Chapter 4
Self-Storage
Greatness is always built on this foundation: the ability
to appear, speak and act, as the most common man.
—Shams-ud-din Muhammed Hafiz
THE STORAGE SPACE smelled like Africa. Standing on the verge of this unlocked six-by-eight-foot room, a closet really, with rush-hour traffic boiling past on busy San Pablo Avenue, Mortenson felt the dislocation that only forty-eight hours of air travel can inflict. On the flight out of Islamabad he had felt so full of purpose, scheming a dozen different ways to raise money for the school. But back in Berkeley, California, Greg Mortenson couldn’t orient himself. He felt blotted out under the relentlessly sunny skies, among prosperous college students strolling happily toward their next espresso, and his promise to Haji Ali felt more like a half-remembered movie he’d dozed through on one of his three interminable flights.
Jet lag. Culture shock. Whatever name you gave the demons of dislocation, he’d been assailed by them often enough in the past. Which was why he’d come here, as he always did after returning from a climb—to Berkeley Self-Storage stall 114. This musty space was Mortenson’s anchor to himself.
He reached into the fragrant dark, fumbling for the string that illuminated the overhead bulb, and when he found and tugged it, he saw dusty mountaineering books stacked against the walls, a caravan of fine elephants carved out of African ebony that had been his father’s, and sitting on top of a dog-eared photo album, GiGi, a coffee-colored stuffed monkey that had been his closest companion back where memory fringes into mere sensory recall.
He picked up the child’s toy, and saw that the animal’s African kapok stuffing was leaking out a seam in its chest. He pressed it to his nose, inhaling, and was back by the sprawling cinder-block house, in the courtyard, under the all-enveloping limbs of their pepper tree. In Tanzania.
Like his father, Mortenson had been born in Minnesota. But in 1958, when he was only three months old, his parents had packed him along on the great adventure of their lives, a posting to work as missionaries teaching in Tanzania, in the shadow of the continent’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro.
Irvin Mortenson, Greg’s father, was born of the well-intentioned Lutheran stock that Garrison Keillor has mined for so much material. As with the taciturn men of Lake Wobegon, language was a currency he was loath to spend carelessly. Well over six feet, and a raw-boned athlete like his son, Irvin Mortenson was nicknamed “Dempsey” as an unusually stout baby, and the boxer’s name blotted out his given name for the rest of his life. The seventh and final child in a family economically exhausted by the Great Depression, Dempsey’s athletic prowess—he was an all-state quarterback on his high-school football team and an all-state guard on the basketball team—got him out of Pequot Lakes, a tiny fish-crazy town in northern Minnesota, and sent him on a path to the wider world. He attended the University of Minnesota on a football scholarship, earning a degree in physical education while nursing the bruises inflicted by defensive linemen.
His wife, Jerene, swooned for him shortly after her family moved to Minnesota from Iowa. She, too, was an athlete and had been the captain of her high-school basketball team. They married impulsively, while Dempsey, then serving in the army, was on leave from Fort Riley, Kansas, on a three-day pass. “Dempsey had the travel bug,” Jerene says. “He had been stationed in Japan and had loved seeing more of the world than Minnesota. He came home one day while I was pregnant with Greg and said, ‘They need teachers in Tanganyika. Let’s go to Africa.’ I couldn’t say no. When you’re young you don’t know what you don’t know. We just did it.”
They were posted to a country neither knew much about beyond the space it occupied on the map of East Africa between Kenya and Rwanda. After four years working in the remote Usambara Mountains, they moved to Moshi, which means “smoke” in Swahili, where the family was billeted by their Lutheran missionary society in a Greek gun dealer’s sprawling cinder-block home, which had been seized by the authorities. And with the sort of serendipity that so often rewards impetuousness, the entire family fell fiercely in love with the country that would be renamed Tanzania after independence in 1961. “The older I get, the more I appreciate my childhood. It was paradise,” Mortenson says.
