The next couple of weeks, I woke up every morning hoping the unusually intense lancing pain in my ankles and feet would have disappeared. Every morning I was disappointed. Finally, I knew I had to see a doctor. Fifteen days before we were scheduled to leave for Africa, I went to see the Ducks’ team physician, Dr. Craig Millhouse.
Millhouse was about as unflappable as they come. Working for decades on ice-hockey players has that effect. On the exam table, I told him about my training hike and the mission ahead.
“Why would you do that?” he said, chuckling. “Sounds like quite an adventure.”
I shrugged. He wasn’t wrong.
Then he rolled his chair over toward me and began feeling around my feet with his fingers and thumbs. Each time he probed too deep, I had to take a sharp breath. My arches, the balls of my feet, my heels, throughout my ankles—all of it stung.
“Well,” he said, “you haven’t completely snapped the ligaments off the bone, but there’s a lot of damage. A lot. You need some ankle braces and physical therapy, but two weeks isn’t enough time for you to heal completely.”
Now I was scared. There was no way we could postpone the climb. Everything was already set in motion.
The next day, I was fitted with braces to support my ankles as I walked, and I started with the therapist. Stretches. Ankle rotations. Foam rollers. Resistance work with coil bands. She even had me picking walnuts off the ground with my toes. The exercise improved my strength, but I was nowhere near healed. With each hour ticking down to the time we were to leave for Africa, the pressure mounted.
Betraying every instinct to avoid doctors, I also made an appointment with Dr. Afshin Aminian, my neighbor and one of the leading orthopedic specialists in the country. His prognosis was very clear and firm. The tendons in my ankles were injured and would not repair themselves by Kilimanjaro.
Then he said, “With zero physical challenges, climbing mountains is difficult. But with your cerebral palsy, you’ve got muscles that don’t function well. They’ll cramp and fatigue far quicker than an able-bodied person’s. Your coordination isn’t perfect. And given the altitude and the lack of oxygen, we don’t know how your brain will respond, particularly as it’s been damaged since birth. There are many uncontrollable variables.”
“I know. I know.” Those were my words. In my head though, I accepted none of what he said about my condition, same as when Dr. Starr had first diagnosed me almost twenty-five years earlier.
“You risk slipping and falling and dying,” Dr. Aminian said firmly.
“I’m good,” I said, thinking only that Kilimanjaro is dangerous for everyone.
He looked at me as if I was crazy and let me go.
I kept my injury, and his warnings, to myself. Before leaving for Africa, I drove out to see Bompa at his Laguna Beach home. He was ninety-one and, with my grandmother in a care facility, he was living by himself.
Bompa was his usual gruff, tough self, but now with a layer of fragility. His hands shook slightly, and his every move seemed to take some deliberate care. I knew he was only holding on until Bomma passed, not wanting to leave her alone after seven decades together. As we sat down for lunch at his big butcher-block table with its iron legs (a table that once reminded me of Bompa himself, apt since he made it), I considered the fact that this might be the last time I spent with him. As usual, he was dressed in torn jeans, a faded shirt, and no shoes.
“When’s your flight? . . . How long’s the climb? . . . Who are you going with?” Bompa asked lots of questions. His final question: “Are you ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said, knowing better than to boast around him.
He gave a worried smile. Then I gave him one of the African stone necklaces I had gotten to give to my supporters in advance of the climb. Bompa fumbled with the screw clasp, but finally I got up and secured it around his neck. I could tell it meant a lot to him, even if he wouldn’t say it. We hugged.
“Take care of yourself. I’ll tell you all about it when I’m back,” I said.
“Come home safe,” Bompa said. “Love ya.”
Outside, sitting in my car before driving away, I put my hands on the wheel and shook from the emotion of it all.
