Becoming the Man Who will Summit the Mountain
19 341 Feet: Kilimanjaro Part XV
I heard the wind last night. It sounded like an angry subway car, a scream from the top of the mountain.
Our American neighbors forgot to batten down their hatches. Their door blew open in the middle of the night, slamming wood into wood, like a giant whomping on our walls — an angry beast pounding to get in.
I folded my sleeping bag over my head. I tried to forget that tomorrow night there will be no door in between me and this mountain.
The next time I opened my eyes, the sun was sneaking into our cabin through a crevice in the curtains. Curtains. Imagine having curtains on a mountain climb.
Horombo Hut is the Shangri-la of Mount Kilimanjaro. We are sleeping in spacious wooden houses, with rooms big enough so I don’t have to sleep with my cousin’s feet in my face. In the morning Rafiki (not his real name, but a Swahili word meaning ‘friend’) brings coffee and wash buckets right to our door.
The much-publicized mountain Wi-Fi is non-existent, the power outlets have no power, and all of my clothes have officially succumbed to diaphoresis, and still, I’m happy. When you’re tired, smelly, and soar, heaven is nothing more than a wash bucket and toilet seat.
Oh yes, the toilet seat. Last night I walked into the washroom, and in the first two stalls there was nothing but a good old hole in the ground. Some outside force, some absurd propensity for hope, made me search the third stall.
A toilet seat! A glorious, gleaming white porcelain chair. I couldn’t get my pants around my ankles fast enough. I sat on that throne with an outrageous smile on my face, listening as Claire entered the women’s washrooms next door, wondering if she would discover the very same surprise.
“Stop it!” she exclaimed in disbelief.
I laughed. She laughed, embarrassed that I could hear her. Shangri-la.
Even our dinner had a fancy feel. We were still huddled together in a frozen dining hall, still watching our breath as we drank our drinking chocolate, but there was cake.
It was a birthday cake, made by a group of excited porters and presented to an exhausted European man in his mid-forties. It wasn’t his birthday, but the word had come up the mountain that the man’s wife just had their very first baby.
We sang Happy Birthday in English. Then the porters sang a birthday song in Swahili. Then the Israelis sang HaYom Tom Huledet in Hebrew. I felt transported to the pages of the Lord of the Rings. We were suddenly dwarves, men, and elves, telling tales and singing, forming a fellowship as we travel there and back again.
The brand new father blew out the candles with tears in his eyes, settling for this second-best celebration; surely wishing he was with his family. The porters cut the cake into slivers so that the entire cabin could try a slice. It was sweet — so sweet that if it had come from my local pastry shop, I would have scrunched my nose, and left my sliver half-eaten. But I’m not in a pastry shop. I’m halfway up a mountain. Even if that cake had tasted like a spoonful of rotting fertilizer, I’d still have swallowed every last crumb.
Splendor and opulence are not set in stone. Affluence is determined by the atmosphere. A simple birthday cake can seem like the greatest of luxuries once you’ve traveled so far away from all the ordinary in your life.
We may not be sleeping in satin sheets, but the greatest luxury on this mountain is the absence of our customary anxieties. I’m not worrying about money, going to work, or fighting traffic. I don’t care how I look, or how old I am becoming, or whether or not I am making the most of my life. I can whittle down my concerns to simple matters: are my boots are rubbing wrong? Am I drinking enough water? Will I persevere when that angry wind screams into my face, taking another step forward when all I want to do is turn around and run back to the oxygen?
Today, as I pack to climb above 16 000 feet, I am celebrating a birth of my own. It is a birth of liberty, my emancipation from all the stresses of life at sea level. A vital step in becoming a sparser, humbler man, a man whose sole focus is the mountain he must summit.
Catch the last part of my Kilimanjaro series here:
Also, this article from Scott-Ryan Abt beautifully captures a travel moment I’ve had many times:
