I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (5 page)

Often, there in my nest in front of the TV screen back at my grandparents’ home, I’d lose myself in just such indecipherable silence the deaths of my parents had put in my head and drift away myself within it. I have often thought that my impulse to write is a way to solve all the silence they left me with. Even the dialogue on the TV screen could not interrupt it when, as a child, I’d sink into it. Words were useless against it back then. Yet on those Saturday afternoons, Johnny Weissmuller, the Banat Swabian émigré in possession of the swellest pair of pecs I’d ever seen, could let loose his ululating Tarzan yell and always jerk me back to earth, to Mississippi, to myself, a nine-year-old boy already guessing that death, not a symbol at all, had many guises.

Later in my television-centric youth, I watched a wizened Weissmuller on
The Mike Douglas Show
describe that Tarzan yell as a recording of three combined voices: “a soprano, an alto, and a hog caller.” But back on those afternoons of an earlier childhood I had no idea the yell was faked. I thought Tarzan actually did let loose like that. It was the truest sound I’d ever heard and seemed to be making the maddening noise my heart itself longed to make to warn me of the danger that was approaching like some beast Tarzan was warning Jane and Cheeta and Boy about in their televised version of Africa. The beast that was stalking me, however, was my own adult self—sex crazed, excessive, HIV positive—there already in the low brush of such a childhood.

*   *   *

A buddy of mine e-mailed me a few summers ago to see if I would be interested in going to Africa with him to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with a group of friends in January of the next year. I had always dreamed of visiting Africa ever since I spent those lazy Saturday afternoons in Mississippi with Weismuller and his way with a vine, his loincloth, the same few lions in every episode. If I really did go to Tarzan’s homeland and do something so anomalous for me—in my fifty years I had never slept in a tent or a sleeping bag or taken a hike any place other than Central Park—would I be able to shake myself out of this new form of mourning I found myself in once I was diagnosed with HIV? If I submitted my body to an experience as unforgiving as the climb up Mount Kilimanjaro would I be able to find a way to forgive myself for the predicament I had caused by behavior far more dangerous than any mountain climb could prove to be?

In the three years since my doctor had first sat me down and said these simple words, “You are HIV positive,” I had grieved for my HIV-negative self, a beloved person, like a dead parent I knew I must someday place in the past if I were to live in the present. I had dealt with the societal shame of my diagnosis by not allowing myself to deny it by keeping it from my friends and family or pretending I was not HIV positive when the subject came up in conversations. I had coped with the initial side effects of my medical regime. And had attempted—unsuccessfully—to deal with the drug abuse that was the linchpin to the real fix in which I now found myself, death no longer something to guess about in its many guises but to count on.

I had even grappled with a grand sort of anger, so grand it at times surfaced as rage. And its surfacing happened in the most surprising moments, as when I received a note from Tom Cruise. During that first year of my diagnosis no one had sent me a note about it. That, in itself, struck me as odd, formal, more thoughtful than friendly. It was postmarked “Los Angeles,” a place as tribal as any in Africa. And Cruise was indeed thoughtful. But sitting there on the heavy grain of his monogrammed stationery this word, among many others, was the one that stared back at me: “illness.” I read that note several times when I received it, each time lingering over that one word, my rage growing at the sight of those seven little letters. My heart raced. I reeled. Tears stung my eyes. From that moment on I resolved that though others might now perceive me as ill, I would not allow my self-perception to be readjusted in such a way. Semantics, always important to me as a writer, had taken on an added significance as words and their meanings had become lifelines to which I clung.

But I could not—no matter how hard I tried—forgive myself for what I kept concluding was a suicidal act: becoming infected at such a late date in my life with HIV. This climb up Kilimanjaro just might help me find that forgiveness I still had not found. I was determined to find it. I could not go on living a life that awaited rage.