At home, I finished packing all the gear. My flight to Africa left in sixteen hours. Finally, after all my checklists had been triple-checked, and after I had put it off as long as I could, I went into the kitchen and paged through the will I had prepared in advance of the trip one last time. The documents, all signed and notarized, were a grim reminder that Kilimanjaro was more than an adventure. I was desperate to prove something, to myself and to the world, and I was willing to drive to the edge to do it.
My body had not yet healed. My doctors had warned me against going. But there was a certain peace in knowing that I was willing to give everything to the effort. I sent an e-mail with a scan of the documents to my brother Matt, whom I had declared the executor of my estate.
I sent a second e-mail to my father. Since our break when I was in college, we had mended our relationship with slow and stuttered steps. He had remarried, to a wonderful spitfire of a woman named LaDonna, and although my dad was still very quiet, he was becoming more open about his feelings. Our relationship still needed a lot of work, but dinners together and his showing up at my marathon race and then my announcement about Kilimanjaro were helping.
Before I went to bed, I checked my fund-raising website. There was a message from Steve Robert. He had just committed $1,000 to my fund-raising campaign, the last donation I would receive before I left the next morning. Steve included the message, “I’m proud of you. Know that you will always have a part of Jakey with you.”
Sleep did not come easy.
It was August 28, 2008, and we were on our way to Tanzania at last. There was no fanfare at my apartment, no tearful good-byes with my family at the airport. The early morning flight from LAX to Detroit with the documentary film crew was uneventful. At our connection in Detroit, I met up with Dilly. From Detroit to Amsterdam, the plane’s entertainment system was stuck on a single movie, Kung Fu Panda. I tried to sleep, but planes, where I am stuck in a single position, are brutal on my body. It was hard to know whether I’d dozed off at all, since that furry panda was playing on a Groundhog Day loop. Most of the time, Dilly and I joked around with each other, trying to ease the tension.
“I live in Texas. The highest thing to climb there is a barstool,” Dilly drawled, stretching out his long legs.
“Are you nervous?” I asked.
“My wife’s nervous.”
I looked at him. He was nervous. “Hope you gave her a big kiss good-bye.”
“How far do we hike each day?”
“I don’t know,” I said, never having once even examined the trail we would take to the summit. “Tim will tell us.”
“And meals?”
I shrugged.
“Who’s carrying what? Will we be stopping a lot? Which day’s the hardest?” He ran down a list of questions.
Finally, I said, “Dude, I have no idea. We’ll learn together.”
“Well,” he smiled. “Shit howdy, that sounds good.”
We both laughed. Dilly had his sayings.
Dilly had grown up in a small town between Austin and San Antonio, where his dad owned a pizza shop. He went to Texas State University and moved to Houston after graduation. Like me, Dilly got a job in sales straight out of college. Two years into his job with ADP, he wanted out of Texas, to see some of the world. His boss thought there might be a position coming available in San Diego, but Dilly would have to wait—maybe for months. That night, Dilly packed his bags, drove for twenty hours, and went straight to the San Diego office of ADP, my office at the time. He talked his way into a job, although he was given one of the toughest spots in the area: from Tijuana to downtown San Diego.
I liked Dilly from the start. He was a born salesman, and though he didn’t speak a lick of Spanish and stood out in the predominately Hispanic territ
ory, he killed it. At the office, his was the cubicle next to mine. I took him out for a night on the town, and three days later he moved into the spare bedroom in my beach house. Paul Flores was living right next door. We were three amigos.
After a few years as roommates, Dilly moved back to Texas and married a local girl, but we remained close. In May I had called him to ask him to join me on the climb. I needed somebody who knew me backward and forward, who would tell it to me like it was. More than that, I needed his humor. Dilly asked his wife, Karen, what she thought about it. She said, “Make sure he makes it, and you get back safe.”
Dilly had only four months to train and, with his sea-level town and 100-degree summer days, the conditions were not exactly ideal. But he didn’t flinch. He swam upstream in a river near his house for two hours at a time to work on his cardio. He hiked up and down the few hills there were in the town to condition his legs. As he traveled a lot for work, he used to stay in the tallest hotel he could find, strap on a thirty-pound backpack, and climb the steps for two to three hours at a time.
