With the lower altitude, my breathing slowed, my headache disappeared, and I felt human again. I knew I would have to climb back up the elevation we were losing, but at that point it was the lesser of two evils. I felt good enough to snap some photographs as we passed a waterfall. However, as we moved from high desert back to moorland, my coordination did not improve, and the assault on my feet did not lessen.
We reached our camp, at 12,700 feet on the side of a valley, so early that the porters had not yet set up our tents. On arrival, we gave a halfhearted cheer, still struggling with morale after the long night before. The sun at its peak, we sat on the ground and ate some sandwiches made with stale bread for lunch. Then most of us crept into the tents, now pitched, and tried to rest.
I was so exhausted that I couldn’t sleep. A couple of hours later, while I was staring at the necklace I bought at the Usa River School dangling from the roof of my tent, a chatter of voices passed our camp. I poked my head out to see another team of climbers coming up a different trail. Bored with staring at the blue roof of my tent, I stepped outside. Below the ridge where we were camped, the clouds were rolling into the canyon forming a billowy white carpet under our feet. I walked down to the ridge and stood on an outcropping of rock, feeling as though I could almost step out onto the clouds and walk clear across the canyon. To my right, about a quarter mile in the distance, stood an imposing vertical wall of rock, behind which rose Uhuru Peak. Something about that high fortress of rock left me feeling a little weak.
Soon after, the rest of the team joined me on the ridge. “What’s that?” I asked Tim, pointing toward the wall.
“That’s what we’re climbing tomorrow,” Tim answered. “Barranco Wall.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know that was there,” Dilly said.
I stared at the wall. Tim explained that it was not a technical ascent, but it was a steep, 1,000-foot-high scramble, and I would not be able to use my poles for balance. For a second, I was angry at myself for not investigating our route thoroughly enough to know that this Barranco Wall existed. Then I was simply scared.
“That’s nuts,” I said, trying to laugh it off, but that wall was not funny.
Soon enough the clouds rose, and the wall disappeared behind them, but the sight of it was burned deep into my skull. Permanently. One wrong step, one momentary loss of balance, and . . . I pushed the thought away.
For the rest of the night, all we talked about was the Barranco Wall. The team had a thousand questions: Were we to pack differently or wear anything different? Would we go up single file? In what order? Was it a continuous climb or would we stop midway? Moody told me that I would be sandwiched between him and Minja. We would try to get to the wall early in the morning to avoid any other teams, and we would take it as slowly as we needed to. Nothing that was said made me feel any better.
After dinner, many of us went straight to bed. Paul took a couple of Tylenol PM from me and conked out within minutes. I played some UNO with Dilly and the guides, but it barely distracted from the thought of the wall, which seemed to get higher and steeper in my mind with each hour that passed. Normally, I would not have let my fears and doubts run amok like that, but I was tired, too tired, to stop them.
Finally, I returned to my tent. I massaged my feet, trying to loosen their stiffness, but even in Crocs they hurt. The balls of them had been in so much pain that day that I had compensated by putting my weight, too much of it, on the outsides. This only compounded my troubles.
Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up. In the dark, the magnitude of my attempt to summit Kilimanjaro and my lack of preparation for it really hit home. Day after day of exertion, the altitude, the cold, my weak legs, my tortured feet, and my lack of coordination and balance. Any of these, or all of them together, could prevent me from reaching the top. Picturing the Barranco Wall for the thousandth time, I added death to the list.
It was day five, and with Dilly and Paul at my side, I stared up at the base of the Barranco Wall. My uneasiness drained the strength from my legs, and I wondered how I could possibly make it up 1,000 feet of vertical rock.
“My God, it’s tall,” Paul said. He looked better after a long, restful, Tylenol-induced sleep.
“I’m worried about my balance,” I said. “If I step left or right at too great an angle . . .” I didn’t finish my sentence. “I’m not worried about climbing it, about the effort, but if I fall, it’s a big fall.”