More so than the house, which wrapped comfortably around a lush courtyard, Mortenson saw the enormous pepper tree as home. “That tree was the image of stability,” Mortenson says. “At dusk, the hundreds of bats that lived in it would swarm out to hunt. And after it rained, the whole yard smelled like pepper. That smell was exquisite.”
With both Dempsey and Jerene wearing their faith lightly, the Mortenson home became more of a community than a religious center. Dempsey taught Sunday school. But he also laid out a softball diamond with the trunk of the pepper tree as a backstop and launched Tanzania’s first high-school basketball league. But it was two all-consuming projects that came to dominate Dempsey and Jerene’s lives.
Dempsey threw every molecule of himself into the great achievement of his life—raising money for and founding Tanzania’s first teaching hospital, the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center. Jerene labored with the same single-mindedness to establish the Moshi International School, which catered to a cosmopolitan melting pot of expatriates’ children. Greg attended the school, swimming happily in a sea of cultures and languages. The divisions between different nationalities meant so little to him that he was upset when they fought with each other. During a time of intense conflict between India and Pakistan, Greg was disturbed by the graphic way Indian and Pakistani students played war at recess, pretending to machine gun and decapitate each other.
“Otherwise, it was a wonderful place to go to school,” he says. “It was like a little United Nations. There were twenty-eight different nationalities and we celebrated all the holidays: Hanukkah, Christmas, Diwali, the Feast of Id.”
“Greg hated going to church with us,” Jerene remembers, “because all the old African ladies always wanted to play with his blond hair.” Otherwise, Mortenson grew up happily oblivious to race. He soon mastered Swahili with such accentless perfection that people presumed he was Tanzanian on the phone. He sang archaic European hymns in his church choir, and joined an otherwise all-African dance troupe that competed in a nationally televised tribal dance contest for Saba Saba, Tanzania’s independence day.
At age eleven, Greg Mortenson scaled his first serious mountain. “Ever since I was six, I’d been staring at the summit and begging my father to take me there.” Finally, when Dempsey deemed his son old enough to make the climb, rather than enjoying his trip to the top of Africa, Greg says, “I gagged and puked my way up Kilimanjaro. I hated the climb. But standing on the summit at dawn, seeing the sweep of African savannah below me, hooked me forever on climbing.”
Jerene gave birth to three girls: Kari, Sonja Joy, and finally, when Greg was twelve, Christa. Dempsey was often away for months at a time, recruiting funds and qualified hospital staff in Europe and America. And Greg, already over six feet by the time he turned thirteen, shuffled easily into the role of man of the house when his father was absent. When Christa was born, her parents took her to be baptized and Greg volunteered to serve as her godfather.
Unlike the three oldest Mortensons, who quickly grew to their parents’ scale, Christa remained small and delicate-boned. And by the time she started school, it was apparent she differed profoundly from the rest of her family. As a toddler, Christa had a terrible reaction to a smallpox vaccination. “Her arm turned completely black,” Jerene says. And she believes that toxic injection of live bovine virus marked the beginning of Christa’s brain dysfunction. At age three, she contracted severe meningitis, and in her frantic mother’s eyes, never emerged whole after the illness. By eight, she began suffering frequent seizures and was diagnosed as an epileptic. But between these episodes, Christa also ailed. “She learned to read right away,” Jerene says. “But they were just sounds to her. She didn’t have a clue what the sentences meant
.”
A still-growing Greg became a looming presence over anyone who would consider teasing his littlest sister. “Christa was the nicest of us,” he says. “She faced her limitations with grace. It would take her forever to dress herself in the morning, so she’d lay her clothes out the night before, trying not to take up too much of our time before school. She was remarkably sensitive to other people.
