118 days ago
118 days ago
The leaders of the multi-national student group studying the Mount Kenya glacier said that he had been the most active youngster of all, scrambling about in the l4,000 foot Teleki Valley area with boundless energy and none of the altitude sickness that plagued me.
Phil had gone up the valley to their encampment the day before after we had completed our first day's hike up the mountain from the trailhead. The eighteen-year-old had smiled and waved cheerfully from his sleeping bag when Phil stopped in at Top Hut to chat with the adult group leaders. The boy had a touch of fever. The adults were not greatly concerned and had prescribed a bit of bed rest.
Phil and Diane lived in Nairobi, where Phil was on a Ford grant teaching law to aspiring Kenyan magistrates. Phil is my wife Sally's cousin, and we accepted readily when they asked us to join them on safari during our summer vacation from teaching in Istanbul. Climbing Mt. Kenya was to have been an interlude of healthy exercise in the midst of many days of sitting in the car and visiting game parks and evenings of gin and beer.
A week previously Sally had slipped away to a medical facility in Malindi where there was an English speaking doctor. I had watched from a distance, and never had my wife looked so blond and fair as when she waited with the other ob/gyn patients, all of whom were bare-breasted African women. The test materials were placed in a brown bag
The results confirmed our happy conviction that we were going to have our first child. I had wondered whether the early pregnancy shouldn't be reason to cancel the mountain climb, but Sally pooh-poohed my concern, called me paranoid, and added that she didn't want to make her pregnancy known to Phil and Diane or the rest of the family at this early stage.
For many people,the ascent of Mt. Kenya is a hike rather than a climb. They say little old ladies in tennis shoes manage it. We found the trek beautiful in terms of scenery but exhausting. Though I considered myself an in-shape thirty-year-old, slogging through bog at high altitudes was a fitness test unlike any I had previously experienced.
We opted out of the last ascent of the permanently snowy twin peaks when we realized it would have involved roping up. Phil grudgingly admitted to being less fit than when he had reached the summit of Kilimanjaro a year or so earlier, and my high altitude headache behind the eyes seemed to become more ferocious with every yard I climbed above the 13,000 feet level. Illogical as it was, I worried about possibly putting Sally and her precious cargo into jeopardy, even though not carrying a heavy pack she was scampering along nearly as easily as Mwaniki and Unpronounceable, our leather-lunged Kikuyu guides and porters.
At daybreak on the second day of our trip, a member of the student group stuck his head into the door of our tin shack and said that they were sending a sick member down the mountain. Was any of us a doctor or medical student? Could we help? Fast walkers had set out at 5 a.m. to get word to the landrovers and to medical people. Rule one of first aid in such a situation is to lose altitude. We unhesitatingly agreed to lend a hand.
The sick boy had fallen into a coma. By the time he arrived on a makeshift stretcher at our hut, he was dead, despite frantic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation efforts. The shock effect on the accompanying students and the self-recriminations of the leaders were heart-rending as Phil and I and our two porters volunteered to become part of a shuttle stretcher-bearing crew to lug the corpse down the mountain.
We rotated six men on the aluminum fold-up cot that served as a stretcher, but someone was always falling in the deep bog of the trail which, when distinguishable, was scarcely wide enough for one person. The stretcher had to stop every two or three minutes to rest or rotate bearers. The shrouded corpse seemed to have a perverse desire to dive overboard or at least to overbalance its conveyance. Phil and I had looped our belts into makeshift shoulder straps as had others, but twice the straps broke and the body had to be removed from the cot/stretcher and readjusted.
Little conversation took place among us bearers beyond panted suggestions of when to take a break, requests for substitution, or rotation of position from one side of the stretcher to the other so that left arm could take over for right arm or vice versa. In silence punctuated by heavy breathing and boots slogging in the deep mud, my gaze became fixed on the sleeping bag and its bulky, shifting contents. I thought back eighteen years or so to a microscopic zygote floating about in the fluids of a womb. But a living, developing organism. I pondered the interplay of luck and circumstance that caused all of us on that African mountainside to be alive except for the burden which we bore. I tried not to think about the phone call some group leader would have to make and the reaction of the dead boy's parents to the devastating news they would hear. I thought of parenthood from an angle that I had never before considered.
Sally wanted to relieve me of my backpack, since she was carrying little other than the precious freight in her womb and a light day pack, but I would have none of it. Diane also remained relatively unencumbered. She broke the tedium of the grim journey by gathering something she called "everlasting flowers" from the surrounding bog areas and stuffing them in her anorak and day pack for future use as house and table decoration.
After four miserable hours we were scarcely halfway to the land rover pick-up point and completely wet and filthy from wallowing in the bog. Mwaniki, at this point, had been relieved at the stretcher and was walking ahead with Sally and Diane, carrying their small packs. Suddenly, in his pidgin English, he announced that the rescue crew was just ahead. No one else could see or hear a thing, but in about five minutes a six-man crew came up over a rise and took over for us, who were exhausted.
Eight hours after starting our burdened descent we came to the park entrance and met the two group leaders who had set out for help at 5 a.m., when the boy had seemed "just a little sick." Their journey had been slowed by having twice had to run from water buffalo, once waiting twenty minutes in the lower limbs of a tree while a lone buff grazed along and off the track. They were thunderstruck when they heard that the boy had died.
At the paved trailhead we bid sad and weary goodbyes. A week or so later, at a campground in Nyeri, we happened upon one of the group leaders. They had learned that the cause of death was not pneumonia, as had been assumed, but a collapsed heart valve brought on by a genetic defect that no one had known about and a combination of altitude and exertion. I felt relieved that those responsible were able to shift the blame for the boy's death from themselves, at least somewhat.
Two weeks later we said good-bye to Phil and Diane after a farewell dinner at their house in Nairobi. Sally quietly eschewed cocktails, wine and post-prandial brandy. Everlasting flowers delivered from Diane's daypack brightened the table and the mantelpiece.
Seven months later our son Brian was born in Istanbul. I was pleased to be allowed to be present during labor and even to assist at the natural childbirth.