Paul and Dilly glanced at each other. I was not a small guy. If I really lost my balance, even Minja wouldn’t be able to stop me from pitching over, and I might carry him off the mountain with me. Paul tried to reassure me that he would be behind Minja to catch him catching me, but I thought that sounded like a lot of opportunities for dropped balls.
“At least it’s a nice day,” I said.
The sky overhead was clear and the sun warm on my face. For a long while, we stood at the bottom of the wall, watching two teams, one Swiss and one German, make the ascent. They looked as if they had grown up in the mountains. We studied the track they took, hopping here, reaching there, stopping on this ledge, sidestepping that steep overhang.
“Okay, look at what he’s doing.” Dilly pointed out one climber who was leaping from one rock to the next.
“Wow. Oh, that part looks hard,” Paul said, indicating a Swiss climber stretching for a handhold to scramble up a boulder.
“And I don’t want to get stuck there,” I said, pointing to a huddle of people waiting on a narrow slip of a ledge for their turn to continue up.
The first climbers had neared the top, and they were so high up they appeared like nothing but ants zigzagging back and forth. None of this watching or waiting did anything for my nerves. In the end, I had to just shut my eyes, to gather myself. Take it one bit at a time, I told myself. Don’t get stuck on making it up the whole wall right now. Just climb one part at a time. Let the rest take care of itself. I slowed down my thoughts, reminded myself that I was there for the challenge, that I could do this, that there was no quitting until I reached the top of Kilimanjaro.
The time came to start. Moody took the lead, I went second, and Minja followed behind. As we scrambled over the first few boulders, Minja stayed very close. Quiet, stoic, and calm, his presence reassured me that he would be there for me if I needed him. I suspected I would.
There was no warm-up on Barranco, no slow rise in the angle of its face to limber up the muscles or acquaint you with technique. It was steep from the word “go.” I slowly made my way up the first couple of hundred feet. Gloveless to get a better grip on the wall and pressed flat against the rocks, I tested each foot and handhold before hoisting myself up. Some sections were straight climbing; others had a thin angled trail through boulders, where I could put one foot in front of the other—and barely that.
Moody and Minja talked almost constantly to each other. Well, Moody chatted away in Swahili, and Minja gave limited, toneless responses. They were mapping out the easiest course up the wall. I carefully watched every move Moody made (latching onto a rock, a little jump, a long slide of the feet), and then figured out if I was able to do the same, adjusting the course slightly here and there to my own abilities. Several times, Moody offered his hand to help me up a section, but I refused it. Not only did I want to do this climb on my own, but also, frankly, I didn’t trust anybody but myself.
Moody hopped over the rocks, his legs moving naturally under him. Mine couldn’t do the same. It had never been more clear to me that climbing was about having faith in your body—in all its parts, hands, fingers, arms, legs, and feet—and having the fluidity, agility, and coordination needed to orchestrate its movements. I had no faith in mine now, and this lack of confidence unsettled me.
At one point, my face pressed to the wall, gathering the courage to take the next leap, I was a kid again—only instead of climbing a mountain, I was trying to drop in on a skateboard ramp on my aqua green Billy Ruff p
romodel board. I watched as my friends went, one by one, gliding with ease off the edge, moving almost effortlessly down the smooth curve of the ramp’s surface. By the time it was finally my turn, I wasn’t excited; I was angry. I was angry about how easily all the other kids had made it look. I was angry because I knew that even if I pulled off the same feat, nothing about it would be easy.
I stepped onto my board and moved down over the lip of the ramp. For one brief moment, everything was fine. I heard the turn of the wheels and felt the rush of air as it blew into my face. But then my feet didn’t adjust quick enough to the change of balance of my upper body. In one awkward motion, I crashed, tumbled, and slammed my elbow on the ramp, learning, once again, that my body was different. Back then, it had taken faith in my body to drop over that edge, but in the years since I’d been learning that having faith in my body came with a painful price. My body had failed me too many times to trust it.
