The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  “There it is,” I hear Tim say.

  To my right, through the glare I see a sprawling expanse, covering much of the horizon. The iconic flattop, snowcapped summit is lost in the clouds. The sight is impressive, but not the awe-inspiring vista I have long imagined. Then something far above the clouds shimmers and catches my eye.

  My focus shifts and perspective alters. The upper outline of the mountain comes clear—twice as high as I first perceived it to be. The glimmer I had seen was the sun reflecting off the dwindling glaciers at the summit, towering far above the clouds that hug the mountain’s midsection.

  “Holy shit,” I whisper.

  It’s a monster.

  We drive on and turn onto a hard-packed dirt road where long yellow grass yields to a field of sunflowers. In the distance, across a vast expanse, a group of women in brightly colored clothes with long flowing skirts carry heavy loads. Where they are coming from or how far they’re going in this open savanna is impossible to say. We pass a truck loaded high with men clinging to the sides, sitting on top of the cabin, hanging off the back—thirty or forty of them holding on. In a field of corn a cart is piled high and a sagging beast of burden strains under a wooden yoke. Farther on, a tall man in a light blue shirt strides toward the road between rows in a well-ordered field, munching on a carrot. We pass into a forest of pine and then cypress. This land is not the parched and dusty Africa, it is a lush and generous earth created by Kilimanjaro, big enough and tall enough to form its own ecosystem, catching the rain and fertilizing rich soil.

  The road narrows and then we’re in a trench so deep, the sides of the van are scraped by the thicket. We bounce through potholes and crevasses. There is nowhere to turn and as the road gets worse, we can only continue on. Around a bend a jeep comes in the other direction. The two vehicles pull forward and stop inches apart, headlamp to headlamp. The driver of the jeep gets out and climbs over the hood of his car to our driver’s window. The two exchange words in Swahili. Voices are raised. The other driver returns to his jeep and shuts off his engine. We sit.

  I’m reminded once again of Dr. Seuss and a story I often read to my children. Two Zax, one walking north, one walking south, encounter each other—neither one yields. Ever. Highways and towns are built up around them as they remain stubbornly entrenched and life passes them by.

  Eventually, Zadock gets out and goes to negotiate. Quickly, he and the other driver are shouting. Fingers are pointed, first down the road and then at each other. Zadock stomps back to our van and pokes his head through the window.

  “We’re walking,” he says.

  We all pile out into the thicket, scratching our arms and legs. As we hoist up our backpacks, suddenly the jeep in front of us starts up and reverses back around the bend. We pile back into our van. Fifty feet beyond the curve, the other jeep is parked off to the side at an easy pull out. Laughter and happy waves are exchanged between the vehicles and we bounce past.

  I knew I wasn’t going to have a solitary man-vs.-mountain experience, but I’m in no way prepared for the scene at the trailhead. Fifty porters are packing our gear and tents and scrambling to assemble our provisions—to support six hikers. In addition, there are three other parties of equal size setting out at the same time. A not insubstantial village is mobilizing toward nineteen thousand feet.

  “We’re going poli-poli—slowly-slowly,” Zadock says. “Stay in my tracks.” We set out and Bob falls in tight behind Zadock, Tim is next, then Roberto, Hank, Eila, and I bring up the rear. The pace is excruciatingly slow, a quarter my usual walking speed, and I find it impossible to find a rhythm. On the trail, porters wearing flip-flops and torn shorts, each lugging forty pounds of gear on his back or head, hurry past us in our hiking boots and polypro tops, carrying only small daypacks.

  “It will take us four to six hours to get to the first camp,” Zadock tells us. Tim is asking Zadock the meaning of various words in Swahili and the names of plants. Hank quickly nicknames him “Timmy-pedia.” We climb through a forest of African rose and holly and brittle wood. Eila drops back and I close in behind Hank, who is very much the young hotshot. He asks Bob where he went to school.

  “Harvard?” Bob answers, his voice rising to a question at the end of the word. It’s the first he has spoken to anyone other than his father all day.

