When people respond to my writing it makes me feel more connected. Recently I’ve received several responses, including this one from Brad Gard: “My friend and I drove part way up Mt. Washington, but chickened out before reaching the top. The road got narrower and narrower without a guard rail and scared the heck out of us. It was an experience seeing the weather change as we got higher and higher.”
Dr. David Stuhldreher also discovered this when he and his family made the trek up through five distinct climate zones of the 19,000-foot Mount Kilimanjaro. Fortunately they were very fit from running up and down stairs, wearing their backpacks. They also took six days to ascend the mountain and only two to come down. It is difficult for us “flatlanders” to understand the impact of altitude. One reason why 40 percent turn back from trying to climb Kilimanjaro is that they don’t take enough time to become acclimated. Dr. Stuhldreher quoted the Swahili saying, “Pole, pole!” that means “Slow, slow!”
Even so, they encountered difficulties because the increasing altitude caused fatigue; his daughter had headaches; and he lost his appetite. “I felt bad about this as the porters spent time preparing excellent food — mainly potatoes and vegetables — for us, and I couldn’t eat it.” When they got to the highest zone there were glaciers and snow. It was so cold that the water froze in his daughter’s camel pack so that she had to share his. A camel pack is a backpack with an interior bladder of water that is sipped through a tube.
“You must never give up,” he said. I understand what he means. Writing these essays makes me think more about my own existence and those of others. The human critter is so diverse, yet we share a common warp and weave of experiences and dreams and our reactions to them.
I had never been west of Chicago until the summer after Bill and I were married when he wanted to show me places he had seen before we went on to California to visit his brother’s family . . . Oh glory, glory, glory! I must stop and watch the dawning. There will never be another dawn exactly like this one. The sky is the delicate pink of the inside of a shell . . .
Now where was I? We elders have so many experiences and thoughts that sometimes they become jumbled up, and we digress to the most recent thing that comes to mind. During that first trip with Bill, I fell in love with the Teton mountains of Wyoming which are just south of Yellowstone. I have seen only two places that rival their beauty — the ocean off the Isle of Capri and California’s Big Sur. The snowcapped peaks rise straight up above a chain of azure lakes and were called “les Grands Tetons” by French fur trappers who thought that they resembled women’s breasts. “Grands” means large, and you can figure out what the slang word “teton” means. A few miles to the East is a range of hills that they called “Gros Ventre” — “Big Belly.”
When Vicki was seven years old we camped at Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park with Bill’s brother, Rick, his wife, Esther, one of their daughters and her husband and a couple of their grandchildren. I had the great idea of our getting closer to nature and escaping the crowds by backpacking, and Bill went along with it. To get in shape — silly me! — I wore a pack loaded with books and canned goods for a month while I did my housework. After the others left we backpacked a few easy miles on flat land to Leigh Lake. Then we took a boat across Jenny Lake and headed up Cascade Canyon. More to come. wclarke@comcast.net