My Year with Eleanor (31 page)

I leaned in to Marie and asked in a low tone, “What
was that about?”

“Police checkpoints,” she answered. “They randomly
pull over cars and search them. If they find anything wrong—and they'll nitpick
until they find something wrong—you have to pay them a fine on the spot or they
take your car. But when they see white people in the car, they let you go. Bad
for tourism.”

Three hours after leaving Arusha, we arrived at
Marangu Gate, the entrance to Kilimanjaro. As we pulled into the parking lot I
was struck by the oddness of a rain forest having a parking lot, as well as a
gated entrance. We were greeted by a swarm of young, fit African men. In
addition to Dismas, we'd be accompanied up the mountain by an assistant guide
and ten porters.

“I feel like a 1930s British colonialist,” I
whispered uneasily to Marie and Henri as the porters unloaded the van of our
personal effects, which they'd carry up and down the mountain for the next six
days.

The three of us checked in, writing our name, age,
address, and occupation in a book, something we'd have to repeat at every
campsite. I signed last and saw that Marie was forty-seven and Henri was
fifty-three and a graphic designer. By the time we were done, the porters had
already hit the trail with our duffels, sleeping bags, and food for the week. We
followed them into the rain forest, breathing in the loamy smells of minerals
and chlorophyll. To discourage erosion, logs had been arranged along the path
forming a kind of staircase to assist us on our ascent. A group of African kids,
maybe seven years old and wearing Crocs in Day-Glo colors, were blocking the
trail. Hands outstretched, they repeated “money, money, money.” Dismas shooed
them off and we continued. Intermittently, porters from other hiking groups
approached from behind and we stepped aside to let them pass.

“Jambo!” (Hello!) they called out jubilantly in
Swahili, grinning widely. They were a chiropractic nightmare, carrying
forty-five-pound bags on the back of their necks, heads tipped forward, for more
than six hours a day. A few balanced them on their heads as they walked. For
this, they earned an average tip of $5 a day, the same I would give a bellhop in
the United States for carrying my bag for three minutes.

After checking to make sure Dismas was out of
earshot, Marie said, “They're beasts of burden. Other cultures use camels or
mules. Here they use young men.”

When I'm in New York, I walk so fast that other
pedestrians zoom by, as though I'm on an invisible moving sidewalk. On the
mountain, our pace was set by the guide. We were walking wedding-march slow.
“Poly-poly” was the motto on Kilimanjaro. It meant “slowly, slowly” in Swahili.
Going poly-poly helped stave off altitude sickness and increased the chances
that hikers would make it to the summit. No one was more disappointed by
“poly-poly” than Henri. He'd set such a brisk pace on Mount Meru that the guides
had nicknamed him “Mountain Gazelle,” Marie told us with obvious pride. Dismas
gestured to the dainty lavender flowers lining the trail. “These flowers are
called impatiens.”

“Impatiens, huh?” I laughed. “I know how they
feel.”

“You have luck on your side, Miss Noelley,” Dismas
said. “The majority of people who make it to the top are old people and
women.”

“Really? I would've thought young men.”

He shook his head. “Their blood is still too hot.
They don't go slowly. They rush. Then they have to come down.”

When we reached the first rest area, I plopped down
next to Marie on a picnic bench. “My ass had better look incredible after this,”
I told Marie, stretching my legs out in front of me. They were holding up pretty
well considering I'd basically spent the last three hours walking up a giant
staircase. I guessed my training paid off.

Dismas and the assistant guides divided their time
between trying to scare off a mongoose—peeping out of a bush with its little
bear face and a mink's long body—and waving away a long-billed crow threatening
to swoop in and make off with our sack lunches (a frequent problem on the trail,
according to Dismas). When they were not warding off animals, they ate their
lunch sitting on boulders about fifteen feet away. There was plenty of room at
our picnic table, but when we invited them to join the three of us, they
refused, heightening the feeling of segregation that pervaded Kilimanjaro.

