My Year with Eleanor (33 page)

“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.

I allowed myself ten minutes and then it was done.
To calm myself further, I repeated Eleanor's quote like a mantra:
“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Marie
and Henri, bless them, lingered over dinner to give me time to pull myself
together. When they returned, I was smiling and we made polite conversation
before bed.

T
he
acclimation day must have worked. I had no shortness of breath as Dismas and I
hiked across the reddish-gray sand of the alpine desert to Kibo Hut the next
morning. Henri and Marie were somewhere farther up the trail moving at a
breakneck pace. The landscape was decidedly Martian, completely devoid of trees.
Just a desolate smattering of rocks, no higher than a foot, and Kili, looming
before us. Though we were hours away I could already make out our trail snaking
steeply up the mountain, the one we would follow to the summit later that night.
It was lighter than the rest of the mountain from years of scuffing by hundreds
of thousands of boots. The temperature was growing colder, and I was now wearing
several layers, my heaviest coat, and gloves.

Something was coming toward us now. It was a man,
one of the summit hikers, being pushed down the path in a three-wheel
wheelbarrow stretcher, ensconced like a pharaoh in his sleeping bag, his face
barely visible. As they rolled past us Dismas exchanged a few words in Swahili
with one of the porters steering the wheelbarrow.

“He had great pain in head,” Dismas translated for
me. “Began losing balance and couldn't walk.” I nodded and tried not to think
about the statistic that one hiker each month died of cerebral edema.
High-altitude cerebral edema was often fatal because it required immediate
medical attention and usually struck at the highest altitudes when you were
already several days into your climb. The descent to the nearest medical
facility was a long and precarious one.

I changed the subject. “Are the glaciers really
disappearing?”

“Yes. In twenty years? No more,” he said solemnly.
He pointed to the base of the mountain. “See that white roof? That is Kibo Hut.
Glaciers used to stretch down to there.” I knew this was the dry season, but I
was shocked at the lack of snow on the mountain. It was completely brown except
for one sad little glacier off to the left, perched on the mountain like a too
small toupee.

When we stopped for lunch, the paraplegic was
there, waiting patiently in his chair while his friends took turns feeding him.
Seven hours after leaving Horombo, we reached 15,000 feet and arrived at Kibo
Hut, the last campground before the summit. Unlike the other camps, which had
huts, Kibo consisted of one communal building, a primitive stone structure with
a tin roof, perpetually glinting in the sunlight. Inside there was one long
stone corridor lined with dorm rooms full of bunk beds. The hallway led to a
small dining room at the back of the building with picnic tables where hikers
would eat a light dinner at 5:00
P.M.
and then,
after a few hours of sleep, a midnight snack before leaving for the summit.
There was electricity powered by solar panels but no running water and no heat.
Because there was no sun, it felt colder inside. We started adding clothing
immediately. When Henri took the temperature inside our cabin, it read zero
degrees Celsius.

We nibbled at a dinner of soup and porridge, which
I thought was only eaten by Goldilocks, three disproportionately sized bears,
and Oliver Twist. And let me tell you, I don't know what Oliver was thinking
when he asked for that second helping. After dinner I hurried back into Kibo
Hut. I held up my hands in front of me. The high altitude was causing my body to
swell, especially my face. When I'd used my tiny travel mirror to apply
sunscreen earlier, I'd felt like I was looking at my reflection on the back of a
spoon. I thought of that old Steve Martin joke. “I like a woman with a head on
her shoulders. I hate necks.”

T
hey
came for us at 11:30
P.M.
and plied us with tea
and cookies. I put on every piece of clothing I'd brought except for the
T-shirts and shorts. I was wearing five layers on top, long johns, fleece pants,
and wind pants. I dropped a few air-activated hand-warmer sacks into the knit
mittens I'd borrowed from Jessica. Each of us had our own porter to walk with us
up the mountain. He would carry our pack, stocked with water, Gatorade, and
snacks to keep our energy up along the route.