Now on the climb, the consequences of this lack of trust made things more dangerous for me, and it wasn’t until this moment that I realized just how vulnerable this made me. More than the kid on the skateboarding ramp, I had reason to doubt myself, to question whether my limbs would let me down. Awkward sidesteps, crisscrossing feet, little jumps, shimmying up on my hands and knees, getting pushed in the back by Minja—the first half of the ascent was ugly and inglorious. My hands were cut up. My pants and fleece were dirty. My ankles burned from the uneven footholds. But I was still alive.
After another stretch of climbing, Minja spotting me from behind several times, we took a forced break on a ledge while we waited for another team to continue up and clear the way. Five minutes turned into ten, then fifteen. We had stopped before for logjams of climbers to clear, but never for this long. I was facing the wall, close enough to kiss it. I didn’t want to move, worried that I might lose my balance. Forced to remain in one position for so long, my legs and ankles began to tighten up badly and to shake.
“Backpack?” Minja asked, extending his hand.
“I’m good,” I said, not wanting to make any changes. He kept his hand outstretched, and I shook my head.
I was very skittish now and thought that if I moved, I might pitch over the side of the cliff, 600 feet down.
“How you feeling?” Paul asked. He was standing to my left, just past Minja.
“I’m good,” I lied.
Another five minutes passed. Moody and Minja spoke quietly to one another.
“We have to get going,” I said, interrupting them. If I had to stay there much longer, there would be nothing I could do to keep my legs from cramping up and collapsing.
“The Barranco Wall,” Dilly called out. “My new favorite activity.”
I wasn’t finding anything funny right then. I was psyching myself out, letting every worry about my body’s inabilities and the precipitous drop off the ledge grow larger and larger in my mind. The strain of the first half of the climb had worn down whatever force of will I had used to push away my fears. I just wanted to be done with this wall, to get off it.
At long last, Moody started moving again. I threaded my way across the ledge. My feet were stiff, and my legs uneasy. Every step was made with hesitation. “You’re doing good, bro,” Paul encouraged from behind. We were crossing diagonally, from left to right (and up), a stretch of boulders with very little room for error. Minja remained to the outside of me, risking his own safety to keep me on the wall.
I grabbed a handhold, but before I pulled myself up, I lost faith in my choice and hesitated. Moody looked back at me. He knew I needed help.
“There.” He pointed to where I should grip the boulder.
It was too far away. There was no way I could trust my body to stretch that far. A little higher up, but closer to me, was a cleft of rock I could reach.
“I’m going for that spot,” I said.
“If you feel good,” Moody replied.
I reached up, seized the handhold, and pulled myself up. My feet shuffled across the boulder. I followed Moody’s next step and hauled myself up some more. On the next maneuver, losing concentration, I didn’t reach far enough out to get a hold on the rock. My fingers slipped away from the wall, and for a second I felt my body fall away.
My heart sank. I thought this might be it. A crippling plummet or . . . the end.
Then, just as suddenly, I was pressed back up against the wall. Safe. With one hand, Minja had arrested my slip and shoved me against the boulder. He kept his hand pressed hard into my back until I nodded I was okay. There was no doubt in my mind that he had saved my life. He just looked at me with that stony face of his, not worried, not looking for any thanks. I thanked him anyway.
On we climbed. Minja kept his body close to mine, occasionally pressing his hand hard into my back. It was as if he was playing defense against me in basketball, except the court was on a ledge up a thousand-foot cliff face. A couple more times he kept me from slipping off the Barranco Wall.
It dawned on me that the lack of expression on Minja’s face was seriousness, not indifference. He was there not to make friends, but to help me reach the summit in one piece.
As we neared the top of the wall, I began tripping every few minutes. Tired, I was getting lazy about lifting up my feet to clear the next step. Instead, I was kind of dragging them up. Thankfully, the slope had become less steep, and so when I fell, I pitched forward into the wall and only scraped up my hands. An hour or maybe a lifetime later, we finally cleared the wall. I stumbled over to a rock, sat down, and wriggled out from under my backpack.