In what could only be a miracle from God, there
were working toilets at most of the camps and outhouses along the trail. Campers
were responsible for their own toilet paper so I'd packed four rolls to last me
the entire trip. After lunch I dug a roll out of my backpack and trotted over to
the outhouse. I felt a little uncomfortable holding the toilet paper in my hand,
such a blatant advertisement of what I was about to do. When I got inside the
outhouse, I saw it was just a wooden floor with a hole in the middle.
Well, this is going to be interesting,
I thought.
Flies orbited in lazy circles above the hole. As I squatted over it, I wondered
if one of them would fly up my vagina and what the protocol would be in such a
situation. Thankfully, they fled in terror. My already overworked quads trembled
a bit as I balanced my weight, but the real problem was my vagina, which had
always operated less like a hose than a five-nozzle sprinkler. This was fine
when you were sitting on a toilet, but now it scattered urine in all directions,
sending it racing along my butt cheeks, down the backs of my legs, and into the
tops of my hiking boots.

O
ur
first overnight stop was Mandara Hut, a campsite nestled in a misty forest
clearing. By the time we arrived in the late afternoon, the guides and porters
had been there for hours, wandering the campground's grassy slopes talking on
cell phones. One of them had a Bluetooth device clipped to his ear. After
settling in, we tramped into the long-tabled dining hall. An abundance of
languages could be heard, but the diversity ended there. Except for one Asian
group, all the hikers were white. The groups would hike separately but en masse
up the mountain, bunking and eating together at the same three campgrounds. The
largest group had twenty-three hikers, churchgoers from D.C. who were climbing
to raise money for clean water in Liberia. The pastor, who had brought his
ten-year-old son, clinked his fork on a glass so ostentatiously that it quieted
not only his table but the entire dining hall. Then, in a commanding voice, he
recited the predinner prayer. “Lord Jesus, we thank you so much for the bonds
that we've formed on this trip and we ask that you guide our conversations at
dinner tonight to strengthen our friendships even more. In Christ's name.
Amen.”

I was scooping lentil soup into my mouth when Marie
whispered, “See that guy over there?” I followed her gaze across the dining hall
to a man in a wheelchair. “Earlier, I overhead someone say that he's a
quadriplegic. His friends are pulling his wheelchair up the mountain with
ropes.”

As I watched the man being spoon-fed by another
hiker, I wondered if he had always been paralyzed. And if so, had they become
his friends before the paralysis or after? And which would say more about their
character?

After we finished dinner, the three of us repaired
to our hut. The huts were actually individual wooden cabins with steeped roofs.
Built into the slanted walls were three narrow double-decker beds topped with
thin, plastic-covered mats. It was so small that we had to take turns standing
in the middle of the room. It was similar to the accommodations in the hull of
The Manatee,
in fact. There were enough cabins
at this camp to sleep sixty people in all. Soon a porter brought us boiling
water to brush our teeth and quickly retreated to the separate accommodations
for porters and guides across the camp. We were not getting up until 7:30
A.M.
, so I assumed we'd stay up reading or talking
for a few hours, but Marie and Henri started readying themselves for bed at 8:00
P.M.
and I had no choice but to join them.
The dining hall was closed so there was nowhere else I could go.

The huts were unheated so we slept in our fleece
hiking pants and sweatshirts. It was the first time I'd had to put on more
clothes to go to sleep. I pulled on the blue fleece shirt Jessica had lent me.
Knowing that she had worn it made me feel less alone.

We each chose a bottom bunk and unfurled our
sleeping bags. They were specially designed for subfreezing temperatures. Unlike
regular sleeping bags where your neck and head have to fend for themselves,
these came up around the head and shoulders with a small opening for the face.
That it was shaped like a pharaoh's coffin—wider up top, tapering toward the
feet—was not lost on me. I usually slept on my side but because of the narrow
fit, there were only two positions for my arms: straight down at my sides or
scrunched up in front of me in the manner of a
Tyrannosaurus
. Trying to fall asleep without sleeping pills while
posing as a dinosaur in a padded casket would've been challenging in and of
itself. Throw in the fact that my body was still on New York time, where it was
1:00
P.M.
, and it was not looking good for
sleep. For a while I listened to my heartbeat playfully skipping around, trying
to adjust to the reduced oxygen. Then I synchronized my breathing with the slow
inhales and exhales of Marie and Henri, hoping I could trick my body into
thinking it was already asleep. There were no windows in the cabin. It was so
dark that sometimes I forgot to blink because I couldn't always tell if my eyes
were open or closed. Every now and then I rolled over and switched sides, just
to break up the monotony.