It was going to take us approximately five hours to
reach the crest of the volcano, known as Gilman's Point. We'd rest there
briefly, then walk for another hour along the rim of the volcano, rising another
688 feet in elevation to reach the summit of Kilimanjaro, called Uhuru Peak, at
19,340 feet. Marie and Henri would walk with the assistant guide and the guy
who'd been acting as our waiter all week. Dismas would escort me up the
mountain. The rest of the porters would head back down to the Horomo Hut, where
we'd meet them this afternoon. All of the groups we'd been bunking with at the
various campgrounds were hiking to the summit at the same time. We gave silent
nods of good luck as we walked en masse from the hut to the trail.

“Why does everyone do the summit hike at night?” I
asked Dismas, over the sound of shoes crunching softly across dirt.

“Best for tourists. Sunrise is best weather and
views.” He paused, trying to decide whether to tell me this next part. “Also, it
is so hikers cannot see steepness of mountain and how far they are from top. If
they knew this, most would give up, turn back.”

At first the dirt was solid. As the trail got
steeper, there was more sulfurous ash mixed in with the small rocks. It was not
unlike the cremains, actually. Then the rocks disappeared, and the trail became
downright fluffy. We were trying to walk uphill in an ashtray. With every step,
I stabbed the toes of my boots into the mountain to keep from sliding backward.
Marie and Henri quickly disappeared before me, but Dismas and I were making good
time, passing other groups. It was a meditative process. For hours I trained my
eyes on the circle of light on the ground, watching Dismas's heels bob up and
down. I was reminded of that old saying:
How do you eat an
elephant? One bite at a time.

Every now and then I glanced back and was startled
by the sharp decline of headlamps dotting the trail behind me.

“Do not look around, Miss Noelley,” Dismas
cautioned when he saw my spotlight whirling away from the ground. “Just look at
ground in front of you.” Other than a forceful push, I couldn't imagine anything
that would make me go down the mountain now. To throw away so many miles of
hiking? Besides, the only thing worse than climbing up this mountain would be
climbing down backward in the dark. As with the rickety trapeze ladder from a
year ago, going up was the lesser of two evils.

Because this altitude offered only 50 percent of
the oxygen at sea level, my job was to keep as much oxygen flowing to my brain
as possible. My frozen nose hairs stood firm as stalagmites and stalactites,
slicing the walls of my nostrils when they contracted with breath. I breathed
through my mouth instead, taking vulgar goldfish gulps. Every few minutes I blew
my nose and my face towel came away full of bloody scabs mixed in with the
frozen boogers. The area beneath my nose was ravaged from excessive blowing, a
Hitler mustache of pink raw skin. Hikers could be heard vomiting on the trail
behind me.

Once in a while, Dismas asked, “You okay, Miss
Noelley?”

“Yup! I'm fine.” I still had no symptoms of
altitude sickness, not even a headache. My legs were holding up beautifully. I
was aware that it was cold, but as long as I kept moving it was not
uncomfortable.

“This very surprising from girl who never hike
before.” He shook his head in amazement. “Most people. They very very tired by
now.”

Four hours into the hike the terrain turned to
boulders. This was a real game-changer. Some of the rocks were bigger than me.
The incline was such that I was reduced to scrambling over them on all fours.
Now that I was using my arm muscles and back muscles, my body began to fatigue.
I couldn't seem to get enough air. I had to rest every ten minutes. I was
slightly ahead of the church group and was determined not to be overtaken by
them. I didn't want to get stuck behind a human traffic jam. During my rests, I
sat on a boulder and watched their line of headlamps making their way toward me
like a string of belligerent Christmas lights. When they started getting too
close, I reluctantly heaved myself to my feet and told Dismas, “Okay, I'm ready
to go.”