  “Harvard,” Hank says, “where’s that?”

  Bob begins to answer.

  “Joke, Bob. That was a joke.” Hank looks back at me and rolls his eyes.

  After less than three hours we arrive at a level area swarming with tents under yellowwood trees. Day one of six on our way to the summit has been a simple stroll through the forest with a thousand-foot elevation gain. Our individual tents are already set up and we assemble for dinner. Zadock passes around the pulse oximeter, then he begins what will become a nightly ritual—telling us all the things that can go wrong and all the people who have failed in their attempt to reach the summit.

  Before I climb into my tent I try to call D but have no cell reception. That night I dream that D and I get married, to each other, but on different days in separate ceremonies in different locations. The sensation during the dream is pleasant and makes complete sense while it is happening.

  By midmorning on the second day we’re climbing through a forest of dense and gnarled trees covered in thick strands of hanging moss. The sun dapples through the trees, and the silver-gray moss takes on a bluish tinge. We stop for a rest on a fallen stump. Timmy-pedia has been bombarding Zadock on what kind of people make the trek to the top—who has the best success rate and who has the worst. Zadock laments taking honeymooners up Kilimanjaro.

  “Do you get a lot of people on their honeymoon?” I ask. It seems a strange choice for newlyweds.

  “Too many,” he replies. “And it’s always a problem. They don’t listen. The men think it’s just walking and always try to take care of the women and ignore their own problems, and the women want to listen to the men and then the guys are always the ones who get in trouble. Always. And then the women don’t know what to do about that, because often they’re able to get to the top and their husbands can’t and it’s a problem. We try to keep them separated on the trail.”

  I try to consider what this metaphor might mean for my own life and settle for knowing that D would never want to climb Kilimanjaro anyway.

  Zadock continues. “Old women are the best to guide. They listen, they go slow, and they nearly always make it to the top. I had an eighty-two-year-old last year. She was great.”

  At just below ten thousand feet we crest a rise, break out of the forest, and drop into one of the three calderas that make up the mountain, entering into what is called the heather zone. Low scrub for as far as we can see. Around a bend in the trail we get our first full view of the iconic conical and glacier-clad flattop peak—although the last few decades have seen nearly 90 percent of the snow vanish. The mountain looks strangely bare.

  Our pace is still painfully slow. The younger guys in the group can’t slow down, so they’re forced to stop every few strides for a beat before marching a few more steps and then stop again. I hang back and begin to count my steps in a rhythm of four. One-two-three-four. Left-right-left-right. Then again. One-two-three-four. Left-right-left-right. And again. My breathing slows. Then I’m playing a game with myself, keeping score, trying to lift my foot only enough off the ground to move it in front of me, and then the next. When I scuff the dirt I lose points. A long time passes in this way as we walk through waist-high heather. At close to eleven thousand feet, the air has a coolness just beneath the sun’s efforts.

  Eila begins to lag behind and when we get into camp I hear her complaining to Zadock about the distances we have to walk.

  “What the hell did she think this was?” Hank says as we settle into the dinner tent. I resist telling him about her one previous day of hiking experience.

  They stuff us with pasta again and Zadock launches into his nightly harrowing tales of people who di
ed trying to summit, and then he passes around his torture device—the pulse oximeter. Immediately Timmy-pedia closes his eyes and begins a type of late-stage Lamaze breathing. His blood oxygen level has been low and Zadock has warned that anyone who cannot maintain a level of at least ninety will not be allowed to attempt the summit.

  My blood oxygen is ninety-three and I toss the device back to Zadock. I have begun to resent this testing, the way I resent anyone having power over me. Eila’s rate is in the low eighties and her pulse is high. Zadock makes her breathe deeply until she gets her number up. The stress that she doesn’t believe in has begun to show on her face. Roberto’s chin has sunk to his chest, like it does each night at dinner. I gently nudge his arm and rouse him awake to clip the device on his finger.

  “I hate this thing, Andy,” he whispers to me. I generally don’t like it when people call me Andy, but there’s something in Roberto that is so benign and his attempt to reach the summit feels so fragile that I don’t want to set him back in any way by challenging him.