Eleanor, despite her high-society upbringing, loved
camping. In the summer of 1925, she, Nan Cook, and Marion Dickerman took her
sons Johnny, nine, and Franklin Jr., eleven, and two of the sons' friends on a
ten-day camping trip to Canada. They piled into Eleanor's seven-passenger Buick
with nothing more than two tents, cooking gear, and a first-aid kit. They slept
in random farm fields along the St. Lawrence River, stopping in New Hampshire to
rent some burros and climb the White Mountains. Eleanor was endlessly game in
the face of discomfort. After Franklin contracted polio, he spent a lot of his
time sailing off the coast of Florida, hoping the warm waters and climate might
have healing properties. Eleanor couldn't sleep in her cabin due to
claustrophobia so she slept on deck, though she felt no less vulnerable
surrounded by open sea. “When we anchored at night and the wind blew, it all
seemed eerie and menacing to me,” she later wrote. “Florida's mosquitoes all
converged on me . . . I always wound up with enough bites to look like
an advanced case of smallpox.”

I had no clue how much time had passed. Three
minutes? An hour? Occasionally I brought my wrist to my face and pressed a
button on my digital watch. The face lit up, emanating a green alien glow.
10:30. 1:04. 1:30. 2:10. 3:33. I was taking an altitude sickness medication
called Diamox in an effort to ward off cerebral and pulmonary edema. It sped up
the acclimatization process by allowing more oxygen to enter your bloodstream.
It was also a diuretic, meaning that I had to pee four times during the course
of the night. It was ten degrees outside and the communal bathroom was fifty
yards away, so pee breaks required preparation. First I wriggled out of my
sleeping bag, struggling not to wake Marie and Henri with the
whisk-whisk
sound of my body rubbing against the
nylon. Then I fumbled around in the dark for my heavy North Face coat and hiking
boots. Once they'd been successfully zipped and tied, I snapped on my headlamp,
basically an elastic headband attached to a flashlight that sits on your
forehead. During one particularly harrowing bathroom break, there was a clacking
animal noise I'd never heard before. It got closer as I ventured toward the
bathroom. Scared, I broke into a run, my headlamp beam bobbing in the darkness.
At 4:30
A.M.
I checked my watch for a final time
and dozed on and off until Dismas woke us three hours later.

O
n the
second day the claustrophobic rain forest gave way to rolling hills dotted with
shrubby plants and heather trees. The miles-away peak of Kilimanjaro was finally
visible. Dismas took a dozen pictures of me with Kili. Later I would discover
that my enormous head was blocking the mountain in 95 percent of them. We
trekked on and found ourselves in the wide expanse of moorlands. The transition
from one zone to another was abrupt, the way the Magic Kingdom in Disney World
was divided into different themes: Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, and
so on. You could draw a line across the trail where one zone ended and another
began. The absurdist landscape of the moorlands could've been created by Dr.
Seuss, especially the lobelia trees with slim trunks and bulbous branches that
exploded on top in an Afro of fluorescent leaves.

I was lost in my thoughts, marveling over my utter
lack of sore muscles today, when Marie asked, “Do you think you're going to
marry Matt?”

I blinked. “What?” I couldn't believe this question
had followed me up a mountain in Africa. Then again, if Michael Jackson's death
could make it this far, I guessed anything was possible.

“Since you referred to him as your husband at
breakfast, I just assumed . . .”

“I did? No, I didn't.” I thought back to our
earlier conversation. “I called him my boyfriend.”

“You called him your husband.”

“You must've said ‘husband' just before me and then
I said it accidentally. Or maybe it was the altitude talking.”