“I’m Huckleberrying out here for you,” he told me.
Now we were Huckleberrying together.
When the plane landed in Amsterdam, we met up with rest of our crew, who were coming in from various parts of the States. Paul and I hugged, and then he introduced me to Tim, our team leader. What struck me about Tim was his Buddhalike calm and the fact that there was not an ounce of fat on his body. He gave me a firm handshake and one of those thousand-yard stares. He was definitely measuring me up, both physically and mentally.
It was an uncomfortable few moments, but finally he said, in his typical quiet voice, “Are we ready to do this mad adventure?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
Another long flight, and we landed in Tanzania in the middle of the night on August 29. As we taxied from the runway, I thought the airport looked eerily empty. There were only a few lights and no other planes. I was a long way from home now. A pair of vans took us to a motel by the airport. In the lobby we gave a muted group cheer and then went off to our rooms. My bed might as well have been made of concrete. I spread out my sleeping pad on top of it, but that was little help. Eventually exhaustion took over.
When I woke up the next morning, I stretched out my legs and ankles. They were still not 100 percent, but I hoped they would continue to heal over the next two days before we started our climb. We moved into a hotel in downtown Arusha and toured the city. The roads were packed with every kind of vehicle: hand carts, motorcycles, pickups, bicycles, 1980s Toyota vans masquerading as “buses,” taxis, and all the rest. Clearly, there were few traffic laws—or police to enforce them—and crossing an intersection was like a game of chicken on steroids. We went to the cultural center, basically a lure to sell tourists souvenirs and trinkets, and snapped photos of ourselves wrestling with a fifteen-foot wooden alligator. I danced and played the drums with some teenagers who had assembled by the entrance. For a moment, it was fun not to think of the mountain that awaited me.
Back at the hotel, over dinner, Dilly informed us that, in his infinite wisdom, he had been taking Cipro for the past week.
“Tell me you haven’t,” Paul said.
“What do you mean?”
When we reminded him that it was the malaria pills—not the antidiarrhetics—that he was supposed to take in advance, he gave us a sour look. Everybody broke down in laughter.
“You’ll need a jackhammer to take a crap,” Paul said.
“Well, shit howdy,” Dilly said, shrugging. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
We laughed until our sides hurt, and then Tim gathered us together. He went over every detail of the climb: what we needed to bring, the role of the porters, what we would eat, the distance and elevation we would travel each day.
“There will only be one really hard day,” Tim said, and I wondered if he meant hard for him—or for me.
Halfway through his prep talk, Tim asked if we would be willing to pay the extra $10 a day for the porters to carry up a portable outhouse. Someone cracked that Dilly wouldn’t need to pay, and again we were overcome. Nothing like a little bathroom humor to break the tension.
The next morning, we piled into our safari vans and drove out of the city. It didn’t take long before we were in the middle of the countryside. We passed every kind of ramshackle dwelling—places made out of branches, scrap wood, rusted corrugated sheet metal, rocks, whatever could be found. Usually, there was a scrawny animal tied to the side of the house. Typically a goat, rarely a cow. The poverty was overwhelming, and I felt as though I had fallen into some kind of time warp.
After an hour, we pulled off the road and stopped at the gate to the Usa River School. When Tim and I were organizing the trip, I told him about my interest in meeting Tanzanian children who had cerebral palsy. It took him a month of research to find a place that cared for them. As the school’s headmaster led us past the gate and into the grounds, we quickly learned why that was the case.
In Tanzania, as in many African countries, children with disabilities are shunned, mistreated, and even killed. They are not allowed in schools. The government offers no care facilities or programs for them until they are sixteen years old. Prior to that, they have to fend for themselves. It is not uncommon to hear stories of children with cerebral palsy or Down syndrome being locked into closets and cages or being left by their families on the side of the road in the middle of the night. In some remote villages, children are burned alive out of fear they have the Devil inside them.