  Hank never has any issues with the pulse oximeter. He knocks out a number in the high nineties consistently and as he lofts the monitor across the tent to Bob—who has been quietly breathing with his hands placed on his knees, eyes closed—Hank tells us how the American people should be grateful to his company because they have paid back the government’s loan with 50 percent interest. They were, in fact, the good guys in the financial crisis.

  Though I’ve come to like him—Hank reminds me of the uncomplicated, athletics-based male friendships I have drifted away from and would be well served to rekindle—I’m infuriated by his hubris.

  “You’re still the devil, though. You know that, right?” I tell him.

  “Oh, yeah.” He shrugs.

  I wake up in the middle of the night—I’ve stopped breathing. A disturbance to the rhythm of oxygen and carbon dioxide entering and exiting the blood that occurs at this altitude can cause breathing to temporarily cease. It’s a harmless occurrence but the first time it happens it’s an odd sensation. I lie awake, and anxious thoughts fill my oxygen-challenged brain.

  I wonder if my knee will hold out. I wonder if my son’s recent difficulty at school is symptomatic of a larger problem. I wonder if my father will die soon. And I wonder if I really am at peace with him, or at least as much as I can be, before he passes. After all my fear of his anger in my youth, and the resentment, and the judgment and disapproval of him in my twenties, and the subsequent dissolution of our relationship, and then the amicable distance that now defines it, what remains—in the middle of the night in my tent on the side of Kilimanjaro—is simply a feeling of disappointment and one of waste.

  Because of both my desire for independence and my natural tendencies toward separation, more than most people I know, I would have benefited from the wisdom of a mentor. Since I have allowed myself little access to any kind of group consciousness, or the benefit of its shared experience, a single trusted person who had come before would have been ideal for me and might have saved me a great deal of trouble along the way—someone to offer up occasional insights or act as a fallback when I needed respite. In my few experiences with some form of limited mentorship, I have felt relief from a void that has long yearned to be filled. Perhaps it is one of the reasons I often seek the “bodyguards” D talks about. The self-reliance that was born of my lack of camaraderie has created a justification for a solitary way of living that is not useful in partnership. It is what D has most struggled with over the years; “I’m right here, I need you to come to me,” she’s often said. It has taken me a long time to even understand what she means by that.

  If I can offer mentorship to my children, so they feel its presence and avail themselves of it if they wish to, I will consider myself a success as a parent.

  I unzip my tent and go out to stare up at the hulking black mass of Kilimanjaro’s peak, the nearly full moon shining down on the glaciers, and my thoughts are brought back to the present and the task ahead. There is something in the challenge—no matter how difficult it might be to reach the summit—that is a relief in its simplicity. The night is cold. I shiver and hurry back in, but as I zipper into my sleeping bag my anxious thoughts return.

  I wonder what would happen if D were unfaithful to me. I try to shake the image from my mind and pick up my book. Unimaginatively, I have brought along Hemingway’s collection of stories The Snows of Kilimanjaro—the book that first inspired this trip, so many years ago. I open it to a tale called “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” In it, a wife is cheating on her ineffectual husband with their game-hunter guide while on safari. When the husband discovers her infidelity, she mocks him and he withers. Then, in the course of a hunt, he steps into his manhood, and when the wife sees this she knows that her husband will leave her. In a moment of panic she shoots and kills her husband, perhaps accidentally.

  I should have brought a different book.

  We set out across moorland scattered with volcanic rock that yields to an alpine-like desert. We’re working our way east to west around the mountain, slowly gaining some of the twelve thousand feet we’ll climb while covering a little more than forty-two miles in the six days to the summit. My legs feel heavy today. To distract my weary mind, I play a game with Hank. We pick a spot in the far distance over the lunar-like landscape and guess how long it will take us to reach it. At first our estimates are hugely exaggerated. What we suspect will take us two hours ends up taking twenty minutes—but soon we’re judging distances within a minute or two. Porters hurry past us in an endless stream, their loads on their heads or shoulders.

