Eventually everything grew quiet. Once again, I was sure I was the last one awake. I stared at the necklace made by the Usa River School kids hanging from my backpack and thought of how much more courage they had than I did.
We struck camp and got going by 8 A.M. on day six, wanting to arrive at the final base camp by lunchtime, so we could take a long rest before setting out for the summit later that night. There was not much talking; everyone was focused on what lay ahead. It was only fifteen hours until we made our attempt. The countdown had begun.
We trekked across and up several ridges. Uhuru Peak was now staring down at us from above. The rise in elevation was fairly gradual as we rounded the side of the mountain, but at that altitude, close to 16,000 feet above sea level, nothing was easy. My feet and ankles were beyond the repair of an uneasy night of sleep, and I just suffered them.
Throughout the morning’s trek, I thought of nothing but the summit and of what kind of commitment it would take to get me there, both physically and mentally. I knew how tired I already was, how much my feet hurt, how cold it would be setting out at night, and how much trouble I had making my way in the dark. All these things, taken together, would make the ascent tough. But in addition to those factors, there was the extreme altitude, the unknown terrain, and the possibility of a storm hitting us midway to the peak. I knew I would keep pushing myself forward, but that might not be enough. I might fall off the trail in the dark, and they would never find me. My legs might give up on me from exhaustion, and I would simply collapse on the slope. My brain might swell from the elevation, and I would pass out or even die.
So many things could go wrong, many of them beyond my control. There was no avoiding the truth: I had never been so confronted by my limitations—or so terrified by them—in my life.
We arrived at our final base camp just before noon. Our tents had been erected among giant slabs of lava rock. Sitting down on one of them, dirty, stinking, and hungry, I realized how much I missed home. I missed hot showers and fresh clothes. I missed the ocean and the warm sandy beach. I missed buffalo wings, pepperoni pizza, In-N-Out burgers . . . the simple things.
Then I thought of my family. Distant as I was from them, I missed them too. I had embarked on this adventure without them, and I wished somehow they could be there to cheer me on, to help me through what I was certain was to come: more moments of terrible weakness and doubt.
Sadness over their absence slowly turned to hurt. For so many years, I felt, they never had my back. First, my father after the divorce. Then my mother, dividing us against him and forcing each of us into her mold, despite the fact that I had a physical condition that made fitting into a mold of any kind impossible. Then Mike, who once always seemed to be the first to my defense, basically disappearing from my life since college and rarely showing up when I needed him. I had hoped he would have been there to train with me. A hike or two, at least. Maybe he could have spurred me to prepare better. With my simmering hurt turning into anger, I finally stood away from the rock and retired to my tent.
After a long rest, I gathered with the others. Moody and Tim, both as serious as I had ever seen them, detailed how we would make the summit attempt. Given that I moved more slowly than other climbers, they wanted us to leave an hour earlier than planned, 11 P.M. instead of midnight. We needed to reach Uhuru Peak just after dawn. That was critical because when the sun came up, the frozen ground would start to loosen and turn into a snowy mush. Getting to the summit would be like trying to climb up a sand dune. Further, the weather patterns during the day were much more unpredictable than at night, and we might get hit by a surprise storm.
Tim and Moody told us to make sure we had batteries in our headlamps, to keep drinking water throughout the night, and to take it slow. Pole, pole. There was no prize for first place. Moody then introduced individual guides for each member of the team. I already had Minja, but now we each would have somebody to look out for us. They were the porters who had been hauling up our tents and food throughout the climb. Now they were our guardians, and we were to listen to them without fail.
Moody and Bariki took us outside the mess tent and showed us one of those single-wheel metal gurneys. If something went wrong with one of us, Moody said, that person would be strapped to the gurney and wheeled down to a lower altitude. There was no other way off the mountain.
Tim and the guides then took us on a three-hundred-yard jaunt to a ridge overlooking the summit. Tim told us how important it was to stick with our guide, stay together, and to keep moving. Sitting down for longer than thirty seconds, he warned, would allow the frigid temperatures to really hit home, and we could freeze to death. He encouraged us, telling us that we all had the strength in us to make it. The climb wouldn’t be easy, but the important thing was to just keep moving. Again, our lives depended on it.