“In some ways, she was like my dad,” Mortenson says. “They were both listeners.” Dempsey listened, especially, to the young, ambitious Africans in Moshi. They were eager for opportunity, but post-colonial Tanzania—then, as now, one of the poorest nations on Earth—had little to offer them beyond menial agricultural work. When his teaching hospital was up and partially running, he insisted, against the wishes of many foreign members of the board, that they focus on offering medical scholarships to promising local students, rather than simply catering to expat children and the offspring of East Africa’s wealthy elite.
Just after Greg’s fourteenth birthday, the 640-bed hospital was finally completed, and the president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, spoke at the ribbon-cutting. Greg’s father purchased gallons oipombe, the local banana beer, and cut down all the bushes in their yard to better accommodate the five hundred locals and expats he’d invited to a barbecue celebrating the hospital’s success. Standing on a stage he’d built for musicians under the pepper tree, Dempsey, wearing a traditional black Tanzanian outfit, stood and addressed the community he’d come to love.
After fourteen years in Africa, he’d put on weight, but he held himself straight as he spoke, and looked, his son thought, if not like the athlete he’d once been, then still formidable. He began by thanking his Tanzanian partner at the hospital, John Moshi, who Dempsey said was just as responsible for the medical center’s success as he was. “I have a prediction to make,” he said in Swahili, looking so at peace with himself that Greg remembers, for once, his father didn’t seem awkward speaking in front of a crowd. “In ten years, the head of every department at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center will be a Tanzanian. It’s your country. It’s your hospital,” he said.
“I could feel the swell of pride from the Africans,” Mortenson remembers. “The expats wanted him to say, ‘Look what we’ve done for you.’ But he was saying, ‘Look what you’ve done for yourselves and how much more you can do.’
“My dad got blasted by the expats for that,” Mortenson says. “But you know what? It happened. The place he built is still there today, the top teaching hospital in Tanzania, and a decade after he finished it, all the department heads were African. Watching him up there, I felt so proud that this big, barrel-chested man was my father. He taught me, he taught all of us, that if you believe in yourself, you can accomplish anything.”
With both the school and hospital well-established, the Mortensons’ work was done in Tanzania. Dempsey was offered a tempting job— establishing a hospital for Palestinian refugees on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives—but the Mortensons decided it was time for their children to experience America.
Greg and his sisters were both excited and anxious about moving back to what they still considered their country, despite the fact that they’d only been there on brief visits half a dozen times. Greg had read the entry on each of the fifty states in the family’s set of encyclopedias, trying to both picture and prepare for America. For fourteen years, their relatives in Minnesota had written of family functions the African Mortensons had to miss and sent newspaper clippings about the Minnesota Twins, which Greg preserved in his room and reread at night, artifacts from an exotic culture he hoped to understand.
The Mortensons crated up their books and weavings and woodcarvings and moved into Jerene’s parents’ old four-story home in St. Paul, before buying an inexpensive pale green home in a middle-class suburb called Roseville. On his first day of American high school, Greg was relieved to see so many black students roaming the halls of St. Paul Central. He didn’t feel so far from Moshi. Word quickly spread that the big, awkward fifteen-year-old had come from Africa.
Between classes, a tall, sinewy basketball player wearing a Cadillac hood ornament around his neck on a gold chain shoved Mortenson up against a drinking fountain, while his friends closed in menacingly. “You ain’t no African,” he sneered, then the pack of boys began raining blows on Mortenson while he tried to cover his head, wondering what he’d done. When they finally stopped, Mortenson lowered his arms, his lips trembling. The leader of the group wound up and smashed his fist into Mortenson’s eye. Another boy picked up a trash can and upended it onto his head. Mortenson stood by the drinking fountain, the reeking can covering his head, listening as laughter faded down the hallway.
In most respects, Mortenson proved adaptable to American culture. He excelled academically, especially in math, music, and the sciences, and, of course, he had the genetic predisposition to succeed at sports.
After the Mortensons moved to the suburbs, Greg’s looming presence on the Ramsey High School football team as a defensive lineman broke open a path of, if not friendship, then camaraderie with other students. But in one respect, he remained out of sorts with American life. “Greg has never been on time in his life,” his mother says. “Ever since he was a boy, Greg has always operated on African time.”
