Excruciating Pain in Beautiful Places

excruciating pain in beautiful places.
‘P
orters? Ha! I’ve never had a porter in my life!’ The man behind the desk repeated himself: for my trip up the 17,057 feet of Mt. Kenya, I would have three porters, along with a guide. Porters; I couldn’t get over it. It sounded so colonial, so Out of Africa. Half the ‘fun’ of climbing up a mountain was knowing that you’d ‘earned it,’ and part of earning it surely included carrying your own stuff, unassisted. Send one home, I told him. I can carry my own backpack. ‘No problem,’ he said, and with a ten second phone call, it was done.
About five minutes later, I came to my senses. I pictured myself later that afternoon, sweaty, tired, and struggling, cursing my heroics. Perhaps I was being a little too hasty about the whole porter concept. Who was I to hurt the local economy for the sake of my pride? If I had to be humble, so be it. I had paid for the damned porters already, so I might as well let them do their job. ‘Excuse me, sir?’ I asked. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Three porters will be fine.’ Well, he said, I’ve already informed them. ‘Ok, ok, no problem,’ I said, ‘two will be fine,’ not wanting to make a fuss.
About ten minutes after that, I realized just how much I was already missing that third porter I’d never met. I found the guy behind the desk in a shed across the gravel parking lot from the office, loading kerosene from a drum into a small plastic jerry can with the man who was to be my guide. ‘Excuse me, um, hi. Me again. Sorry to bother you. But if you don’t mind, I’d like you to call them back and have them arrange for that third porter.’ No problem, he assured me with a smile, undoubtedly glad that he would remain behind the desk while the guide shepherded this miserable git up the mountain for the next three days.
A
nd so we were off, my guide, my three porters and I, to conquer Mt. Kenya. Well, not exactly. Since I only had a total of 3 and a half days before I had to get back on an airplane, I didn’t have enough time to summit. The last part of the climb was also ‘technical,’ involving helmets and crampons and ice axes and all kinds of macho climbing equipment that appears great in photos but, in my experience, is not as fun as it looks. So I was content with the lesser of the 3 peaks of Mt. Kenya at 4,900 meters, point Lanana. Though I liked the idea of some kind of climax to the climb, I wasn’t obsessed with the idea of a summit, really I wasn’t; just happy to get out and do a bit of hiking.
From the lodge we took an olive green land rover that was held together with duct tape and bits of string. It had the delightful ‘vibration effect’ that all old land rovers get after 500,000 kilometers, whereby the whole contraption shakes violently over every pebble and emits squeaks from every one of its thousand joints and you feel like your teeth are going to shake right out of your head. On every steep uphill climb toward the base camp this particular vehicle insouciantly emitted exhaust directly into the cab, an effect which was judged to be somewhat less in the back seat, where I, the honored leader of our expedition, was given a seat.
After an hour long climb up a rutted dirt road through a lush forest we arrived at the gates of the national park, where I was requested, as chief of party, to sign the five of us in. After another half hour we arrived at ‘Meti,’ the first base camp, so called because it is a 100 meters away from a Kenyan national meteorological observatory. A few bushback, a sort of russet-colored forest deer, munched on the grass amongst the wood frame huts, while several dozen black Sykes monkeys roamed all over the camp’s green lawns, languidly munching on some non descript monkey food, leaping from the stands of bamboo to the roofs of the huts, and looking disinterestedly in our general direction to see if we’d dropped anything edible yet.
A
fter a little while I took off up the hill with one of the porters, named James, who asked me with a smile to call him, ‘Jimmy.’ When I found out that my name could only come from his mouth as ‘Elik,’ I decided to go for a hip sobriquet too, and asked him to call me ‘EJ.’ I had to remind him to call me EJ and not Elik just about every time he used my name, and after about fifteen minutes I gave up. Elik it was. Any attempt at conversation, in fact, proved to be agonizing. Every time he didn’t understand something I said (things like, ‘You find it difficult to understand me, don’t you?’), he would stop walking, turn around, cock his head to the side like a cocker spaniel who knows the sounds mean something, he just doesn’t know what, and say, ‘huh?’ Our ‘hiking’ was ten steps, followed by a pause to clear up our misunderstanding, followed by another ten, and so on.