Then it was back to the mess tent for an early dinner. Paul raised his mug of coffee for a toast: “We’re all going to the top.”
Everyone clinked mugs and raised a cheer. We had started with ten, but after Nancy dropped out, we were nine.
We returned to our tents before sunset to try to get some sleep before go-time. I put everything I would need for the climb into my backpack, then lined the inside of my sleeping bag with all the clothes I would wear for the ascent: long underwear, red blizzard jacket, sweatshirt, snow pants, beanie, and balaclava. This way, they would be warm when I put them on in the middle of the night. I forgot to include my boots; I didn’t even think of it.
As the sun fell, the temperature dropped, and even with my sleeping bag stuffed like a sausage I found myself shivering. The wind began blowing, its gusts buffeting the fabric of my tent. I tried to sleep, but I kept wondering what kind of terrain we were facing, whether it would be scree or hard rock or snow. Mostly, I worried about the first part of the climb: making my way through the dark. I had trouble crossing from my bedroom to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and I remembered Mt. Whitney well, trying to keep my balance on the forest trail without anything for my eyes to focus on so I could get my bearings.
Sleep eluded me. I questioned why I had come to Tanzania, what was it that drove me here. Clearly I was desperate to prove that I was equal to any who had dared this mountain. Prove to whom? Others? Myself? Was this worth risking my life and enduring such agony, day after day? What would it reveal anyway? Lying there in my tent, I didn’t have any answers. But I needed to find them.
My eyes were heavy from the high altitude, but still sleep did not come, just short restless dozes. No breath was deep enough to draw the oxygen I needed from the air. No matter how tightly I cocooned myself in my sleeping bag, I was still cold.
7
Fire in the Furnace
At 11 P.M., a porter came by to make sure I was awake. I was already up and dressed. I was wearing four layers and was still freezing; my breath looked eerie in the glow of the headlamp. The wind was so strong that the gusts were blowing the side of my tent flat against the ground. It was deadly cold, 15 below or less—without doubt the coldest it had been since we began. Sitting alone in my tent, I was already short of breath, adrenaline racing. My mouth was dry, and my tongue felt twice its normal size. I knew I needed to calm down and relax, but I was unable to slow the parade of fears marching through my head. The wind, the cold, and the darkness outside only made these fears seem worse.
“Maji moto, maji moto,” the porter chanted. I drank some hot water, warming my hands on the mug, and then pulled my balaclava back down over my face to keep the biting cold air off my exposed skin. Then I slowly, painfully, strapped on my braces and boots. The moment I slipped my feet into the boots, I knew I had made a mistake—a big mistake—by not putting them into my sleeping bag with the rest of my gear. They were frozen solid. My already stiff feet were now encased in what felt like concrete. They felt numb immediately. Nothing to do about it now. Got to get going.
The darkness outside the tent was overwhelming. Even with a headlamp, I could not anti
cipate how I would find my way through the pitch-black. Then the gusting, frigid wind hit, and my adrenaline spiked even higher. My boots an icebox, I paced back and forth, occasionally stomping my feet.
Minja appeared through the darkness. “Hello, Bonner,” he greeted me, in his deep voice.
The others assembled. I gave each one a fist bump, but my mouth was too dry to speak. Sips of water did nothing to help.
Waiting for everybody to gather seemed to take a long time. I was growing colder with every passing second and wanted to get started—anything for a release from my nerves. “All right! Let’s get moving!” I kept saying, though my voice was whipped away by the wind. My hands began to burn from the cold, and I loosened my grip on my poles, which helped with my circulation.
