My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  But first I had to get through customs. As I stood in line with the other grungy hikers, my backpack felt aggressively oversized, my gear too new. I scanned the airport crowd until my gaze settled on a portly African man holding up a sign with my name on it. He’d be driving me to the city of Arusha, where I’d stay in a hotel tonight and tomorrow recovering from jet lag before hitting the mountain. When I said that I’d be staying in a hotel, I meant that I’d be staying in a hotel. “Sightseeing in Arusha is discouraged” was a common refrain on Kilimanjaro websites. On the city’s Wikipedia page, this line stood out: Increasingly, tourists are being held up at machete point, even during the day. (“Ohmigod, that’s so authentic!” Jessica had said.)

  It was only 7:30 P.M. but felt much later because there were no streetlights. There were other people on my shuttle staying in Arusha, most of them bound for safaris. The scene was the same at every hotel. Each had a gate out front guarded by a formidable canine that greeted us by straining at the leash, rising on its hind legs, snarling. Holding the leash was a young man in a camouflage uniform. Another camo-garbed attendant with a long-barrel gun slung over his shoulder stepped forward to check the driver’s affiliation, opened the gate, immediately closing it behind us. The presence of the guards was both comforting and alarming. I felt safer knowing they were out there, but why were they necessary? My hotel had an open-air lobby with a dingy tile floor. It was completely empty except for the receptionist, who was trying to program the Stevie Wonder song “I Just Called to Say I Love You” as her cell-phone ringtone. She paused long enough to hand me a cartoonishly big hotel key. The bellhop was a teenage boy swathed in a plaid blanketlike garment that extended over his head. In place of shoes, he wore pieces of rubber car tires on his feet. He led me down a winding concrete path lined with tall plants to a room on the first floor. The room was bare bones with the same tile floor as the lobby and stone walls. Because I hailed from a first world country, the mosquito net over the bed seemed romantic, instead of reminding me of malaria. But the single lightbulb hanging by a cable from a hole in the ceiling had a nooselike quality that had me swallowing nervously.

  I’d been awake for thirty-two hours. In that amount of time, I’d packed, traveled from New York to New Jersey to Amsterdam to Tanzania. I’d flown seventeen hours, watched eight movies, and endured a five-hour layover. Still, I wasn’t tired. So I opened my hiking backpack and pulled out two rectangles of white poster board I’d brought from New York. Becca had given me the idea. “You should make signs that you can hold up in the pictures you take at the summit,” she’d told me the last time I’d seen her at the hospital. “They make great Christmas presents.” I’d meant to make them before I’d left New York but packing had taken longer than I’d expected, so in the end I’d just thrown the poster board and two black markers into my backpack. Now I was grateful to have something to do here in this room with no telephone or television or even electrical outlets. Under the harsh light of the naked bulb, I spent an hour making block letters and coloring them in with black marker. On each side I wrote a different message:

  HI MOM!

  I ♥ DAD

  I ♥ MATT

  (and just for fun) I’M HIGH

  The ink dried up toward the end and I hoped my dad wouldn’t notice that the letters on his sign grew progressively lighter from left to right. At 11:30 P.M. I opened my sleeping pill bottle for the last time this week. Over the past five months I’d gradually stepped down to a half pill only to fall off the wagon. After a recent rash of restless nights, I was back up to three pills. As I popped them into my mouth, I felt both guilty that I was still taking them and terrified that I was about to give them up. Tomorrow would be the first time in ten years that I’d gone to bed without some form of sleep aid. When the familiar soupy feeling took over, I climbed onto the mattress and arranged the net around me, making sure there were no unauthorized openings. Somewhere around five in the morning I woke to the beautiful soulful drone of the Muslim call to prayer being broadcast over a loudspeaker somewhere nearby.

  My head guide, the man who would be leading me up the mountain, was named Dismas. A thirty-six-year-old native Tanzanian, he had been to the top more than three hundred times.

  “Miss Noelley, your name like Christmas. Mine too!” He grinned as I climbed into the van that would ferry us to the base of the mountain. Everything he said sounded exotic because of his lilting Swahili accent, even when he opened up the conversation by saying, “Deed you know dat dee King of Pop has passed on? I see on CNN thees morning.”

  I’d be hiking and bunking with an older French-Canadian couple, Marie and Henri. The first thing I noticed about them was that they had nearly identical bodies, five feet seven, sturdy but trim. They were outfitted in T-shirts and hiking pants made of synthetic, sweat-wicking textiles. Henri’s head could have been lifted off the neck of actor David Strathairn. Marie had the clean blank face of a woman who rarely wore makeup. Her thick brown hair was cut bluntly above her shoulders and jutted out several inches from her head. They’d returned yesterday from nearby Mount Meru, a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain they’d hiked to practice for Kilimanjaro.

  “To better acclimate ourselves to the altitude,” Marie said brightly.

