Common Ground: Mt. Kilimanjaro

June 2004 | Journeys

Mt. Kilimanjaro

The (W)rite Passage

by Matt George

I learned something that afternoon on the roof of Africa. At 19,340 feet, I found myself hunched against the tattered summit flag of Mt. Kilimanjaro watching a thread of pink saliva fall from my lips and freeze on my cracked, bloody finger tips. Something was wrong with my lungs. I sat on a glacier, but my breath burned hot. My tongue tasted of wet pennies.

Nicolaus, my exhausted Tanzanian guide spoke no English and I no Swahili. He stood 50 yards away, trying to urinate. I sensed from his posture, his apprehension at being caught on the summit so late in the afternoon. The daily whiteout was taking its time, but we could see a storm advancing at a runner’s pace from six thousand feet below — a billowing explosion in slow motion that we watched helplessly from above. I began to mutter a prayer from my childhood. I was afraid, and I felt alone.

It’d taken me a long time to get this fucked-up in life. And I’d worked real hard at it.

I was born to a fighter pilot from Ohio and an alcoholic Irish schoolteacher from Connecticut. One instilled in me a religious fervor for adventure; the other a profound respect for romance. My mother recited poetry and my father wore a sword to work. Growing up in the central desert of California meant our vacations were long drives to mountainous campgrounds to fish and hunt. For the quiet stretches, I used to peer out the back window of our enormous station wagon at mountaintops and soaring red-tailed hawks. I’d close my eyes and imagine myself at the great bird’s altitude, looking down into the Sonoran Valley. Inside its skull and through its eyes, I would see the world revolve beneath outstretched, fluting wings. I could see my face pressed up against the glass from on high, the mist of my breath steaming against the window as fast as it would evaporate — the phantom proof that I was alive.

I’d quit high school at sixteen. That summer, I bamboozled my way into college. This drab adventure was cut short by an opportunity to become a professional surfer, which I did for many years, traveling the Grand Prix circuit around the world to moderate success. I then submitted a freelance story to Surfer magazine. They published it and asked me to be a staff writer and photographer. I took the job and spent many more years globe-hopping with pen and film in hand.

Secretly, my heart was at war. Something about the role of the writer deeply disturbed me. Was I going to be a participant in life and history or merely an observer? Was I for real or had my skill at projection condemned me to a world of narratives and fanciful imaginings?

I joined the Navy. Maybe they could figure it out. They didn’t. At 27, I washed out of the SEAL program and was cashiered.

I returned to my post at Surfer. They sent me to the Caribbean. I won enough money in a card game in Puerto Rico to make it to Kenya where I planned on marrying an old girlfriend and running her safari business. Fifteen minutes after stepping off the plane, we both knew it would never work.

So I hitched a ride with the flying doctors to Tanzania with a notion to visit Gilman’s Point, 630 feet below Kilimanjaro’s summit, the fabled spot of the leopard carcass that Hemingway so famously memorialized in fiction. I found it. She was deflated and inert in a case of black ice five feet below my boots. I felt nothing. So I pressed on to the summit, and here I sat, hoping for an epiphany.

It came that evening.

Nicolaus and I had staggered down through the lashing storm, hand in hand, to the Kibo hut at 15,000 ft. I was in terrible shape. Nicolaus was borne away on a litter to the roaring communal fireside, and I, in second-degree shock, was stripped and bundled into two goose-down sleeping bags and rolled onto a top bunk. Soon after, a 63-year-old Norwegian woman slipped in next to me. She was naked. She held me like an infant and shared her body warmth.

She saved my life, singing softly into my sun-broiled right ear. A German lullaby — I can still sing it. And I can still feel the heartbeat that pressed against me through those small, withered breasts with their acorn nipples. I shivered for endless hours, coming back slowly, realizing through her touch how much weight I’d lost. And there it was: Breathing in, breathing out. The steaming phantoms. The proof of my life.

Later, much later, when the communal fire had turned to embers and all were asleep, I realized that, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t projecting. I was here, in the flesh, and no more than a broken-down storyteller. Now it was time to repair myself. To get to it. To survive, share, teach, and entertain. Surely there was some shred of nobility to be found in this.

Between the even breathing of the woman holding me, I remembered a poem my dead mother had taught me as a child when we crossed the Atlantic aboard the USS Independence just after the Cuban missile crisis.

I hung on to that poem through that long night in the Kibo hut. I still hang on to it.

Wise wretch, with pleasure too refined to please.
With too much spirit to ever be at ease.
With too much quickness ever to be taught.
With too much thinking to have common thought.
You purchase pain with all that joy can give.
And die of nothing but a rage to live.

I have no idea who wrote it. But I’ve never forgotten the wonder I felt then, shivering, pressed against that naked stranger on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Was I going to tell stories for the rest of my life?

Or were they going to tell me?

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