At long last, Moody stood at the front of our team and said, “We go.” He led us forward, single file, into the darkness. With our hunched backs and solemn faces, we might have been a prison chain gang. Tim was right in front of me and Minja behind. I struggled to settle into a rhythm. My legs were already hurting, and my balance was off. With the spare circle of light cast by my headlamp, I could hardly see where to put my feet. The hood of my jacket limited my peripheral vision and my ability to hear—but I could still hear my breathing, ragged and heavy. Whenever the wind changed direction, it blew my jacket hood down over my headlamp and blocked its light. I’d try to push it away, but with my half-frozen hands it was like trying to swat clumsily at a fly in a windstorm.
Twenty minutes into the climb, I was a wreck. I stared at Tim’s boots and tried to follow his footsteps up the steep trail. Even when the headlamp did cast a clear halo of light on the path, it provided little solace. I didn’t know where I was or whether there was a cliff to one side or the other. The trail was uneven, and the wind threw me off balance even more. I felt it might flick me off the mountain at any moment.
Terrified, I grew short of breath. My backpack seemed to weigh more and more, and I felt increasingly awkward in my heavy jacket, as if I was some fat mummy trying to stumble his way up a mountain. A half hour into the ascent, Minja put his hand on my shoulder. It was time for a break. Standing there, trying to suck some partially frozen water out of my CamelBak, I was full of doubt and self-criticism. This was the point in the day’s climb when I was supposed to be feeling my freshest. How could I possibly handle six more hours of the same at ever-increasing altitudes? Once again, my haphazard approach in preparing for this climb was coming back to haunt me.
Tim asked me if I wanted to sit down for a moment. I did not. I could not. I might never get up again. I tried to eat a PowerBar, but it had frozen solid. I tore at it like a dog, getting only a few bites before my jaw hurt from the chewing. I sucked at the tube on my CamelBak, but it had frozen solid as well. Squeezing the tube didn’t break up the ice crystals. Tim and Minja had a go, but didn’t have any luck either. Minja took my CamelBak off and poured the water into a metal screw-top bottle, which he put into my backpack.
I began to shiver uncontrollably. I shook my numb hands and beat them against my thighs, hoping to get the blood moving. The only warmth I felt was from the burning pain in my ankles and legs. It was clear to me that, if things did not improve, I would never make it to the summit. Minja asked if I wanted him to take my backpack and, like a fool, I refused.
“I may not do this,” I mumbled quietly to myself. I thought about what that would mean for everybody who had supported me, from my coworkers at the Ducks to my friends, to Jake’s family, to all those kids who chipped in money from their lemonade stands and the like. I could not let them down. They had faith in my ability to reach the top of Kilimanjaro. They believed in me. And I couldn’t betray that belief. There was no way I would let that happen.
No way.
Time to get moving. Time to pull myself together and get myself into a rhythm.
We headed back onto the trail, Tim ahead of me once again. My little internal motivational speech carried me through the next twenty minutes—maybe the next half hour. Then the wind picked up some more. The gusts roaring around me must have been striking at 40–50 miles per hour. Chippings of rock spat into my face, hitting my goggles, pinging off my ski pants. It felt as though I was climbing through a tornado. My hood continued to block my headlamp intermittently, and the wind would sometimes treat my jacket like a sail, yanking me off balance.
On we climbed, the slope unrelenting, one switchback after the next. I lost all sense of my surroundings and of the others on my team. The only thing that mattered was Tim, charting my path. I focused on his heels. If he could handle this, so could I. So could I. Exhausted beyond belief by the end of the first hour, I questioned how I would continue for the next ten. But Tim kept trekking upward, and so I followed.
One time, at a hairpin bend, I heard a voice through the howling wind. It was in Swahili, a combination of a hum and a song. It was Minja. The sound broke the monotony of the wind, and as we continued Minja continued to sing. I would hear him whenever I turned my head or when we reached another switchback. The song, which had the softness of an old hymn, reminded me of the Usa River girls’ song. The thought of them encouraged me, and I finally found some rhythm in my pace.
When we next took a break, I discovered that the top of the screw-top bottle had come off and my water was gone. Minja didn’t carry any water either. The altitude hit home, and I heaved for breath, trying to suck in as much oxygen as possible before we started moving again.