Dilly and Paul congratulated me on “not dying,” and even Minja gave me a high five. Looking down from the top and out across the huge desert valley, I felt a momentary sense of relief and pride. This quickly gave way to exhaustion. I leaned over and tried to recover my breath. My legs trembled uncontrollably. Worse was the mental exhaustion. Someone was talking to me, but I had trouble following. My brain didn’t seem to want to work. It couldn’t carry one thought to the next, and this distressed me. I knew that if I was anything but completely alert, I would take shortcuts and make mistakes about where I placed my feet.
I wasn’t the only one hurting. Mitch looked like death warmed over. His face was empty of color, and he looked dazed. He and the rest of the documentary crew had carried their cameras up the slope, preparing shots and filming as they went. They were not immune to the strain and altitude.
We all stayed where we were, resting, for what seemed like a long time. I had been too nervous to eat much at breakfast; I now devoured a half-frozen Power Bar and sucked up at least a liter of water from my CamelBak. The clouds cleared enough to give us a stunning view of Mt. Meru in the far distance. Then Tim rounded us up, advising that we still had a long way to go—up and down three extensive valleys—before we could set up camp. Already spent, I struggled to fathom how I was going to manage another four hours and another 1,000 feet in elevation before the end of the day.
I told myself yet again not to think of the whole challenge as a single entity. Take one valley, then the next, then the next. One at a time. I put out of my mind the thought that there were still two more days of climbing, including the long night hike to the summit. One hurdle at a time. Focus on that one and on nothing else.
And so we continued on. We followed a flat trail around the mountain, then went down a long valley, across a riverbed, and then right back up the other side, not gaining any elevation in the hour-long trek. Then came the next valley. Down and up. The mountain was covered in fog, which obscured much of what lay ahead and, thankfully, how far we still needed to go.
Then we reached the third valley. Everything around us was crushed reddish-black volcanic rock. This last valley of the day was a monster: very steep down and so steep up that I could not even use my poles to push myself up. It was largely a scramble straight up, my knees often brushing against the slope. The balls of my feet, taking most of my weight, were being absolutely punished.
To keep my mind off the p
ain, I tried to speak to Minja about the climb to the summit ahead, but he would only answer, “Pole, pole.”
When I staggered out of that final valley, I had nothing left in me. I dragged my legs toward the camp, which was set on a sharp slope. Reaching my tent, I took a long deep breath and then half fell through the opening. I peeled off my boots, trying not to pass out from the misery of it all. When I lay down, my head was at least twelve inches above my feet because of our angled position on the hill. I turned my body around so as to elevate my feet, but then all the blood rushed to my head, and I got dizzy. I laughed at the insanity of my situation; then, in a compromise, I wrestled my body sideways to the slope. Outside, I could hear huge birds cawing and swooping overhead. They might have been pterodactyls from the terrifying sound they made.
They can have me, I thought. Let them pick me up and carry me to the summit in their claws.
This was my last thought before I passed out, my feet halfway out of my tent. I woke up a couple of hours later, just in time to stumble over to the mess tent. There was a fresh shipment of food, so we dined lavishly on bread that tasted like compressed sawdust and some kind of meat substance.
After dinner, most of us returned to our tents. I massaged my feet, but they were too sensitive, particularly under the arches, to do it for very long. Even moving my toes was painful. They might as well have been stuck in rigor mortis. I decided to leave them alone. It was almost impossible to get comfortable on the slope. I curled up on my side, but felt as if I was about to roll downhill.
“Previously on Dexter,” Dilly intoned, the little glow of his iPod faintly visible from my tent. His solar-powered battery always had enough charge for one episode a day. He sounded restless, no doubt because his flannel sleeping bag was basically nothing more than an ice blanket. He tried to joke about it, but I knew he was miserable. Last night he hadn’t even wanted to go into his tent to sleep.
One More Step: My Story of Living with Cerebral Palsy, Climbing Kilimanjaro, and Surviving the Hardest Race on Earth Page 9