Waiting for us in the central courtyard were three dozen teenagers, all in matching blue uniforms, their eyes looking us over nervously. Most of them suffered from a physical deformation, such as a club foot or a missing limb, or from a neurological disability like mine.
I went up to a few of them and introduced myself in the pidgin Swahili I had learned, which basically consisted of, “Hi. My name is Bonner.”
One girl, who clearly had Down syndrome, shook my hand and tried to say hello in English. She was very shy and stumbled over her words. The headmaster asked her to try again, and with a clear voice she finally said, “Hi. I’m Barbara.”
I smiled, and she gave me back the biggest smile I could ever remember.
Afterward, the kids lined up in three rows and sang to us in Swahili. The headmaster translated the lyrics for us, something along the lines of:
Even though life is not perfect,
the sun will come up today,
and the sun will go down tomorrow.
What happens in between is what matters.
Remember to be happy and kind.
Remember, it’s all about people.
Most of the words were lost on me, and the song was offpitch and uncoordinated. But none of that mattered. They sang with such hope—you could see it their faces, hear it in their voices—that it left every single one of us uplifted. During their next song, they welcomed me into the circle. I danced about and butchered the chorus. Everyone laughed and had a good time.
Then the headmaster gave us a tour, showing us where the children slept and the classrooms in which they learned to read and write as well as knit, carve wood, and make jewelry. There were several large, well-constructed buildings, but most of the place was empty. Clearly there was room for many more students. From their shop, I bought some necklaces and then thanked the kids for their songs before returning to the bus.
As the headmaster closed the gate after us, a chill went through me. Here I had met thirty to forty teenage kids from the whole of Tanzania, and it was the only place in the country I could find that helped children with disabilities. The obvious question was: Where are all the other kids? There had to be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands who needed care. How many were instead being abandoned, starved, hidden, locked in cages, or killed? It was a thought that would not leave me.
That same night, after an early dinner and a final briefing from Tim, I returned to the hotel room I shared with D
illy. We were leaving for the mountain early the next morning, and there was a lot to pack. It looked like an REI shop had exploded inside the room. Boots, thermal underwear, hiking poles, dry-wick T-shirts, gloves, hats, Camelbacks, toiletry kits, and dozens of other items littered the beds and the floor.
As I began sorting through everything I needed for the climb, Dilly was battling to roll up his bulky flannel-lined sleeping bag, which was more a square than a rectangle. Dilly was wrestling with it as though it was a crocodile he had by the tail, trying to fold it and cram it into a nylon sack while it continued to wriggle out of his grasp. Fifteen minutes into this skit, I was doubled up with laughter.
“Where’d you get that thing?” I asked, thinking the bag looked like something I wouldn’t even take to a sleepover as a kid, let alone a mountain with subzero temperatures.
“Bass Pro Shops.”
“Okay.”
“I got it in the bargain bin. It was $10, down from $300.”
This broke me down ever further. Dilly was always a bit cheap, but there really should be limits.
After a few more hours of packing and watching BBC TV, we crawled into our beds and turned off the lights. For a long while we were both quiet, unmoving.
“Are you awake?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Dilly said. “I’m trying to get in my head what we’re about to do.”
“We’re not here to attempt this,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as him. “I’ve got to do this. I can’t be weak. I’ve got to do this.”
Dilly rolled over and switched on his camera. I wasn’t sure what he was doing until he turned the screen toward me and hit play. He had shot a video of the Usa River schoolkids singing. We listened to their song several times. Afterward we were both silent again, back in darkness.
I didn’t sleep much, maybe a couple of hours at most, but by the time the sun came up, I was as ready as I would ever be.
One More Step: My Story of Living with Cerebral Palsy, Climbing Kilimanjaro, and Surviving the Hardest Race on Earth Page 6