I retrieved Cruise’s note from its hiding place beneath the felt lining of the wooden deco box that held my tarnished silverware and read it for the first time since receiving it. I had hidden it there because I didn’t want to throw it away, but I also didn’t want it lying around to serve as a kind of certification for my “illness.” Once I retrieved it—it had been in that box untouched for over two years—I did not pause over those seven letters. Most important, I did not put it back into its hiding place but threw it into one of the drawers of my desk where I kept unpaid bills and drafts of magazine articles and sharpened pencils and a couple of pornographic DVDs, the detritus of a writer’s life. I then e-mailed my friend back that he could include me in the climb up Kilimanjaro. I looked at my calendar and began the countdown of days until I could board a plane and head for Africa, a place that once upon a time held that sound my heart still longed to make.

*   *   *

The group my friend had put together for the climb up Mount Kilimanjaro was a diverse one. He was a consultant for Médecins Sans Frontières and his boyfriend, who also helped organize the climb, was then the director of treatment and advocacy for Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City. His sixty-five-year-old father and his father’s sixty-nine-year-old best friend, two flinty old gentleman-farmer lawyers from New Hampshire who had never left the United States, also wanted to come along. Others in the group included an internist who was a professor at Columbia University; a Mexico City–based social services consultant; a Web site developer from Boston along with his Massachusetts husband, an editor in textbook publishing; and a product production director for Martha Stewart, who had e-mailed Stewart to tell her that he was making the climb having known that she had made it once herself. Within seconds, Martha had e-mailed him back: “DON’T TAKE THE ALTITUDE FOR GRANTED!!!!”

I certainly wasn’t going to. I had done my research. I read many blogs about the climb in which those who had successfully made the summit on the six-day Machame Route we were taking claimed that the last forty-eight hours of their ascent were the hardest two days of their lives. I read, of course, Hemingway’s
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
and one of his stark sentences stuck out to me among all the other stark ones. I read it over and over as I had the sentence Cruise had written me with “illness” in its own stark predicate. “You can’t die if you don’t give up” was Hemingway’s proposal to me.

The tour company one chooses and the guides one is assigned are the difference between a successful climb up Kilimanjaro and a less successful one. Mauly Tours, run surprisingly for such a male-dominated continent by three Indian women (two daughters and their mother), was the Tanzanian company we chose not only for the testimonials of its former customers but also for our smugly enlightened politics. Our guide, Adam Ringo, and his two assistants—Bernard Lucas and Anthony Mtui—could not have been more professional. To lead a bunch of grumbling gay city slickers and two crusty old heterosexual Live-Free-or-Die-ers up an African mountain takes the carefully attuned emotional skills of a psychiatrist, the inspirational aptitude of an athletic coach, and the bedside manner of a medical professional.

Our first day of the climb consisted of hiking up the steep rocky steps embedded in the two levels of rain forests that circle the foot of Kilimanjaro where most of the members of the mountain’s Chaga tribe live in their hidden villages and work so diligently to protect their tree farms from poachers. The forest’s jungle-like canopy shielded us from the heat of the sun but also created a steam bath effect as, sweating profusely, we climbed steadily upward. The nervous excitement I had been feeling as we began the day quickly gave way to the calming concentration that overtook me when my body experienced the steady exertion that such a climb required. The jungle here receives over seventy-eight inches of rain per year—three times the rainfall of London—which results in the vast array of vegetation: the latched branches that serve as a home for the ever-scurrying blue monkeys and the thousands of species of birds, the colorful
Impatiens kilimanjari
that blooms nowhere else in the world but here, and the abundance of usnea (old man’s beard) that hung from so many of the gigantic trees hovering about our path.

Seven hours later we finally reached our first camp. I stared at the small tent I was to share that night with my friend from Martha Stewart’s company and found the breath, there at around eight thousand feet, to blow up my air mattress to put beneath my sleeping bag. During that first night, however, I discovered the mattress would not retain the air I had blown into it, and for the next four nights of the trek I would be sleeping flat against the sharp, rocky ground.