The family’s work in Africa had been rewarding in every way except monetarily. Paying tuition at an expensive private school was out of the question, so Mortenson asked his father what he should do. “I went to college on the GI Bill,” Dempsey said. “You could do worse.” In April of his senior year, Greg visited an army recruiting office in St. Paul and signed on for a two-year tour of duty. “It was a very weird thing to do, right after Vietnam,” Greg says. “And kids at my school were amazed I’d even consider the military. But we were broke.”
Four days after his high-school graduation, Mortenson landed in basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. While most of his classmates were sleeping in during the summer before college, he was jarred awake the first morning at five by a drill sergeant kicking and shaking his bunk and shouting, “Drop your cocks and grab your socks!”
“I decided I wasn’t going to let this guy terrify me,” Mortenson says. So he greeted Senior Drill Sergeant Parks the next morning at five, sitting fully dressed in the dark on his tightly made cot. “He cussed me out for failing to get eight hours’ sleep while I was on government time, made me do forty push-ups, then marched me over to HQ, gave me a stripe, and marched me back to my bunk. ‘This is Mortenson, he’s your new platoon leader,’ the sergeant said. ‘He outranks all you mofos so do what the man say.’”
Mortenson was too quiet to effectively order his fellow soldiers around. But he excelled in the army. He was still supremely fit from football and the high-school track team, so the rigors of basic training weren’t as memorable to Mortenson as the poor morale he found endemic in the post-Vietnam military. He was taught advanced artillery skills and tactics, then embarked on his lifelong interest in medicine when he received training as a medic, before being posted to Germany with the Thirty-third Armored Division. “I was really naive when I enlisted, but the army has a way of shocking that out of you,” Mortenson says. “A lot of guys after Vietnam were hooked on heroin. They’d OD in their bunks and we’d have to go and collect their bodies.” He also remembers one winter morning when he had to collect the corpse of a sergeant who’d been beaten and left in a snowy ditch to die, because his fellow soldiers found out he was gay.
Posted to Bamberg, Germany, near the East German border, Mortenson perfected the ability he would have for the rest of his life, thanks to the military’s irregular hours, to fall asleep anywhere, at a moment’s notice. He was an exemplary soldier. “I never fired a gun at anyone,” Mortenson says, “but this was before the Berlin Wall fell and we spent a lot of time looking through our M-16 scopes at the East German guards.” On watch, Mortenson was authorized to fire at the Communist snipers if they shot at East German civilians trying to escape
. “That happened occasionally, but never while I was on watch,” Mortenson says, “thank God.”
Most of the white soldiers he knew in Germany would spend weekends “catching the clap, getting drunk, or shooting up,” Mortenson says, so he’d catch free military flights with black soldiers instead—to Rome or London or Amsterdam. It was the first time Mortenson had ever traveled independently and he found it, and the company, exhilarating. “In the army my best friends were black,” Mortenson says. “In Minnesota, that always seemed awkward, but in the military race was the least of your worries. In Germany I felt really accepted, and for the first time since Tanzania, I wasn’t lonely.”
Mortenson was awarded the Army Commendation Medal, for evacuating injured soldiers during a live-fire exercise. He was honorably discharged after two years, glad he’d served and now saddled with his second-most-unbreakable habit, after arriving late—the inability to drive a car forward into a parking space. Long after his discharge, he’d still back every vehicle—a jeep in Baltistan, his family Toyota on a trip to the mall—into a space as the army teaches, so it’s facing forward and prepared for a quick escape under fire.
He headed to tiny Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, on a football scholarship, where his team won the 1978 NAIA II National Championship. But he quickly grew weary of the homogeneous population at the small, unworldly campus, and transferred to the more diverse University of South Dakota, in Vermillion, on a GI scholarship.