It's hard to keep perspective when you're on a
mountain because that's the one thing you don't have—perspective. I was too
close to the mountain to make sense of it. I had no idea where I was in relation
to the top. I'd think I was about to scale the final crest, but when I'd reach
the top, there was another crest—never before seen! I'd clamber over the next
“peak” only to find another, higher ridge.

“The mountain keeps making more mountains!” I
wheezed to Dismas during one of our rests. “How much farther to Gilman's Point?”
I was no longer concentrating on the ground directly in front of me, but
obsessing about the end goal. I jammed a chocolate bar, now chalky from the
cold, into my mouth.

“We are eighty-five percent of the way there, Miss
Noelley.”

“Eighty-five percent?!” I exclaimed, and a few
clumps of chocolate fell to the dirt. “Are you effing kidding me? I thought we
were, like, ninety-five percent!”

Now we were moving again. I was suffocating. Can't.
Breathe. I fumbled with the snap buttons of my jacket. In one movement I tore
open the front. “Get off me!” I shrieked at the jacket, as if it were an animal
that had leaped onto my back. I yanked off one glove, my fingers reaching for my
throat. My pulse was racing so that the beats were almost indistinguishable.
Dismas waited patiently and said nothing. He had seen this all before.

Fifteen minutes later we were standing alone in
front of a plaque announcing that we were at Gilman's Point. Dismas stole away
to pee. I gazed at the lights zigzagging up the mountain, each dot representing
a different hiker.

“Whooooooo-hoooooo!” I whooped into the
darkness.

“You got that right, bitch!” someone—presumably not
a member of the church group—hollered back.

I tried to take a sip of the water, but it was
frozen. I sampled the Gatorade. Also frozen. Dismas returned, and we set off to
circumnavigate the ring of the volcano.

“This is very dangerous part, Noelley.
Only
step where I step.”

We hugged our way around boulders to keep from
plummeting into the steep crater on our right side. I knew it was there, one and
a half miles across, six hundred feet deep, but couldn't see it, which was
probably a good thing. The sky over the horizon was lightening, filling me with
urgency. I wanted to be at Uhuru as the sun rose.

“Must go faster, must go faster,” I repeated, but
the words were slow and blurry, my jaw numb.

My upper lip was so raw that I'd ceased blowing my
nose. The snot had been dripping down a clump of hair and frozen into a
snotsicle. We walked alongside the glaciers, majestic and huge like white
whales. I heard voices. I kept glancing over my shoulder at the eastern horizon.
The sun. Had to beat the sun. As I entered the clearing, I heaved my fist
wearily into the air. I was startled to learn that out of everyone who summited
Mount Kilimanjaro that day, I finished fourth. I'd thought there had been so
many more people ahead of me. The first had been a bespectacled man from New
Zealand. Henri and Marie had come next, beating me by a half hour.

I thought I'd feel extremely proud of myself if I
made it to the top. Instead, I felt humbled. “The only thing that will get you
up that mountain is sheer iron will,” Becca had said, but she was wrong. I
didn't believe people flew sixteen hours and hiked for four days and turned back
because they weren't determined enough. On the way up the mountain I'd seen a
quadriplegic whose friends were pulling him using ropes attached to his
wheelchair. Meanwhile, I'd had no altitude sickness, migraine headaches,
vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain, or even blisters. The weather had been
perfect—no rain or snow. Any one of those things could've prevented me from
getting to the top. Sure, willpower had
something
to
do with it. For most part, though, making it to the top was pure dumb luck, as
random as getting hit by a drunk driver and ending up paralyzed from the neck
down. I was no better than any of the people who hadn't made it. In a way, it
almost required more courage to turn back and acknowledge your limitations. I
couldn't imagine going home and having to face family and friends eagerly
asking, “So did you make it to the top?” Having to face yourself and the guilt
and self-punishment that comes from falling short of expectations—that's
courageous. Making it to the top felt like a reminder, rather than an
accomplishment. It was a reminder that in my life—just like on the mountain—I'd
been incredibly lucky.