How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

  I smiled at the memory. It helped keep my trepidation about the days to come at bay.

  “I’m nervous,” I finally said. “I’m scared I’m not in good enough shape to make it up the mountain.” I wasn’t worried about Nick. At age forty-two Nick was still able to drink a six-pack of beer at night, rise the next morning, and then run a half marathon without training.

  I couldn’t see his face, but I knew my husband was drifting off to sleep. He wrapped his arm around me and just murmured, “I’ll carry you if I have to.”

  Rural Tanzania smells different—the way the planet smelled before humans went everywhere wearing Axe body spray and coated in Purell—a sweet mixture of burning earth and animals and human sweat and life that’s real and comforting. We were just two hundred miles below the equator, but the air at the foot of Kilimanjaro was cool and crisp.

  We set out early on a Sunday morning, the sounds of the village slowly fading into the distance. Other climbers stretched and fueled up with bananas and energy bars while I gnawed cautiously on a Cadbury chocolate bar.

  The concept of actually climbing Kilimanjaro and not just talking about it didn’t become real until we stood at the base of the mountain.

  “It’s much bigger than it looks on postcards,” I said, gazing at the vast cloud-covered mass of earth looming in front of us, so tall we could only see a small portion of it.

  One of the mountain guides, named Jos, tried to assure me that people in much worse shape than I had made it to the summit.

  “The Russians, they drink the vodka all the way to the top,” he said. “They fine.”

  I told him vodka makes me do funny things too.

  “And another man, Helmut was his name. I think he was Austrian. He was seventy-two. He drank gin all the way up the mountain. At five thousand meters he pulled out a bottle of the Johnnie Walker. He drank it and collapsed and then he died. His wife just started laughing. She told me we must go on and call someone to get his body. ‘He wanted to die on Kili,’ she said. But she made it to the summit and she was very old.”

  “That’s a terrible story, Jos.”

  “But she made it,” he insisted.

  Our main climbing guide was Justaz, pronounced like “justice,” who looked like a more fit and more approachable version of Jamie Foxx and had climbed Kili more than 250 times. Even though he was younger than both Nick and me, he was married with four kids.

  Justaz warned me he’d seen more than twenty couples break up while trying to summit the mountain, most memorably a pair on their honeymoon. The new wife felt crappy, with headaches and a chill, when they set out for the mountain. By the end of the first day her husband had stridden to the front of their hiking group while she lagged behind. The tension between the two was so high that on the third day he threw her things out of their shared tent, telling her he was sick of her whining.

  The woman sat on the ground and cried. Justaz tried to comfort her.

  “Do you know how to sing?” she asked him. He nodded.

  “Can you sing anything in English?” He nodded with less confidence and hummed a tune from the British pop band Westlife.

  When they reached base camp for the summit at just over fifteen thousand feet, the husband demanded that he be allowed to summit the mountain without his wife. He scurried to the top with a guide and hightailed it back to Marangu. She went up later with the rest of the group.

  “He just left her?” Nick asked in disbelief.

  “I thought we’d see him when we got all the way down the mountain,” Justaz recalled as he held pace next to me. “But he changed his flight and left her there.”

  I think he sensed the story was getting me down.

  “But I’ve also organized a wedding on the summit. We were at 5,895 meters with a priest, best man, maid of honor, bridesmaids, and twelve other guests!” he said to lighten the mood.

  “Climbing the mountain is actually a good metaphor for succeeding in marriage,” he said to us. “What you have to remember is that both the mountain and a marriage can be completely different in the afternoon from what it was like in the morning. You can’t try to predict what any day will bring. Trying to predict it will only bring grief. You have to try to enjoy the parts that are wonderful.”

  Butterflies the size of my hand flew just inches from my face—some speckled periwinkle blue, others black with perfect white polka dots. Violet monkeys the size of large dogs bolted into the path and let out bloodcurdling shrieks at the sight of us.

  “Monks on the run!” Nick shouted and chased after them to take a picture.

  Giant tree roots and moss-covered boulders obstructed our path. We wandered through a dead volcanic crater filled with willowy waist-high elephant grass. Glacial streams rushed over boulders, winding their way through beds of red mountain gladiolus.