  Marie was a nurse who used to work in an oncology ward. She and I talked about her job and my volunteer work as we drove, cars ffffttttting by dangerously close on the two-way street. Henri stared out the window quietly. It was a blur of trees, hills, and the occasional stream, interrupted by boxy one-story buildings and concrete general stores with soft drink and beer logos painted on the sides. We passed a leafy coffee plantation where women stood barefoot in the plants rummaging for beans. I marveled at the women walking alongside the road with baskets balanced on their heads but was completely charmed by the little girls trailing after them who also had baskets on their heads; being less steady than their mothers, they kept one hand on the top at all times. Though it was in the eighties, most of the men milling about wore button-downs and jeans or khaki pants. The rest were in native dress, their bodies swaddled from head to toe in brightly colored material, with matching head scarves. Some of them carried walking sticks, which they used to prod herds of goats and cows. There were a number of stray dogs and cats lurking around. Whenever I traveled I found the sight of animals strangely comforting. No matter where you went, they were the only things that looked exactly the same as back home. When our van pulled over, I stuck my head out the window. A uniformed officer at a makeshift roadside guard post was gesturing for us to stop. Our eyes met and he hesitated. Then he changed his mind, silently dismissing us with a wave.

  I leaned in to Marie and asked in a low tone, “What was that about?”

  “Police checkpoints,” she answered. “They randomly pull over cars and search them. If they find anything wrong—and they’ll nitpick until they find something wrong—you have to pay them a fine on the spot or they take your car. But when they see white people in the car, they let you go. Bad for tourism.”

  Three hours after leaving Arusha, we arrived at Marangu Gate, the entrance to Kilimanjaro. As we pulled into the parking lot I was struck by the oddness of a rain forest having a parking lot, as well as a gated entrance. We were greeted by a swarm of young, fit African men. In addition to Dismas, we’d be accompanied up the mountain by an assistant guide and ten porters.

  “I feel like a 1930s British colonialist,” I whispered uneasily to Marie and Henri
as the porters unloaded the van of our personal effects, which they’d carry up and down the mountain for the next six days.

  The three of us checked in, writing our name, age, address, and occupation in a book, something we’d have to repeat at every campsite. I signed last and saw that Marie was forty-seven and Henri was fifty-three and a graphic designer. By the time we were done, the porters had already hit the trail with our duffels, sleeping bags, and food for the week. We followed them into the rain forest, breathing in the loamy smells of minerals and chlorophyll. To discourage erosion, logs had been arranged along the path forming a kind of staircase to assist us on our ascent. A group of African kids, maybe seven years old and wearing Crocs in Day-Glo colors, were blocking the trail. Hands outstretched, they repeated “money, money, money.” Dismas shooed them off and we continued. Intermittently, porters from other hiking groups approached from behind and we stepped aside to let them pass.

  “Jambo!” (Hello!) they called out jubilantly in Swahili, grinning widely. They were a chiropractic nightmare, carrying forty-five-pound bags on the back of their necks, heads tipped forward, for more than six hours a day. A few balanced them on their heads as they walked. For this, they earned an average tip of $5 a day, the same I would give a bellhop in the United States for carrying my bag for three minutes.

  After checking to make sure Dismas was out of earshot, Marie said, “They’re beasts of burden. Other cultures use camels or mules. Here they use young men.”

  When I’m in New York, I walk so fast that other pedestrians zoom by, as though I’m on an invisible moving sidewalk. On the mountain, our pace was set by the guide. We were walking wedding-march slow. “Poly-poly” was the motto on Kilimanjaro. It meant “slowly, slowly” in Swahili. Going poly-poly helped stave off altitude sickness and increased the chances that hikers would make it to the summit. No one was more disappointed by “poly-poly” than Henri. He’d set such a brisk pace on Mount Meru that the guides had nicknamed him “Mountain Gazelle,” Marie told us with obvious pride. Dismas gestured to the dainty lavender flowers lining the trail. “These flowers are called impatiens.”

  “Impatiens, huh?” I laughed. “I know how they feel.”

  “You have luck on your side, Miss Noelley,” Dismas said. “The majority of people who make it to the top are old people and women.”

  “Really? I would’ve thought young men.”

  He shook his head. “Their blood is still too hot. They don’t go slowly. They rush. Then they have to come down.”

  When we reached the first rest area, I plopped down next to Marie on a picnic bench. “My ass had better look incredible after this,” I told Marie, stretching my legs out in front of me. They were holding up pretty well considering I’d basically spent the last three hours walking up a giant staircase. I guessed my training paid off.

  Dismas and the assistant guides divided their time between trying to scare off a mongoose—peeping out of a bush with its little bear face and a mink’s long body—and waving away a long-billed crow threatening to swoop in and make off with our sack lunches (a frequent problem on the trail, according to Dismas). When they were not warding off animals, they ate their lunch sitting on boulders about fifteen feet away. There was plenty of room at our picnic table, but when we invited them to join the three of us, they refused, heightening the feeling of segregation that pervaded Kilimanjaro.