  “How come some of the porters carry stuff on their heads and some don’t?” Timmy-pedia asks Zadock.

  “It depends where they grew up,” Zadock tells him. “How far they were from the water source. Kids who grew up in the city didn’t need to carry water so they use their shoulders to carry things, but if you lived in a village you were maybe a long way from water. It’s the women who fetch the water, and the little kids are always chasing behind their mothers and want to carry water too.”

  “How much do they carry?” Timmy-pedia presses.

  “When you’re about five you can carry a three-liter can on your head, then at ten you can carry ten liters, and then at twelve, twenty liters. Then you are a teenager and don’t want to do it anymore.”

  We camp above thirteen thousand feet. I still have no cell service on my phone. Timmy-pedia has a satellite messaging device that allows single letters to be scrolled and typed from a center joystick. At the dinner table it takes me twenty minutes to scroll and type a few words to D—“no cell service. halfway up mountain. knee is holding. X.”

  “God,” Hank says from across the table, “I’m trying to think who I’d even e-mail. My father maybe.”

  I look over at him and am brought up short. Trying to carve out space for myself, often traveling to the ends of the earth to achieve it, wishing I had no responsibility, yearning for total freedom, and here is someone with just that, unattached, with endless space surrounding him, and my feeling isn’t one of envy or even wistfulness. I don’t yearn for what he doesn’t have—and the realization shocks me.

  Outside the mess tent, fog has shrouded our campsite.

  The Lava Tower sits at just over fifteen thousand feet. It’s a large outcrop jutting three hundred and fifty feet up into the sky, and we can see it from far off across the relentlessly rocky trail. Hank and I both judge it to be forty minutes away—it takes us nearly an hour and a half. By the time we arrive I have a ferocious headache. It is my first serious effect of the altitude. It feels as if a metal band has been placed around my skull beneath the skin at my temples and is being ratcheted tighter and tighter. I try to breathe, slowly and deeply. I can feel my heart racing while I’m at rest. My chest is very, very tight. Panic rises. This is only fifteen thousand feet; the summit is at nearly twenty. The stagnant air inside our red mess tent makes me nauseous and I can’t eat the zucchini soup o
n offer. Then Zadock goes to retrieve his pulse oximeter, and while he’s gone, I lose it.

  “This is bullshit. This is a total misuse of technology. This constant testing and judging. It’s totally screwed up. All it does is add stress and pressure and ruins the trip. It doesn’t prove anything. I’m not fucking doing it anymore.”

  My rant wakes Roberto. His chin rises from his chest and he looks at me with weary eyes from under his Yankees baseball cap.

  “Why would you let this stress you?” the Indian neurosurgeon asks softly.

  The others stare at their soup. Zadock returns and tosses the meter to Timmy-pedia, who doesn’t see it because his eyes are closed and his heavy breathing indicates that he is in the late stages of giving birth. The contraption falls to the ground and I storm out of the tent.

  Once we drop off the ridge after lunch my headache quickly vanishes. Clouds hang low and engulf us; we can’t see more than a few feet in any direction as we walk. A stream rolls down to our left and supports life like we haven’t seen in a few days. Strange cactus-palm-like plants jut up, small yellow flowers clustered at their trunks. We have come farther around to the south side of the mountain and the snow above us is thicker now. We camp below a high cliff and the next day Zadock issues a new walking order. Eila will go first, behind him. Roberto will be second, “and then the rest of you,” he explains.

  There is one tense moment beside a precarious drop on the Great Barranco Wall and then the landscape opens out into the strangely soothing desolate expanse of the Western Breach. The air now is thin and cool under the bright sun. There is a feeling of gathering expectation as several of the trails up the mountain converge and the path becomes more crowded. I have strength in my legs today and my eyes keep lifting to the summit directly above us. I’m relaxed in a way I haven’t been until now. My thoughts are light, and the day feels full of possibility. There is a lot of banter on the trail, even as Eila falls back.