to gather enough breath. Two of his teammates hung by his side, speaking quietly in his ear, very worried.
“It’s a long, hard way,” one of them said as I passed.
We’re into big-league stuff now, I thought. The first two days had been easy. Now any of us, no matter how strong, could be struck down by the altitude. The sight of this Dutchman destroyed my confidence.
Keep going. You got this, I told myself again and again as I made my way to the top of this ramp of hell. At one point, I was stopping every ten minutes to rest, gasping for air, my legs leaden. The others had disappeared into the distance. That was fine by me, as they now couldn’t see how hard I was struggling. This hill was the first slap in the face, awakening me to how unprepared and ill-trained I was for this climb. The thought stung.
The trail leveled off at last almost two hours later. My ankles felt as though they were being stabbed with icepicks, and I was sapped of energy. Sitting down, I stared ahead at nothing in particular and took little sips of water from my CamelBak.
Moody appeared at my side with a porter whom he introduced as Minja. I had noticed Minja before because of his distinctive beanie hat and the long, rainbow-striped umbrella he kept stuffed in his backpack. He was tall and thin, with huge baseball mitts for hands, and he had one of the most expressionless faces I had ever seen. Happy, sad, impatient, hopeful—nothing registered. He was stone.
“Jambo,” I said. (“Hello.”)
“Minja will hike with you,” Moody said. “If you need anything, he’s your guy.”
I half smiled. Minja looked at me indifferently and said, in a very deep voice, something in broken English that I couldn’t understand. We were off to a great start.
We left behind the moorlands and now looked to be crossing a high desert, the landscape empty but for strange pillars and clumps of lava. For a while I remained in the middle of the pack, but then gradually dropped to the rear again. Minja kept at my heels, going at whatever pace I set, which was never faster than a turtle crawl. Only when the others took a break would I catch up with the group, but by the time I arrived they would be ready to go. Paul offered to carry my backpack, no doubt seeing from the constant grimace on my face how much I was hurting. I thanked him, but said no.
I wanted to do this on my own, and he had his own bag to haul.
My legs felt as if they were swelling, and pulses of pain shot from the instep of my right foot. Any help the braces gave me on the first two days had worn off. Worse, the altitude was really kicking into high gear. A slow, relentless headache began to grip the sides of my temples. There was nothing to do about it but suffer, continue, move onward. At one point, Tim stopped me on the trail and asked how I was doing. I simply hung my head. I didn’t have the energy for words.
Halfway through the day, the temperature plummeted without warning, and the mist that had clung to the mountain like a blanket began to freeze. Visibility dropped to a dozen feet or less. It was the first time I realized how quickly the weather could change and how easy it would be to get lost on this mountain, to take the wrong step to a very long fall. If it were not for the lava formations, the landscape would have looked as barren as the moon.
In the midst of this desolation and fear, I found my thoughts, almost inexplicably at first, drifting back to the Usa River School. For such a hurried visit, every detail was still vivid. The nightingale voice of the girl without legs sitting in a wheelchair in the front row. The shy “Jambo” from Barbara. “There is no other place,” the response by the headmaster when I asked where other disabled children were treated. The two teenage girls who sang arm-in-arm together, each wearing one of the other’s sandals, so they both had a green and red pair. I remembered looking at one empty half-built building while the headmaster spoke of those who never made it there, those abandoned, locked in cages, set afire. I remembered dancing beside a teenage boy, his elongated face overtaken by the huge toothy smile. The Usa River School was such a retreat for children like him, yet it barely sustained itself on the intermittent government funds, and only those over sixteen were allowed within its gates. It was a tragedy, a crime, that so many were unwelcome in their own bodies and left untreated.
And yet here, in what felt like one of the bleakest places on earth, thinking of the kids at the school gave me hope. The optimism they all shared despite their circumstances reminded me of why I was here in the first place, pushing my legs forward.
And I needed all the help I could get. Day three was living up to its brutal reputation. Whenever I asked Minja a question (“How much longer? Where are the others?”), he would only reply, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” or “Pole, pole.” I was pretty sure he didn’t understand anything I was saying.
Keep going. Survive, I kept telling myself, hour after hour.
At last, cold and wet from the icy mist, crushed with fatigue, and suffering with each step, I reached the Moir Camp in the late afternoon. In my tent, I struggled to take my boots off without passing out from the pain. I knew my feet were a mess. Paul came by to see if there was anything he could do. He helped me over to Shirley’s tent. Our team nurse greeted me with her usual cheery smile. I took off my Crocs and socks, and she examined me. A worried look quickly came over her face, particularly when she saw how swollen my legs had become.
Each of her manipulations of my ankles and feet, whether left, right, up, or down, took my breath away. The tendons in my ankles felt frayed into useless strands. Shirley massaged my feet, trying to ease them. There was a large mass of dead skin on the ball of my right foot, caused by my boot rubbing against it, and she wanted to cut it away to ease the pain. I appreciated her good intentions, but I didn’t want to risk it. With five days to go before we returned down the mountain, an open cut on the sole of my foot seemed like a bad idea. What if it got infected? Paul offered some advice from his Ranger days on how to reduce the swelling. From the weak sound of his voice, it was clear he wasn’t doing so great either.
Returning to my own tent, I lay down on top of my sleeping bag and tried to pull myself together. I couldn’t show others how hard this was for me—how tough it was to breath, how much my legs hurt, how worried I was about whether I could continue. Keep it to yourself. Nobody needs to know.
