My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  I had no clue how much time had passed. Three minutes? An hour? Occasionally I brought my wrist to my face and pressed a button on my digital watch. The face lit up, emanating a green alien glow. 10:30. 1:04. 1:30. 2:10. 3:33. I was taking an altitude sickness medication called Diamox in an effort to ward off cerebral and pulmonary edema. It sped up the acclimatization process by allowing more oxygen to enter your bloodstream. It was also a diuretic, meaning that I had to pee four times during the course of the night. It was ten degrees outside and the communal bathroom was fifty yards away, so pee breaks required preparation. First I wriggled out of my sleeping bag, struggling not to wake Marie and Henri with the whisk-whisk sound of my body rubbing against the nylon. Then I fumbled around in the dark for my heavy North Face coat and hiking boots. Once they’d been successfully zipped and tied, I snapped on my headlamp, basically an elastic headband attached to a flashlight that sits on your forehead. During one particularly harrowing bathroom break, there was a clacking animal noise I’d never heard before. It got closer as I ventured toward the bathroom. Scared, I broke into a run, my headlamp beam bobbing in the darkness. At 4:30 A.M. I checked my watch for a final time and dozed on and off until Dismas woke us three hours later.

  On the second day the claustrophobic rain forest gave way to rolling hills dotted with shrubby plants and heather trees. The miles-away peak of Kilimanjaro was finally visible. Dismas took a dozen pictures of me with Kili. Later I would discover that my enormous head was blocking the mountain in 95 percent of them. We trekked on and found ourselves in the wide expanse of moorlands. The transition from one zone to another was abrupt, the way the Magic Kingdom in Disney World was divided into different themes: Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, and so on. You could draw a line across the trail where one zone ended and another began. The absurdist landscape of the moorlands could’ve been created by Dr. Seuss, especially the lobelia trees with slim trunks and bulbous branches that exploded on top in an Afro of fluorescent leaves.

  I was lost in my thoughts, marveling over my utter lack of sore muscles today, when Marie asked, “Do you think you’re going to marry Matt?”

  I blinked. “What?” I couldn’t believe this question had followed me up a mountain in Africa. Then again, if Michael Jackson’s death could make it this far, I guessed anything was possible.

  “Since you referred to him as your husband at breakfast, I just assumed . . .”

  “I did? No, I didn’t.” I thought back to our earlier conversation. “I called him my boyfriend.”

  “You called him your husband.”

  “You must’ve said ‘husband’ just before me and then I said it accidentally. Or maybe it was the altitude talking.”

  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 th
e 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.

  Every 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 b
ent 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.

  “I know it seems like a long time, but let me share a little secret from when I was a rower in college.” He’d explained that when he was on the crew team at Yale, he often had to do timed tests on a rowing machine, appropriately named the erg. “They’d be like an hour of the hardest strain of your life, and I’d always tell myself, ‘No matter what happens, in an hour this will be over.’ Whether I sucked or did great or even if something terrible happened like I tore a muscle, there would be a time in the near future when I wouldn’t be doing that activity anymore. It’s kind of a wimpy way to think about things, but it works.

  “And just remember,” he’d added, “if things get tough, eat the sherpa. That’s what they’re there for.”

  How bizarre that I’d just finished dinner and Chris, Jessica, Bill, and Matt hadn’t eaten lunch yet, that it was summer where they were and spring here. It was like they were living in a parallel universe and I’d time traveled, which I supposed I had. I was living in the future. My dad had gone to China on business a lot when I was a kid. Whenever he’d call, the first thing I’d ask was, “What day is it there?” This had been a thrilling concept to me, that it was Monday in Houston and he was calling me from Tuesday. Now this filled me with sadness—everyone I loved was part of the past.