My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  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.

  The 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.”

  They 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 big
ger 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.

  It was a damn fine view, for sure. To put it in perspective, the Empire State Building is 1,453 feet high. It would take thirteen Empire State buildings stacked on top of each other to equal the height of Kilimanjaro. The peak of Kilimanjaro was simultaneously the most impressive and least assuming location I’d ever spent time in. There was only a crude wooden sign covered in jaunty yellow writing citing the altitude and announcing itself as the tallest freestanding mountain in the world. It was as if the sign knew it couldn’t compete with the view, so it didn’t even try. Here I was looking at these beautiful glaciers that probably wouldn’t be here in twenty years. I could actually see the curve of the earth. It suddenly registered that between this moment and skydiving, I’d seen the curve of the earth twice this year.

  There was a sharp snapping sound, and I looked over to see Dismas lifting a blue-and-silver can to his mouth.

  “Are you seriously drinking a Red Bull right now?” I laughed, staring in disbelief at the supercaffeinated energy drink. That it was the only liquid that didn’t freeze at negative ten degrees should concern us all.

  My camera batteries had died as soon as I got to the summit. Thank goodness Becca had warned me to bring extras. Dismas took pictures of me standing in front of the wooden marker holding the handmade cardboard signs I’d colored. I couldn’t wait to surprise my parents and Matt with the photos when I got home. Marie, Henri, and I smiled at one another and posed for a group picture, but we did not hug. I felt detached from them now. I’d done this without them.

  Maybe it was my imagination, but over the past few days I’d gotten the impression that Henri purposefully wasn’t taking pictures when I was taking them, as if he didn’t want to concede that I’d chosen a good shot. I’d raise my camera and he’d immediately lower his. When I glanced over now, his camera was hanging at his side.

  Incredulous, I asked him, “Aren’t you going to take a picture of the glaciers?”

  “No,” he said stubbornly.

  I shrugged and turned away from him and gasped. On the other side of the mountain—opposite of the sunset side—the layer of clouds below was so seamless and stretched so far that it took me a few moments to realize it wasn’t snow. The day was clear and the dark shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro cast perfectly onto the radiant white. So many things had to come together for this moment to happen—I had to be here exactly at sunrise, it had to be a clear, non-snowing day, and the clouds had to be thick enough to form a white canvas for the shadow.

  “It’s amazing!” I cried, lifting my camera. “You have to get a picture of this!” />
  Henri glanced at it dismissively and walked away.

  Now that we were no longer moving, the cold was penetrating. Every moment my hand was out of the mittens taking pictures of the sunrise was torturous, but I wanted to capture everything. The colors were constantly developing, luminous gold erupting into searing coppers, then giving way to aching purples and brilliant blues. Each time I decided I’d found my favorite color of the sunrise, it melted into another more spectacular shade than the last. It was, quite simply, the most magnificently beautiful thing I’d ever beheld.

  We’d been cautioned about “mountain madness,” where people became delirious due to the reduced oxygen. So far none of us were exhibiting any bizarre behavior, but Dismas wasn’t taking any chances.

  After twenty minutes, Dismas said, “We go now. Not good to stay in my main office too long.”

  The descent took three hours. Slogging down the mountain in reverse was a rare opportunity to revisit one’s accomplishments, to see how far you’d come. Dismas had been right. If I’d known what was before me, I might have turned back. In the boulder section, we stepped from rock to rock, praying they didn’t give way and start an avalanche. When we came to the volcanic ash zone, it stretched before us steeply and endlessly.

  I looked at Dismas wearily, “Can’t I just curl up in the middle of an inner tube and roll myself down the mountain?”

  Without the presence of footholds, it was too steep to tread upon. Instead we “skied” down the mountain. This was accomplished using the painful combination of leaning backward and bending one’s knees as we slid our feet through the ash. I can say with confidence that my knees will never be the same. We trudged into Kibo Hut dusted in sulfur. Dismas allowed us only an hour to sleep. Removing just my boots, I gingerly slid into my sleeping bag and lay awake with my eyes closed.