  Looking ahead at the steep and rocky inclines made me anxious, and when I concentrated on those, I became convinced I’d never get over the next ridge. Instead I looked down at my feet, just putting one in front of the other. There were stretches of the mountain where I didn’t think at all and bits where my monkey mind leaped from branch to branch. When my body started to hurt I chanted a personal mantra softly: “Your body is strong. Your body is strong. Your body is strong. Thank you for being able to climb this mountain. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” I’d frequently stop and pretend to take pictures on my phone just to catch my breath.

  I began to appreciate the flat bits—the simple sections, relaxed and smooth. It was nice for things to be easy. These reminded me of the parts of a marriage you might call boring—the long stretches where you settle into a daily routine, grocery-shop, do the laundry, binge-watch The Wire, go to sleep at a reasonable hour every night, and wake up and do it all over again the next day. For so long I’d considered this kind of monotony to be boring. I wanted the hills, the roller coaster, the constant adrenaline rush of newness. For too many years I had relished the things that were hard. I wanted to conquer the most difficult jobs, explore the furthest reaches of the world, tame the men everyone else said couldn’t be tamed. Now I wanted to just appreciate the flat bits of my life and marriage.

  Nick outpaced me, often leading our small group up the mountain. I wanted to call up to him, but I was reluctant to slow him down. Was I becoming the woman who was ditched on her honeymoon?

  On the mountain you lose all concept of time. Hikers on their way down from the summit trudged past us through the rocks and dirt like zombies, refusing to meet our eyes. They’d likely finished their ascent to the summit less than twenty-four hours earlier. The last day of any Kilimanjaro climb has been described by serious trekkers as “hell on earth,” and “the most painful thing I’ve ever done.” Even Arctic trekkers who have experienced temperatures of –30 degrees say they have never experienced cold like the bitter chill on the way to the top of Kilimanjaro. On the final day of the climb, the ascent to the final peak begins just after midnight, on about three hours of sleep. When you ask the guides why they do this gonzo thing in the dark, they tell you that it’s better for you psychologically if you can’t see the steepness and distance involved in reaching the summit. The rocky scree coating the ground at that altitude turns all climbers into Sisyphus. Two steps forward are rewarded with at least one step back. The trail is littered with climbers who have passed out or are experiencing debilitating nausea from altitude sickness. Throughout the hike, the thought of that last day constantly festers in the back of your brain.

  Hiking the mountain is difficult, but sleeping on it is impossible. There’s no fire or heat in the A-frame sleeping huts stationed along the trail, just wooden walls to protect you from the intense wind. Ravens perch on top of them and howl, as if warning you to turn back toward the comfort of the Kibo Hotel, Isaac, and French fries. The huts sleep five, with three sleeping pads on the floor and two bunked. The only warmth came from my sleeping bag, a rented four-season down bag that alleged it would protect me to –22 degrees Celsius.


  I couldn’t sleep after an endless first day of hiking. I was freezing and the door to our hut would stay closed only with three pairs of boots piled in front of it. My feet had been torn to shreds that day by boots just a touch too tight. My breathing was labored from the altitude and a dull ache had formed just behind my eyes. I couldn’t imagine how I would endure three more days of this. The damn Diamox made me need to pee worse than I’d ever needed to pee in my entire life, but outside of our hut a tree hyrax, a chubby rodentlike creature that resembles a cross between a muskrat and a raccoon, made a noise like it was killing a Japanese tourist. I turned my headlight on low and read the graffiti former climbers had etched into the hut’s walls.

  I made it to the top but it was so fucking hard.

  It’s cold and long and endless. We smell like shit, look like shit and really need to take a bath.

  The mountain kicked our asses but it was worth it.

  Don’t do it. Stay here. I wanted to die.

  I climbed unsteadily down from my bunk and sat on the floor, stroking Nick’s forehead to wake him up. His skin was warm under my cold hand.

  “I can’t sleep,” I whispered. “Can I climb into your sleeping bag?”