The trail was now littered with large rocks, and I could no longer drag my feet along, one after the next, which is what I had been doing. I needed to lift my legs now, and this moved the effort and the danger to a whole different plane. Time and again, unsettled by the wind and darkness, I almost tripped and fell. Terrified that my lack of balance might see me pitch off the side of this mountain, I slowed even further.
At some point, Tim separated from us, maybe to see how the others on our team were doing. Minja took the lead, and I realized that Dilly was behind me. Mouth shut, eyes wide, he looked as terrified as I felt.
“You doing all right?” he finally managed.
I shook my head no.
We followed Minja, and Dilly’s guide took up the rear.
Another hour, maybe more, and my legs were shot. I let myself get lost in the searing pain. It started in my toes, spread across my arches into my ankles, then rose up my calves and into my knees, quads, and hamstrings. Every muscle from my lower back down was in spasm. With no other release, I howled into the wind. Dilly must have been in the same state as he howled along with me.
“Shit worked!” he shouted, nudging me with a smile.
“A war cry,” I said.
We kept howling and trekking upward, switchback after switchback. But eventually the howling lost its appeal. We were still hours away from sunrise at 6 A.M., which was when Tim said we should be reaching Stella Point, a ridge several hundred yards below the summit. There was still so far to go, and with each passing step my pace seemed to slow.
At another break—I couldn’t tell which one at this point—Moody came up to me. He shined a flashlight into my eyes, then raised three fingers. “How many am I holding up?” he asked. I said the number. He asked my name, then where I was. I must have answered correctly because I got a thumbs-up.
Paul materialized out of the darkness. “I know it’s hard,” he said. “But you’re doing a good job, bro. You’re doing it.”
His eyes were glazed, as if he was drunk, and I imagined mine looked the same. I was certainly feeling similar effects.
Then we were back on the trail once more. The others moved farther ahead, becoming nothing more than the tiny lights of their headlamps on the switchbacks higher up the mountain. I felt all alone in the world but for Minja.
My dry, scratchy throat nagged at me, and I wanted nothing more than a long drink of water, which I could not have. I was struggling to take even a few more steps, with so far still to go, when Minja stopped me again and asked if he coul
d take my backpack. Far past pride, now merely trying to survive, I said yes. The relief from taking off my backpack kept me moving through several more switchbacks. I couldn’t imagine being able to continue under its weight.
As we climbed, the wind began playing a maddening game with me. When we were heading straight into the wind, my hood blew back, and my headlamp shone onto the trail. On the downside, this face-on assault blasted pebbles and dust into my face and overwhelmed me with its roar. When the wind was behind us, my hood blew down over my face, blocking my headlamp and leaving me in the dark, unbalanced, and with every step a gamble. Yet it was only then, with the wind at our backs, that I could hear Minja’s singing.
The night seemed as though it would last forever. Four hours, five, I had no idea how long we had been at it, but the sky appeared to have no intention of ever growing light. The rest breaks could not come quickly enough.
“Is it time?” I would ask Minja.
He would either shake his head or say, “Close. It’s close.”
Just keeping going until the next break, I would tell myself. You don’t have to go any farther. Just the next break. When we stopped, I would lean heavily on my poles, head hanging down, trying to gather my breath. When it was time to move again, Minja would take my arm and pull me back onto the trail.
Somewhere—the hundredth switchback, the thousandth—the pain in my legs blew past anything I had ever known. With each step my feet and ankles sent shock waves of agony. I wanted to cry, to sit down on a rock and weep, but that would mean giving in to the pain. I had known pain my whole life, as far back as I could remember, from the time I woke up each day until I hit the sack. I had adapted to it, but that was not the same as escaping from it. Pain just became something I understood very well. I knew how to handle it. No good came from this physical pain; there was no way to benefit from it. It simply needed to be blocked out.
One More Step: My Story of Living with Cerebral Palsy, Climbing Kilimanjaro, and Surviving the Hardest Race on Earth Page 10