That night, back in the hut, they brought in the food; rice and beans, fried fish, mushroom soup, and cut fruit for dessert, along with tea and warmed milk. It felt strange to be sleeping in a 10 bed hut by myself, eating alone at the table, while the rest of the guys ate by themselves. Near the end of the meal the 40ish guide Richard came in, and we chatted a bit about the trip. He wanted to make sure that I wasn’t expecting too much out of our summit bid, that we might just make a run for the top and then head straight down, and not the ‘circumnavigation of the main peaks’ that was advertised in the brochure. You may be too tired, he said. I assured him that I had learned my lesson with the porter debacle, and wasn’t planning to be a hero. That agreed, he said good night and we all went to bed.
A
t seven the following morning Richard and I walked up the same path that Jimmy and I had started the previous afternoon. The first hour and a half were through a fairly dense forest, and despite being well above the 10,000 feet of Meti camp, there wasn’t much to see beyond thick forest on either side and more path in front of us, as steep in most places as a flight of stairs. As it turned out I had been wise to accept the third porter; they were only there to carry our food, and I was expected to carry my own pack. Richard pointed out the numerous piles of buffalo shit and the one pile of elephant shit on the trail, and we talked about all the animals he’d seen over the years, and about the time several years ago when a lion had chomped on a guy’s leg while he was sleeping in a tent and dragged both him and the tent a good long way, crushing the guy’s femur before giving up and going away hungry. It took them a full three days to find that lion before they killed him, Richard said. Then we talked about the Masai for a while, and he told me what a no-good bunch of cattle rustling, trouble making, uneducated thieves they were, whom I nevertheless found endlessly more fascinating than the far more westernized and pacific Kikuyu.
W
e hiked for another half hour before we got above the first tree line and the sky opened up. There were broad meadows of yellow grass studded with rocky outcroppings and black succulent trees not unlike the Joshua trees of the southwest. The views were stunning. Though there were clouds in the valley we could still glimpse the dark outline of another low, nameless mountain chain on the other side.
By then I could feel the air growing thin. We had started that morning at 10,000 feet, and it was clear, to me at least, that oxygen was not as copious as one would have liked. The legs were willing, but the heart was weak. We’d pause to rest and catch our breath, but then five minutes after we started my heart would be pounding as if I was in full sprint. It was about ten in the morning and the sun was so strong that I couldn’t raise my eyes much further beyond Richard’s shoes in front of me. I took a long-sleeved shirt from my pack and tied the sleeves loosely around my head so that the collar was like a hat brim, and found that it kept the sun off of my head and I could actually see. Richard had a smartly tight pack with all the loose dangly straps neatly stowed away, nice hiking pants, and tight-fitting gators around his ankles. I looked like an idiot. When I turned around I could see the shadow of my pack, with about twenty loose straps swinging in as many directions with every step, and I had a shirt on my head. But what the hell. It was comfortable. And who was I trying to impress?
The farther ridgeline turned out to be a mirage, and just gave on to another, and another. The Joshua trees thinned out and we passed though an area of low scrub and more rocks, a few of which we had to grab on to with one hand and skirt our way around, but nothing too difficult. At one point the summit came into view over the near horizon where the trail disappeared over a ridge; three giant fingers of black rock jutting into the sky, crusted in snow and swathed in cloud. We hiked a bit more, and it disappeared again behind another ridge.
W
e had been hiking for about three hours when my head first started to ache. It wasn’t bad at first, but I knew it was the thinning air. I’m smart like that, having heard about it on National Geographic and having puked my guts out on a mountain once before. I drank as much as water as I could, but I knew that a headache setting in already at 12,500 feet was a bad sign. ‘It’s 10:45, now,’ I said, ‘and we started at 7:30. What time to do we arrive at Mackinder’s camp?’ I asked. ‘About two more hours,’ they said. Uh oh.
