Pre-Kili

I don't know why people climb mountains. They are big. So big that they are symbols for big, they define big, they're metaphors for impossibility. We stay away from them, build roads around them and sometimes under them but never over them.

I live (or have lived) on a plateau that is to the west of the mountains of Africa's Great Rift. There are no acacia trees or mosquitoes or baboons or cobras, and we can't grow oranges or rice or papayas or mangos. Three miles away, at the foot of the rift, lies the Rukwa valley. There, people grow all those things and fight the bugs and the heat and the snakes and mangy apes. Three miles from where I sleep, a vastly different world. Between us: Mountains. Nature respects the mountains.

Almost nothing lives or grows on top of Mount Kilimanjaro. Maybe lichens. Maybe moss. Nothing else. The animal kingdom doesn't mess with mountains, at least not this one. Yet, thousands of people climb it each year. Not all of them make it. Maybe we should take a note.

I never wanted to climb mountains, always assumed it best to leave them alone, to leave it to the moss and lichens and goats, and to Moses and the vegans who wear those Life is Good T-shirts. And so when someone asked me if I'd like to climb, I laughed, said "I don't think I'll be doing that, I'm broke and sorely out of shape." But they persisted, and since I was going to Africa anyway, and since you only ever need to do this sort of thing once, and since I'd had a nice long run of 24 years and would be going to Heaven in the end anyway, I finally said yes. Besides, the worst thing that could happen is that I a) die on the mountain and go to heaven or b) wuss out halfway up and come back down a failure, get disowned by my friends and family and pursue what I already know to be my inevitable future in the circus. And I kind of like the circus.

And now, I have seen the mountain, and it is big. When I first saw it, it didn't look so big, just a subtle peak with its head in the clouds, a long way off. Then we drove and drove and it didn't seem to get any bigger until finally we were at its base and it was suddenly so impossibly ginormous that I have no words to describe it appropriately. In my experience, things do not get this big. Dump trucks are big. Skyscrapers are big. Kilimanjaro is... I don't know. It's a landmark and an icon. It's mind-blowingly huge. Even as we drove away toward Arusha, it didn't shrink, and an hour down the road where we sat in the shadow of Mt. Meru, a very large mountain with no crown of snow, we saw Kili's glacier poke out above the clouds and it was still dominant, still king, still refusing to fit within the scope of my eyes. Kili reminds me, most assuredly, that I am still very very small and had better not even think about setting foot on it. Kili is famous. It's on postcards. To my knowledge, I am on no postcards.

In preparation, I've been climbing and clamoring and and hiking for the last three months, and I am as ready as I will ever be. Tomorrow morning, we're actually going to climb it. We'll drive to the mountain and put our feet on it and walk slowly, slowly toward the summit, three and a half miles up into the atmosphere to where the animals don't go.

So for now, I'm going to stop talking about it. It's all kind of surreal anyway, and I'm not doing it justice. I know we have a lot of people praying for us, and that is all the reassurance I need. If we summit, it will be Friday, I think.

One Love

jim