This recollection based on a single sheet of notes taken on the back of my Rwandan entry-visa receipt…and memory.
I’m in a hostel in Moshi, Tanzania. My goal here is to climb Kilimanjaro, a 19,000 foot tall extinct volcano — its peak the highest point in Africa.
The world is always shrinking. My girlfriend’s voice crackles in from ten thousand miles away with surprising news. A friend’s colleague has been kidnapped by extremists in Egypt, forcibly taken from a car while traveling from the airport to his worksite. He has a wife and a kid.
Should his government fail to pay a ransom within five days he will be filmed having his head cut from his body. Tomorrow morning I begin my five day attempt on Kilimanjaro.
I imagine myself in an orange jumpsuit, sitting in a cage, awaiting my execution at the hands of a broken ideology.
. . .
At sunrise I squeeze into a small van with the rest of the climbing party. I meet my trekking companion Luís, and our guides Juma and Gregory. While I wonder if I can make it up Kili, Luís, shouting over the engine in his Valencían accent, tells me his hobby:
“I run mountain marathons!”
A mountain marathon is exactly what it sounds like. I again wonder if I’m out of my league. I think back on the man I hired to assemble this ragtag group.
“Remember,” he had cried as I signed the various waivers accepting responsibility for my own death, his big eyes brimming with energy, “Remember, you must fuck the mountain!”
“Poli, poli” says Gregory, as we gain altitude and lose oxygen. Slowly..slowly.
“Enjoy your lifetime,” whispers Juma as we eat, sitting on a blanket at the end of the day.
On day three I look up at the trail cutting back and forth across the wall we must climb tomorrow. Kilimanjaro towers over us now. We measure pulse and oxygen saturation twice daily to confirm that our bodies are acclimatizing to the thin air.
At this point I realize that ego is useless here. No, one does not fuck the mountain. One must befriend it, even tame it.
This new wisdom carries me through day four. We reach base camp — just under 16,000 feet.
“Let us finish this piece of cake,” jokes Gregory.
We still have seven hours before we begin our summit attempt, but at 3pm it is too early to sleep. We play checkers with bottle caps against the porters. We lose. The rest of our time is spent prepping our cold-weather gear and resting as much as we can.
From here on out each step I take represents the highest altitude I have ever climbed.
At midnight Juma wakes us. We measure our oxygen saturation levels a final time. We eat a few biscuits and set off into the frozen, lunar landscape.
Boot. Pole. Boot. Pole. Step. Crunch. Step. Crunch.
An orange, bowl-shaped moon rises to remind us that, yes, we are still on Earth.
In the hours of frosty darkness my mind travels everywhere it can. I think of the places I’ve called home, old friendships, and the women I’ve loved. I think about time and life and how I want to spend it.
And I never stop thinking about the man in the orange jumpsuit. Is he dead already? He remains balanced in my awareness like Schrödinger’s Cat.
Despite constant movement, I cannot keep my hands and feet warm. A trail of headlamps bobs ever upward. Soon we begin to pass those who have turned back. Some weeping. Some vomiting. Three miles above sea level and it feels like I’m moving underwater. I pause only to empty my bladder or fumble a rock-hard candy bar from my bag.
After five hours of climbing, we reach Stella point. The sky is turning a deep royal purple but still there is no sun. The summit is now less than an hour away. To celebrate this milestone, Juma grinning wildly, reveals that he snuck a thermos of hot tea into my backpack which I have unknowingly carried through the night.
“Tea time! Tea time,” he shouts and laughs and dances about, howling at his cleverness.
We howl too, hearts pounding in our ears. Then we drink the tea and howl some more.
And yet the struggle is far from over. Poli, poli. Shuffling upward toward Uhuru peak I can feel my energy draining out behind me like the slime track of a snail. Each breath pulls in barely half the oxygen I would get at sea level. Step, crunch, step, crunch, and then, at last, I am here. I am standing on the rooftop of Africa. The earth continues to turn and the sun pierces the horizon.
And I cry. Not out of happiness. Partly out of emptiness. But mostly out of awe, for myself, for the planet, for the scale of it all. In this brief, stunning moment it is easy to trust that everything fits together perfectly to form something immense and beautiful.
But even at the summit the glaciers are melting, a reminder of our warming planet and, ironically, the incessant conquering of our species.
And then comes the descent, a finite game of using overclocked, watery legs for stability in a ski-like slide ever downward through gravel and dust. We sleep for twenty minutes at base camp and then continue most of the way down the mountain until we finally stop to camp our fifth and final night in the moorlands.
In the end, it became clear that the axiom was neither “fuck the mountain” nor “tame the mountain.”
In the end it was the mountain that tamed me.
Western governments do not negotiate with terrorists. Thus, the abducted man, father and husband, was murdered on schedule and, per usual, almost nobody noticed. His executioner, when he swung the machete, probably felt a lot like I did on the mountain’s peak. In awe of himself. Believing that everything fit together to form something immense and beautiful. And he was part of it, a warrior for truth.
The human need to conquer is no different than greed and jealousy, just another example of antiquated wetware. These aspects of human nature no longer serve our collective interest. And our environment continues to change faster than naked minds or culture ever could.
So we remain vulnerable, us humans, playing at games on maps where imaginary borders are drawn thicker than roads or rivers. Ideologies battle like competing viruses with stakes higher than they have ever been.
I’ve long been blasé with regard to classic American patriotism but I’ll remain a patriot of humanity for as long as it makes sense to do so. There is one American adage, however, which still echoes in my mind on a global scale.
United we stand.
Divided we fall.
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