For a long time I felt it was because I am a practical person who, faced with an elephant outside his tent, examines all the possibilities—to run away, to call for help, to scare the elephant off—and, having rejected them all, sensibly decides to go to sleep.
But later I realized that we are all like that. We all can work ourselves into a hysterical panic over possibilities that we won’t look at. What if I have cancer? What if my job is at risk? What if my kids are on drugs? What if I’m getting bald? What if an elephant is outside my tent?
What if I am faced with some terrible thing that I don’t know how to deal with?
And that hysteria always goes away the instant we are willing to hear the answer. Even if the answer is what we feared all along. Yes, you have cancer. Yes, your kids are on drugs. Yes, there is an elephant outside your tent.
Now the question becomes, What are you going to do about it? Subsequent emotions may not be pleasant, but the hysteria stops. Hysteria accompanies an unwillingness to look at what is really going on; it promotes an unwillingness to look. We feel we are afraid to look, when actually it is not-looking that makes us afraid. The minute we look, we cease being afraid.
Knowing in advance what you are going to do about something is not so easy. I remember in 1968 I was getting ready to dive off a boat in the Virgin Islands, and some man was putting on all this equipment. I was interested, because the man was a diving instructor, and instructors don’t usually carry a lot of equipment. Finally he strapped a knife on his calf. All my life I had been seeing divers strapping on knives, and I never understood why.
I said, “Excuse me, but why do you carry a knife?”
“Oh,” he said, “you know. Just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“You know. In case something happens.”
“Like what?”
“Like you get your lines fouled, and have to cut yourself free.”
“How would that happen?”
“Oh, like in a wreck. Diving in a wreck, you get your lines fouled.”
“But there aren’t any wrecks here.”
“I know, but a knife is still good to have. You see something nice, a piece of coral or whatever, you cut it free and bring it back.”
“This is a protected undersea park; you can’t take anything.”
“I know, but there’re other reasons, too.”
“Like what?”
“Defense.”
“Defense against what?”
“Whatever’s down there. Say, sharks.”
This was a little knife with a nine-inch blade. I tried to imagine the undersea battle. “This knife would help you fight off a shark?”
“Damn right.”
“You think it would cut the skin? Sharks have pretty tough skin.”
“Oh yeah, sure. It would cut the skin.”
“So you figure you’d kill the shark with that knife.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Of course, to stab the shark you’d have to be awfully close to it, wouldn’t you? The shark would really have to be close.”
“Well, they do that, you know.”
“I know. But the thing is, when you first see the shark, instead of backing away to safety, you would have to move forward, because you have to get close to attack the shark with your knife.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Oh no. I’d back away. Sure. See, the knife is just in case. In case he comes after me.”
“If he comes after you, then you’d try and stab him?”
“Well, no, what I’d probably do is, I’d hit him on the nose with the handle. You know, sharks have very sensitive noses; you pop them on the nose and they generally turn and run.”
“But why wouldn’t you hit him on the nose with your movie camera?” I said, pointing to a big piece of equipment at his feet. “That’d be in your hands anyway, and it’s a lot easier to hit a shark with a big movie camera than a little knife handle.”
“Yeah, that’s probably what I’d do,” he said.
“So why are you carrying the knife?”
“You never know,” he said. And he plunged into the water.
I couldn’t argue with that.
Later, when the dive was over and we were back in the boat, he unstrapped the knife he hadn’t used and said, “You know, I was thinking about what you asked me, why I carry a knife. You know why?”
“Why?” I said.
“Because I just feel safer with it.”
I couldn’t argue with that, either.
“I just feel ready for anything when I have the knife strapped on.”
“Gee,” I said, “every shark I’ve seen has seemed so big and powerful and fast, I don’t think I would’ve felt any better to know I had a little knife with me.”
He looked up suddenly. “You’ve seen sharks?” he asked.
Once, on Bora-Bora, I was diving with my brother. There were two other divers in the boat, a man and his ten-year-old son. Because the boy was so young, we were diving in the lagoon and not on the outer reef.
The boy’s father could talk about nothing but sharks. He kept saying, “Are there any sharks around here?”
We kept saying, “Nothing dangerous, nothing to worry about.” Actually the lagoon was full of white-tip reef sharks. You saw them all the time; you saw them while you were snorkeling twenty feet from the hotel beach.
And the man was saying, “Now, don’t worry, son, about any sharks.” The man was nervous, speaking rapidly, his hands shaking. Meanwhile, the kid wasn’t worried about sharks at all. He was just going diving.
They plunged into the water first. My brother said, “I hope that guy is going to be okay.” Because the guy was almost certainly going to see sharks down there.
We dropped over the side and went our own way, exploring the coral heads. A little while later we saw the man take his son to the surface. The kid had run out of air. Then the man came back down and poked among the coral, taking photos with his Nikonos and flash.
Pretty soon a white-tip came cruising by. I held my breath, waiting for the guy to freak out. But the guy didn’t see it at all. He was busy with his pictures.