We continued on. After a little while the porters hiked on past us and it was just Richard and I, taking turns with the lead. We eventually left the sight of the towns in the valley behind us. We could see three bare, rising ridgelines; one across a valley to our right, another across the valley to our left, and the one we now snaked along, following a high trail just below the crest of the ridge, gradually gaining altitude. Each of these high ridges was bare of trees, just a carpet of dry grass a shade lighter than rust and black rock outcroppings. At some point we turned a corner into another, higher valley, and the summit was visible at the end of the sloping valley, a huge bowl of scree topped by the black rock ridge of the three snow-covered black fingers of the summit at the far left side. The landscape had changed at once. There were strange succulents everywhere, rosettes of spiny leaves curved upward to catch the dew at their base, some with tall, geometrically prickly cones shooting three or four feet from their centers, and several other odd-looking high altitude plants, including a six foot tall stalk covered in what looked like a thousand shaggy green dreadlocks. And there were innumerable Joshua trees, spaced far enough apart that you could see each one, both on our side of the valley as well as the far side, but so many in number as to make the mere idea of counting them inspire dizziness. Or perhaps that was just me.
B
ecause at this point, the air was really starting to get to me. My head was pounding. If the frequency of my rests was making Richard grow impatient, he didn’t show it, though I was getting fairly annoyed with myself. My legs were fine; they wanted nothing more than to continue moving. It was more like a total failure of my body’s central energy system. No force of will could make my head stop pounding, my ears stop ringing, or my heart stop screaming out for rest or ritual suicide. After a half hour along the rising ridgeline trail of this, the last of the valleys before the summit, we could see the lodge. The long zinc roof caught the sun, still at least two kilometers away at the top of a small hill at the bottom of the bowl of scree, impossibly far away at the bottom of the opposite side of the valley.
After an infinite number of rests and footsteps that went one, two, one, two, we went down one side of the valley, across a four-log footbridge over a small rushing stream, and up the other side. At the first rocky outcropping there were a bunch of hyrax, small innocuous brown animals that look like giant guinea pigs and are said to be the closest living relative of the elephant. Like the monkeys at Meti they were almost totally unafraid of humans, and only slightly more curious. They were fascinating little creatures, and I couldn’t give a damn. I was wasted. I collapsed on the grass in front of them. More hyrax emerged, until there were 7 or 8, nibbling at invisible little morsels, sniffing my scent on the wind, and looking at me with half hearted curiosity. Somehow the presence of these disinterested, overgrown guinea pigs only seemed to heighten the absurdity of my situation. A sign said, ‘Mackinder’s Camp 200 Meters.’ I think the last two hundred meters took me a half hour.
When I arrived Richard was waiting with a cup of hot tea. All I could say was ‘bed.’ My head felt like it was in a vise, but that my nameless torturer hadn’t thought that sufficient, so he decided to insert several invisible wood screws at strategic intervals in my temples and forehead, which he drove further in with a quarter turn of each screw, every ten minutes. I was nauseous. I was shaking. There was no denying it; I had altitude sickness.
On the way in to the lodge I had briefly glimpsed the summit; stunningly beautiful, incredibly close. The whole place was magical, otherworldly, as summits always are; utterly rare, like a place on another planet. Though the features of the landscape were in enormous disproportion to the scale of everyday life, their size was commensurate to their sparsity. It was a space as empty as a desert, where every feature stood out in stark relief, as if the image of every boulder and crest had the volume turned up. A single black bird of prey circling on the updrafts was the epitome of solitude. Broad waves of scree rolled down the sides of the peaks, and a single white cloud jealously caressed the tallest finger; while the other peaks on the bowl ridge were cloudless, the white tuft endlessly changed shaped in the wind, but never left its place.
At least, that’s what it looked like in retrospect. At the time, my thoughts ran closer to, ‘Look at – ow – that – ow – peak, it’s so – shit that hurts – beautiful – the way the – goddamn my ears are ringing – sunlight falls on the – oh my dear god this can’t be for real – surface of the – ow, ow, ow – summit.’ I went inside and crawled into bed and proceeded to get a fever. With chills.
A
little while later I heard a young Australian woman talking cheerfully with her guide. She complained about the cold, saying that she had every single item of clothing on. I came out to find that she was in fact doing her best impersonation of an Eskimo, wearing a scarf, hat, and parka indoors, trying to write in a notebook with gloved hands. Still, she was nowhere near the agony that I was in, and I hated her for it. She wished me well as I sat down to eat my dinner. ‘I hope you feel better,’ she said, ‘it’s no fun.’ Indeed.