I awoke the next morning with an aching sacroiliac and a scowl on my face, wondering what in the world I had gotten myself into. But the scowl—if not my aching back—slowly began to disappear when I looked above our tents as the morning clouds parted and I got my first real look at the mountain’s snow-covered peak. I had put on my iPod earlier in the morning and Blossom Dearie was now singing, incongruously, “I Walk a Little Faster.” “Can’t begin to see my future shine as yet / … rushing toward a face I can’t divine as yet,” she sang there on a slope covered in heather as I tried to fill my lungs with the air that was becoming as seductively thin as Blossom’s voice. The sun hurried the rest of the clouds away and I stood in the oddly chilly warmth provided by both it and Blossom’s sophisticated plaint. I stared at the distant peak. Would I really make it up there? I wondered. Would I find that evasive bit of self-forgiveness I had come seeking? Or would I just wake up every morning with additional back pain? I silenced Blossom—she was going on now about building herself a stronger castle in the air—and set forth on the second day of the climb.

*   *   *

The moorlands at this altitude became, at first, dense with even more heather—rhinos once lived here among all the groundsel and lobelia, as our guide Bernard, an expert on plant and animal life, had informed me when spotting the now-infrequent flowers along our increasingly rugged route. As we approached the alpine desert that jutted up before us, I hung back with my friend who had initially e-mailed me about joining him on Mount Kilimanjaro and confessed to him the main reason I had decided to come along was that I considered this a trek for self-forgiveness. I knew that he had been HIV positive himself for twenty years, which was now more than half his life. He first found out when he donated blood to the Red Cross through his fraternity at Dartmouth and got the fateful call that amounted back then to a death sentence. He had been nineteen.

He greeted my confession with silence.

I pressed him further and asked him the one question I had always wanted to ask him. “How have you stayed alive?”

He didn’t break his stride but motioned at the view below us. “This,” was all he said, shrugging as he gestured at the rough beauty of the world in which we now found ourselves. “This,” he said again, “this,” and moved steadily onward.

*   *   *

At the next campsite on the Shira plain I wanted some after-dinner Blossom Dearie, but my iPod’s battery was already running too low. I had to listen instead to nearby German climbers gabbing away all at once, a cacophony of guttural enthusiasms competing with an even nearer group of hippie progeny from Northern California listening to one of their members play an odd assortment of tunes on his too ably fingered fipple flute: “Climb Every Mountain,” “How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?” and “Moon River.” I had visions of Andy Williams and Julie Andrews in matching lederhosen waltzing toward the Barranco wall, our next day’s destination, while I tossed and turned on the Shira’s shards of gravel beneath my flat sleeping bag.

In the morning, barely having slept, I trudged down to the latrine to stand in line for my turn inside the foul wooden shed with the tiny hole carved into its floor that had served as the unmet target for the man with stomach problems who had been in line in front of me. I held my breath and took better aim. By the time I exited the shed the campsite had become overrun by white-necked ravens that roamed the place like rats attempting to scavenge what they could from our breakfast leftovers.

When traversing the twenty-six miles of the journey up and down and across Kilimanjaro one experiences climate changes that are the equivalent of a six-thousand-mile trek. That morning, there at the 11,500-feet altitude of the Shira camp, I began to cope with how cold the next few days were going to be. I bundled up for the misty climb toward the Machame Route’s famous Shark’s Tooth, a tower of lava we were aiming to reach in the afternoon after making our way through the rocky terrain that reminded me of the starkest of NASA’s images of neighboring planets.

Though I had been taking my Diamox pills as a prophylactic against altitude sickness, this was the day that I became frightened that I just might be the first member of our group to turn back. I began to experience the first signs of nausea and could feel the pressure inside my head as my brain had begun to swell. My headache was so bad—I was feeling so sick—I could barely chew what lunch I was able to choke down. By the time we reached the lava tower at 14,300 feet, I was really worried. Self-forgiveness was the last thing on my jumbled mind. I only wanted to breathe more steadily and calm my wildly skipping heart.

Was I making myself physically sicker here in Africa instead of finding the deeper healing for which I yearned? It was a bit selfish of me anyway to come to Africa, the place on this planet most decimated by AIDS, to seek some bit of inner peace instead of turning my gaze outward and finding a way to help others who suffered much more than I. I looked over at the sixty-five- and sixty-nine-year-old codgers from New Hampshire who stayed with me at the bottom of the cloud-enshrouded Shark’s Tooth as the other seven in our group excitedly set out to climb its bouldered ridges. I felt, at that exact moment, older, more feeble, closer to death, than I had ever felt in my life.