Other sharks appeared. Sharks passed to his left. Sharks passed to his right. Sharks glided over him; sharks slipped beneath him. He must have had a dozen encounters with sharks in the space of ten minutes.
Back on the boat, he said, “Beautiful dive, wasn’t it?”
“Beautiful,” we agreed.
“Thank God I didn’t see any sharks,” he said. “I don’t know what I would have done if I had.”
Kilimanjaro
“The odds are seven to one against,” the courier said.
“Against what?” I said.
“Against your making it to the top of Kilimanjaro. I polled the men, and they are seven to one you’ll never make it.”
It was late afternoon in my camp in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania; I was approaching the end of a two-week safari in Africa with my courier, Mark Warwick. Next I was scheduled to climb Kilimanjaro. I hadn’t really thought much about Kilimanjaro until now.
Curious, I said to Mark, “How did you vote?”
“I voted no.”
“You don’t think I’ll make it, either?”
“No.”
“Have you climbed Kilimanjaro?”
He shook his head. “I’m not that crazy. I’ve heard the stories from the people who came back.”
“I heard it was pretty easy,” I said. “Just a walk to the top.”
“Well, a lot of people don’t finish the walk,” he said. “Don’t kid yourself. It’s bloody difficult, trekking above eighteen thousand feet.”
That wasn’t how it had seemed months before, when I had read the African guidebooks, planning my trip. The books merely said that the famous Mount Kilimanjaro was an extinct equatorial volcano, with a broad sloping cinder cone, which meant that, although it was the highest mountain
in Africa, you simply walked to the top, with no need for technical gear or specialized mountaineering knowledge. Since Kilimanjaro was on the equator, the weather was milder than comparably high mountains elsewhere. The climb was routine; thousands of people did it every year. The standard ascent took five days, and was easily arranged by any travel agency. It sounded like fun.
Sitting on the floor of my house in Los Angeles with guidebooks opened all around me, I had said to Loren, “Hey, look at this, we can climb Kilimanjaro. Want to do it?”
“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”
So I had called my travel agent and said I wanted to climb Kilimanjaro, and the agent said no problem; she’d set it up to follow the safari; we should remember to pack boots and a parka, and that was that.
I had never done any climbing, but I owned a pair of hiking boots I’d gotten to shoot a movie a few years back. I’d worn the boots for a week in the desert, and I remembered them as fitting okay—not great, but okay. I had an old parka from my Boston days. I packed a sweater and an extra pair of jeans; the travel agent said everything else would be provided.
If it was just walking, I figured I could do it. I played tennis once a week or so, and I didn’t get too tired. But, just to be safe, I cut back on my cigarettes and beer during the final two days of the safari. Just to be safe.
But now here was my courier, my guide and leader, the white hunter who had taken Loren and me around Africa for two weeks, telling me in the pleasant African twilight, as the air cooled and the sun set and a line of wildebeest moved in stately procession across the floor of Ngorongoro Crater, here he was telling me that he and the men who ran the camp had concluded I’d never make it to the top of Kilimanjaro.
I just looked at him oddly, as if he were misinformed. “I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” I said.
“You ever been at altitude before?”
“Sure,” I said, thinking back. When I was a kid, I’d been on glaciers in Canada. I had visited some relatives in Boulder, Colorado. Sure, I’d been at altitude.
I didn’t think it was such a big deal.
“Eighteen thousand feet’s pretty high,” Mark said, shaking his head. “That kind of altitude changes everything.”
“Uh-huh,” I said vaguely. I continued to feel that he was misinformed, or at any rate that there was something he didn’t understand. Mark mistook my vagueness for concern.
“Look here, don’t worry about it,” he said, laughing and slapping me on the shoulder. “I was just joking.”
“You weren’t.”
“I promise you, I was.”
“What do you want to bet I make it?” I said.
“Look here, Michael,” he said. “It was just a joke. You’re taking this entirely too seriously.”
I persisted. “I’ll bet you a dinner, when I get back to Nairobi,” I said, and named a French restaurant that he had mentioned as expensive and good.
Mark agreed to the bet. “Right,” he said. “Now: how will we verify that you actually get to the top?”
“Do you think I’d lie?”
He raised his hands. “I’m just asking how I’ll know. A bet’s a bet. How’ll you prove it?”
“Well, there’ll be pictures,” I said. “I’ll have pictures.”
“They won’t be developed yet.”
“I’ll develop them in Nairobi for you.”
It turned out that you couldn’t get color processing done in Nairobi; the film was all sent to England and took weeks.
“I’ll get a statement from the guide or whoever.”
“Could be forged.”
“Well, Loren will tell you whether I made it or not.”
“That’s true,” he said, nodding, “she’ll tell me whether you got up there.”
So we agreed that, once back in Nairobi, if Loren said I had climbed Kilimanjaro, he would buy the dinner.
Then a thought occurred to me. “What if Loren doesn’t make it?”
Mark shook his head. “The boys are six to two that she’ll make it to the top. We’re not worried about her. We’re worried about you.”
“Great,” I said.