I ate a bit, and I managed to keep it down. I conferred with Richard. If I felt this bad in the morning, there would be no Point Lanana for me. Any thought of edema, brain hemorrhage, or stroke aside, this simply wasn’t any fun. If the gods of the mountains were kind enough to endow me with a clear head in the morning, as they had after a previous bout of altitude sickness in the California Sierras many years ago, I would say a prayer of thanks and march my way up the last 700 meters to the Point. But if not, I would head straight down. Anything to take that vise and those screws off my head.
I was lucky enough to find a sleeping pill that I had left in my bag, which I swallowed after dinner for some a good three hours of sleep, from 8 pm till about 11:00. Then I tossed and turned, shaking and sweating on fever dreams until Richard came in at 2:00 in the morning to ask if I wanted to make the moonlight ascent. Alas, I had fallen out of favor with the gods. I told him that we would head down to Meti after breakfast, and he looked pleased and said that he would go back to bed.
I slept a total of two hours after that, at intervals. One of the particularly evil things about altitude sickness is that it won’t let you sleep. At six the first light crept through the window, and I decided that I could take it no longer. I struggled to sit up like a man with the worst hangover in the world, packed my bag, got some water outside for my parched mouth, found Richard in his bed and told him I was heading down. Now. He could catch up with me on the way. I loaded my bag, walked bout 150 meters, and puked all the water I had just drank, then dry heaved and spat for about five minutes, and continued, one foot after another. I turned around and snapped a few pictures of the summit. Needless to say, the summit at sunrise was absolutely breathtaking.
W
hat’s the deal with climbing mountains, anyway? Though it’s a rare person who would call altitude sickness fun, most of us who enjoy higher mountains have had it at least once or twice in our ego-driven quest for more peaks. But even without altitude sickness, anyone who has been at the top of a mountain will tell you that a summit is rarely a pleasant place to be. The wind is generally howling, and you are usually the coldest you will be all day. Yes, the views are amazing. But so are the views of sunset out the window of a 757. And you can see that with a bloody mary in your hand. Heck, I had already seen the summit of Mt. Kenya through the window of a plane, on my way up country on an earlier trip. So there was no mystery. And while I stay in fairly good shape, I have yet to come down from a high climb feeling anything other than wretchedly tired, aching in every muscle. Yet I still crave them. Even the most gut-wrenching climbs I’ve made still stir something in my memory; I rarely remember how painful they were, only the views, the ascents, the last steps onto the top. Is it all just an ego trip? For some, I suppose. But I don’t claim to be a serious climber, and will promptly shut my mouth in the presence of one. I’m just someone who likes to climb whenever I get the chance, and the memory of a good hike will often sustain me for months to come.
S
o I was more than a little dejected. They caught up with me after an hour. After another hour we stopped to rest and without meaning to I actually fell asleep for a few minutes. They woke me and I felt worlds better. Though the vise was still on, my tormenter had actually turned the screws in the opposite direction. We continued down, and in a four and half hours we were at Meti.
I met the caretaker of Meti at the bottom, and we fell to talking while I waited for them to make my breakfast. For once, I was confident about being able to keep it down. He told me that in addition to being caretaker, he was a guide, too. He said that he had led 11 Japanese up the mountain, just last week.
‘Eleven Japanese? That’s a lot of Japanese.’
‘Eleven? Oh no. Not for Japanese. I’ve led twenty, even thirty Japanese. They always come in great number.’
‘How many porters for eleven Japanese?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘How many made it to the top?’
‘All of them. Japanese always make it to the top.’
‘Oh.’
‘Japanese are very deter-mined. They always go all the way to the top.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Even if he is vomiting, sick, his friends will push him, push him! Very… deter-mined.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Very deter-mined.’
‘Me, I get sick, I come down.’
‘Yes! Much better. Could be serious! You should come down. Is better. Edema, anything. Dangerous. You can get very sick.’
‘Yeah. And besides, if it’s not even fun anymore, then what’s the point?’
‘Yes. Exactly. If it’s not fun anymore, if you are sick, why keep going?’
Naro Moro River Lodge, Kenya
15 March, 2006