  “There isn’t room, Platypus.”

  “There is. It will be practice. For a submarine.”

  “Squeeze my hand,” Nick whispered, his face lit softly by a small sliver of moon coming through the hut’s solitary window. “Squeeze it hard. Like you mean it.” I squeezed as I crouched there, staring through the window at some of the most magnificent stars I’d ever seen. Nick unwrapped himself from his own warm sleeping bag and led me back to mine, making sure it was properly zipped.

  “Scooch all the way to the bottom to get all of the air out of it. Okay. Now we need to pull this all the way up and over your head.”

  “I’ll be smothered!”

  “You won’t be smothered. I will never let a sleeping bag smother you.”

  Justaz was spot on about the mercurial moods of the mountain. The next morning was sunny and clear, so much so that we could see across the vast expanse of Tanzania for miles, all the way to the plains of the Serengeti. Climbers set out early each morning just as the sun cleaves the horizon because it’s the only time the mountain is free of clouds. You can see just far enough ahead to be comfortable with the next steps and so, for a small window of time, the future feels as safe as the past.

  The afternoon is another matter entirely. It can unexpectedly pour buckets in the afternoon, even if it’s not supposed to be rainy season yet. And as in a marriage, if you begin your day with too many expectations, the mountain will throw them back in your face with glee. But that’s part of the fun of it, really—the unknown and the slight terror that accompanies it. The day before will never prepare you for what happens the next, and yesterday is forgotten the second your tired body lies down. And yet each day on the mountain does make you stronger and more open to the uncertainty.

  As I continued to hike, I thought about all the time I spent worrying and whether that worry had yielded anything productive. The locals have a phrase in Kiswahili, Hakuna matata, that literally translates to “No worries.” I’d thought it was something Elton John made up for Disney’s The Lion King soundtrack, but it isn’t. The phrase began to resonate even though altitude sickness was constantly on my mind.

  When it came to altitude sickness, Justaz was the Dalai Lama. He wouldn’t allow any members of our group to discuss their symptoms with one another. “Much of it be in your head, and then those symptoms become contagious throughout the group,” he advised. “You be positive and you probably will not have it. When I trek and I feel a little headache, I switch off my brain and it goes away. I feel a little nauseous. I tell my brain this is not happening.”

  “You could make a fortune as a mindfulness coach in New York City,” I said to him.

  “But Jo, then how would I climb the mountain?”

  I slept better, but not great, that second night, a night even colder than the first. The secret to my intermittent slumber was the Ambien I’d stashed inside my bottle of Advil. I’d promised myself I’d be careful with the pill, since I had no idea what it would do to my body at a high altitude. But I couldn’t bear another sleepless night, and so I nibbled just a half before scrunching into my sleeping bag.

  I woke feeling like my entire body had been rolled in broken glass from the arduous treks of the two previous days. Even though he felt fine, Nick made sure to slow down with me. He carried some of the weight from my pack and stole a salt shaker from the mess hut so I would stay hydrated as well as napkins from the other trekkers so I’d never run out of toilet paper.

  There are no rest stops along the trail. When you gotta go, you find a place in the bush.

  “We call it an LWV, a loo with a view!” Justaz said.

  “Pole-pole,” Nick insisted to the guides. It meant “My wife needs to go slow” in Kiswahili. Picture the movements of an arthritic septuagenarian; that was the pace my body preferred. It had nothing to do with my weird genetic condition and everything to do with the fact that climbing this mountain was really hard. We fell in step with a group of Japanese wearing ski goggles and face masks and a ninety-year-old dentist from Germany who wore hiking pants and a Bavarian-style sweater cut off at the midriff to stay both warm and cool on the trail.

  On the path Nick invented a whimsical song to keep me going. It made no sense but had a rhythm that worked well with the click, click of my walking sticks.

  “Oregano, oregano. Gotta keep it moving. Gotta keep it moving. Oregano, oregano. Oh yeah. All right.” I didn’t have to say anything to Nick. We both knew this was what teamwork should feel like.