The Marangu Hotel stood at the foot of the mountain. It was run by a charming elderly German woman. The hotel had once been a farm; it was Spartan and efficient, and seemed to exist only as a staging place for tourists to climb the mountain. I was told there were several such hotels in the area.
Loren took a bath, remarking on how plentiful the hot water was.
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess they have to have it. When people come down off the mountain, they must want hot water and no fooling.”
While she took her bath, I walked out into the garden behind the hotel. It was early evening. Although we had been driving near Kilimanjaro for the last two days, I still hadn’t seen the mountain because of haze. I could not see it now, but among the roses in the garden there was a little shellacked photo on a wooden pedestal showing the mountain and the route up, so I suspected, as I looked at the photo, that Kilimanjaro was probably directly in front of me.
I went back into my hotel room, and mentioned to Loren that I felt a certain frustration about not being able to see the mountain I would be climbing tomorrow. Loren didn’t seem to mind; it didn’t matter to her, this abstract quality of the whole adventure.
That night in the dining room with its dark polished floors there was only one other party, a family of Americans at a nearby table—a husband and wife and their teenage son. They didn’t say much, and had a dazed look on their faces, but their movements, even the way they spooned their soup, conveyed an unusual economy of gesture; they were people who had been through something.
I was sure they had come down from the mountain.
“Well,” Loren said, “why don’t you ask them how it was?” On the eve of our departure, the question was much on our minds. We felt a little giddy with anticipation. Our giddiness didn’t seem to accord with the flat, dull quality of the returning American family. I waited until they were leaving, and walking past our table, to ask them if they had climbed the mountain.
Yes, they said. They had just come down that afternoon.
“You all made it to the top?” Loren asked.
Yes, they all made it to the top.
“Anybody in your group not make it?”
They weren’t sure, but they had heard about a group of English students from another hotel who had been climbing at the same time. Several of the English students had not made it, and had turned back. Some of them had gotten sick from the altitude.
As they spoke, the dull look never left their eyes. I couldn’t tell if they were tired, or disappointed, or if something odd had happened that they weren’t talking about.
“Well,” I said brightly, “how was it? The climb?”
They paused. Nobody seemed to want to answer this question. They looked at one another. Finally the wife said, It was good. It was a good climb.
“Hard?”
In some places. The fourth day was not easy. The rest of the time it was okay.
I was disturbed by the flat intonation, the inward manner. We were curious about them, but they showed no curiosity about us at all. They didn’t ask where we were from; they didn’t ask if we were climbing; they didn’t offer any tips or hints or reassurances. They just answered our questions, volunteering nothing, then let the conversation trail into silence, said good night, and left.
“Huh,” Loren said, watching them go.
“What are we letting ourselves in for?” I asked.
“I think they were just tired,” she said.
I slept uneasily, and woke shortly after dawn. I went out into the chilly garden. The atmospheric haze had thinned, and for the first time I saw, hanging suspended above the roses, the broad white sloping cone of Kilimanjaro. Its profile was so wide I felt disappointed; I had imagined a view more like the dramatic cone of Fuji than the bland arc of snow now before me. I almost didn’t take a photograph, it looked so unspectacu
lar.
On the other hand, Kilimanjaro looked safe, matronly. More like a breast than a mountain. And that encouraged me.
How bad could it really be?
The German woman gave the orientation lecture. We were surprised to find we were not the only people climbing: there were six others. We were instructed to divide ourselves into groups of four, since four people shared each overnight hut. Loren and I joined a California lawyer named Paul Myers, and a Swiss surgeon named Jan Newmeyer. Both were experienced climbers, but both were a decade older than I. I felt I would be able to keep up with them. Loren was not worried: she was only twenty-two and in good shape.
The German woman had charts and photos and maps; she had given this lecture countless times before, and she did it smoothly and well. Today, the first day, we would hike through rain forest to nine thousand feet. The second day we would hike in meadowlands to twelve thousand feet. The third day we would cross the high, cold, windswept saddle between the two peaks of Kilimanjaro, and spend the night in a tin hut at fifteen thousand feet, at the base of the cinder cone. At two the next morning, our guides would awaken us and we would begin climbing, in darkness, to reach the summit in early morning, when the weather and the views were best. Everyone would reach the summit if we took our time; not long ago, she said, a sixty-year-old man had reached the summit—arriving a bit later than most, but reaching it without difficulty, nevertheless. Remember, at the summit there was only half the oxygen as at sea level. The key thing at altitude, she told us, was to take your time. And she added, rather peculiarly, that we should not let the guides push us—they sometimes offered to push you, but we would not find pushing helpful. We were warned about the dangers of altitude sickness, and told to turn back immediately if we developed a dry cough.
From the summit we would descend to sleep in the huts at twelve thousand feet. The following day we would return to the hotel. All together we would be gone five nights. All together we would walk seventy-two miles. The guides and porters were highly skilled; if we needed extra clothing, it would be brought to our rooms while we packed; she was sure we would have an enjoyable trip and she wished us luck.