The mood at dinner was somber. Nobody was cracking jokes, and nobody was looking for a game of UNO. Instead, we had a short debate about whether or not any of us would use Diamox, the altitude-sickness drug. Our Tanzanian guides advised against taking it, and Tim was in agreement, since one of its side effects was dehydration, a significant danger. Most of the team was struggling so much with the elevation—from upset stomachs to gripping headaches—that a little dehydration (or more frequent trips to the bathroom at night) seemed like a small price to pay. In the end, Tim and I were the only ones who said we didn’t want to take any Diamox.
It was pretty quiet in the mess tent that night. The top of Uhuru Peak was still very far away, and there were several days left to go. After such a long, exhausting hike, the thought of more of the same dampened our collective spirit.
After dinner, we all retreated to our tents. I conked out within minutes. What I didn’t know was that during the night Paul would be battling a serious case of altitude sickness himself. He had been suffering with a bad cold since he left Utah and was having trouble sleeping. Sometime past midnight, his head suddenly felt as if it was about to implode. He tried to relax, but the pressure in his skull only intensified. He crawled to his knees and then out of his tent to get some fresh air, hoping that would help. A bout of diarrhea overcame him. He paced around for a few steps, and then collapsed on the frozen ground, gasping for air. The pounding in his head was the worst pain he had ever experienced—and Paul had suffered some. He stayed outside the tent, thinking that the cold felt so good, so right, until his survival instinct kicked in, and he realized that he would die if he remained out there much longer. On his hands and knees, he got back into his tent, bundled himself up in his sleeping bag, and focused on his breathing, waiting, hoping for the excruciating headache to disappear. It did not.
Kilimanjaro was merciless that way.
6
The Wall
Paul looked terrible. He squinted in the light, as if the sun was boring into his skull. It was before breakfast, the next morning.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Not good at all, brother,” he said, a rare admittance. Paul was never anything less than positive.
“It’s just . . . My cough’s bothering me,” he said. He told me a little about his trouble sleeping, but not in much detail.
It wasn’t in Paul’s nature to complain, but it was clear that the Iron Horse was hurting pretty bad. There was never any doubt in my mind who was the toughest bastard in our group, and if Paul was struggling, I wondered how any of us would make it. It was becoming clear that this mountain made one pay for any weakness. Clearer still was how many of them I had to expose in the first place.
In the mess tent over coffee and a chewy porridge, there were a lot of sunken, weary eyes and listless movements. Everybody was beaten up pretty bad by the altitude. Sleeping on the ground through a night of bitter wind and cold hadn’t done much to help with that. Rick said his headache was a hundred times worse than any he had ever experienced. Dilly said that his took his breath away. Mine wasn’t as bad, but I was still groggy, and my stomach hurt. I forced down the lukewarm porridge, knowing that I would need the energy.
Taking stock of our team, Tim addressed us. “We’re going to head down in elevation some, have a quick, short day, and get to our next camp, so everyone feels a little better. Keep your fluids up.”
After breakfast, I hit our portable toilet for the first time. My ass almost froze to the hard seat and, for just a second, I had the twisted thought that I might have to summit Kili with it frozen to my backside. When I came out of the toilet, not feeling much better, the strangest, most incongruous sight struck me.
There was Dilly, sitting in one of the mess-tent chairs, which he had positioned out in the sun. Feet stretched in front of him, jacket unzipped, sunglasses on, he was basking in the sunlight as if he were on the beach instead of surrounded by craggy barren rock 15,000 feet above sea level. Scattered about him were his sleeping bag and clot
hes.
“Catching my bronze . . .” Dilly said, tipping his Oakley sunglasses down a little on his nose and giving me a big grin, “ . . . and feeling sexy.” He pushed his sunglasses back into place and tilted his head back to the sun.
For a long moment, I didn’t know what to think; then I just laughed. Paul joined me to look at the spectacle, as did the rest of the team.
“Getting my bronze on,” Dilly said to the gathering crowd. “I’m defrosting, boys.”
It was the brief moment of comic relief we needed before striking out for the day, and I loved Dilly for the gift.
We headed down a ridge opposite the one we had climbed the day before. We moved in a loose band, everyone at a stable, glacial pace. My headache steadily eased, but for some reason I was having a lot of trouble with my balance and coordination. I would see dips and angles in the trail and know that I needed to adjust my steps, yet my brain refused to coordinate. My legs felt strangely disconnected from the rest of my body, and it was tough to maintain any rhythm in my stride. Increasingly I relied on my poles to control the chaos and to keep me upright. Minja remained behind me, but fortunately he never had to catch me to keep me from falling. Although the descent demanded less exertion, it was still tough on my knees, hips, and quads, and my toes kept jamming into the front of my boots, inflicting further damage on my feet, which had started hurting the moment I tightened my bootlaces that morning. At this point, there was nothing I could do about it.
Kilimanjaro had given us a sunny, warm, windless morning, and we took frequent breaks with lots of water. An hour into the day’s labors, we saw small pockets of vegetation on the side of the trail, then shrubs, then giant Dr. Seuss–like trees. I had never been so excited to see the color green.
With the lower altitude, my breathing slowed, my headache disappeared, and I felt human again. I knew I would have to climb back up the elevation we were losing, but at that point it was the lesser of two evils. I felt good enough to snap some photographs as we passed a waterfall. However, as we moved from high desert back to moorland, my coordination did not improve, and the assault on my feet did not lessen.
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