  In what could only be a miracle from God, there were working toilets at most of the camps and outhouses along the trail. Campers were responsible for their own toilet paper so I’d packed four rolls to last me the entire trip. After lunch I dug a roll out of my backpack and trotted over to the outhouse. I felt a little uncomfortable holding the toilet paper in my hand, such a blatant advertisement of what I was about to do. When I got inside the outhouse, I saw it was just a wooden floor with a hole in the middle. Well, this is going to be interesting, I thought. Flies orbited in lazy circles above the hole. As I squatted over it, I wondered if one of them would fly up my vagina and what the protocol would be in such a situation. Thankfully, they fled in terror. My already overworked quads trembled a bit as I balanced my weight, but the real problem was my vagina, which had always operated less like a hose than a five-nozzle sprinkler. This was fine when you were sitting on a toilet, but now it scattered urine in all directions, sending it racing along my butt cheeks, down the backs of my legs, and into the tops of my hiking boots.

  Our first overnight stop was Mandara Hut, a campsite nestled in a misty forest clearing. By the time we arrived in the late afternoon, the guides and porters had been there for hours, wandering the campground’s grassy slopes talking on cell phones. One of them had a Bluetooth device clipped to his ear. After settling in, we tramped into the long-tabled dining hall. An abundance of languages could be heard, but the diversity ended there. Except for one Asian group, all the hikers were white. The groups would hike separately but en masse up the mountain, bunking and eating together at the same three campgrounds. The largest group had twenty-three hikers, churchgoers from D.C. who were climbing to raise money for clean water in Liberia. The pastor, who had brought his ten-year-old son, clinked his fork on a glass so ostentatiously that it quieted not only his table but the entire dining hall. Then, in a commanding voice, he recited the predinner prayer. “Lord Jesus, we thank you so much for the bonds that we’ve formed on this trip and we ask that you guide our conversations at dinner tonight to strengthen our friendships even more. In Christ’s name. Amen.”

  I was scooping lentil soup into my mouth when Marie whispered, “See that guy over there?” I followed her gaze across the dining hall to a man in a wheelchair. “Earlier, I overhead someone say that he’s a quadriplegic. His friends are pulling his wheelchair up the mountain with ropes.”

  As I watched the man being spoon-fed by another hiker, I wondered if he had always been paralyzed. And if so, had they become his friends before the paralysis or after? And which would say more about their character?

  After we finished dinner, the three of us repaired to our hut. The huts were actually individual wooden cabins with steeped roofs. Built into the slanted walls were three narrow double-decker beds topped with thin, plastic-covered mats. It was so small that we had to take turns standing in the middle of the room. It was similar to the accommodations in the hull of The Manatee, in fact. There were enough cabins at this camp to sleep sixty people in all. Soon a porter brought us boiling water to brush our teeth and quickly retreated to the separate accommodations for porters and guides across the camp. We were not getting up until 7:30 A.M., so I assumed we’d stay up reading or talking for a few hours, but Marie and Henri started readying themselves for bed at 8:00 P.M. and I had no choice but to join them. The dining hall was closed so there was nowhere else I could go.

  The huts were unheated so we slept in our fleece hiking pants and sweatshirts. It was the first time I’d had to put on more clothes to go to sleep. I pulled on the blue fleece shirt Jessica had lent me. Knowing that she had worn it made me feel less alone.

  We each chose a bottom bunk and unfurled our sleeping bags. They were specially designed for subfreezing temperatures. Unlike regular sleeping bags where your neck and head have to fend for themselves, these came up around the head and shoulders with a small opening for the face. That it was shaped like a pharaoh’s coffin—wider up top, tapering toward the feet—was not lost on me. I usually slept on my side but because of the narrow fit, there were only two positions for my arms: straig
ht down at my sides or scrunched up in front of me in the manner of a Tyrannosaurus. Trying to fall asleep without sleeping pills while posing as a dinosaur in a padded casket would’ve been challenging in and of itself. Throw in the fact that my body was still on New York time, where it was 1:00 P.M., and it was not looking good for sleep. For a while I listened to my heartbeat playfully skipping around, trying to adjust to the reduced oxygen. Then I synchronized my breathing with the slow inhales and exhales of Marie and Henri, hoping I could trick my body into thinking it was already asleep. There were no windows in the cabin. It was so dark that sometimes I forgot to blink because I couldn’t always tell if my eyes were open or closed. Every now and then I rolled over and switched sides, just to break up the monotony.

  Eleanor, despite her high-society upbringing, loved camping. In the summer of 1925, she, Nan Cook, and Marion Dickerman took her sons Johnny, nine, and Franklin Jr., eleven, and two of the sons’ friends on a ten-day camping trip to Canada. They piled into Eleanor’s seven-passenger Buick with nothing more than two tents, cooking gear, and a first-aid kit. They slept in random farm fields along the St. Lawrence River, stopping in New Hampshire to rent some burros and climb the White Mountains. Eleanor was endlessly game in the face of discomfort. After Franklin contracted polio, he spent a lot of his time sailing off the coast of Florida, hoping the warm waters and climate might have healing properties. Eleanor couldn’t sleep in her cabin due to claustrophobia so she slept on deck, though she felt no less vulnerable surrounded by open sea. “When we anchored at night and the wind blew, it all seemed eerie and menacing to me,” she later wrote. “Florida’s mosquitoes all converged on me . . . I always wound up with enough bites to look like an advanced case of smallpox.”