  By the close of day three, going pole-pole, I felt a mixture of adrenaline and pride. We’d ascended thousands of feet, slowly but surely, to land at an altitude higher than I’d ever been. I’d even become immune to the weird side effects of the Diamox.

  The highest summit of Kilimanjaro is called Uhuru, which translates to “freedom.” On the fourth day of our climb it was plainly in sight, so close we felt like we could reach out and touch it. I ran toward it, spreading my arms and doing a silly dance through a grove of giant groundsels, alien-looking trees found only on Kilimanjaro above fourteen thousand feet. They resemble Joshua trees mixed with cactus and pineapple. These would be the last substantial plant life we’d see before entering Kilimanjaro’s alpine desert, a harsh, dry landscape consisting mainly of rock and ice. Nick thumbed through my phone and played the Toto song “Africa” and joined me, both of us waving our arms in the air, making the guides giggle.

  Taking a thousand photos of the peak distracted me from the fact that my husband was slowing down.

  We were in the alpine desert, so close to the final ascent, when Nick felt the effects of the altitude in new and severe ways. It began when he hallucinated that he saw a fish smiling at him from on top of a very large boulder.

  “He’s laughing at me.” He pointed. I brushed it off as another of his attempts to make me laugh in an uncomfortable situation.

  Next his head began to throb and his stomach heaved.

  “I don’t feel good,” he whispered reluctantly. “It’s getting worse and worse.”

  I sat in the sand and pulled Nick down beside me. I was conscious of the fact that I could smell myself and wondered if he could too. We hadn’t showered in four days and the sweat on our bodies had frozen, unfrozen, and refrozen over and over again.

  “I have to go down,” he said.

  “You don’t. You’re fine. We’ll wait it out. Oregano, oregano. Gotta keep it moving. Gotta keep it moving.” I handed him the salt shaker from my pocket.

  “Eat this.”

  As we sat there, four guides silently wheeled a metal stretcher past us. Lying down on it was a lumpy, vaguely human form, sheathed in a sleeping bag cocoon, an oxygen tank clanging against the rusted metal of the stretcher.

  “Is he dead?” I asked Justaz.

 
; “No.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was fibbing to keep us calm. “Are you sure?”

  Justaz looked down the path where the stretcher had disappeared around a bend and remained silent.

  Nick looked at me. His face was transformed, contorted. His eyes, usually curious and alert, were dulled and his jaw was tense and tight. “I need to go down.”

  I placed my hand on Nick’s arm. “Are you sure?” I looked at him. So strong, so handsome, and for the first time since we’d met, so vulnerable.

  “You can keep going,” he said. “You’re doing great. Keep going.”

  I could have kept going. Thanks to Nick’s slowing down, carrying my pack, and sneaking me extra food, I finally felt strong enough to make it up the mountain. My ego wanted me to keep going, if only to post an Instagram from the summit. But I didn’t need to. And I wasn’t about to abandon my sick husband on the side of a mountain in a foreign country, scared and alone. “I feel like a chump,” Nick said, wincing from the pain and closing his eyes.

  “I’ve known a lot of chumps and you’re the best one I know,” I said and stroked his back. For the first time since we’d been married I realized that part of my role as a wife was taking care of my husband the same way he took care of me. I echoed the words he’d said to me before we got married.

  “I want to take care of you,” I said. I meant it. “Please let me take care of you.”

  Nick nodded.

  “We’ll do it again sometime,” he said.

  “When we’re old and retired and comfortable enough with ourselves to wear sweaters cut off as crop tops,” I answered. Not for a second did I catch myself and think, Maybe I won’t be able to do it when we’re older. Maybe this is my last chance.

  I got more out of that mountain than I ever thought I would. I was certain of something now: No matter how my disease progressed, I had faith that if we wanted to climb that mountain again, I’d be able to do it with Nick by my side. I trusted my body and I trusted my husband. Sitting at nearly fifteen thousand feet in the air, I pulled a deep breath into my belly and let it rush out in a single sigh. I felt no pain, no anxiety, and no urge to do anything but hold Nick’s hand. I didn’t want to live my life with limitations or let fear govern what I would or wouldn’t, could or couldn’t do.