Learning to fly
Some final thoughts on my Mt. Kenya experience
If you need to catch up, here are parts one, two, and three.
Coming down was (in many ways) the hardest part.
You may recall I broke my wrist descending a mountain in Austria last year. That weighed heavily on my mind as I started down from Mt. Kenya’s summit. When that happened, I was only 2 hours away (combined hiking and driving) from excellent health care. I had a cast and painkillers in no time flat.
On Mt. Kenya, I was days away, more comparable to what my friend Jen had endured in rural Tanzania. That experience had also barged into my thoughts so many times I brought along a bottle of narcotic painkillers I hadn’t used after a minor surgery.
The descent is when most climbing accidents happen. You’re tired, you’re less focused, you get sloppy, you want it all to be over, and gravity comes and sh*ts all over your mood.
You feel like you’ve made it, you’ve reached your goal, and now you can rest on your laurels. But you can’t. You never can.
Mt. Kenya was very, very steep, and the ground was covered in loose rock. I was afraid. I crept along like a sedated sloth. Many times, I just sat on my butt and slid along. Hard to fall when you’re already on the ground. Take that, gravity.
“Pole pole ndiyo mwendo (slowly is the right speed),” Sammy reminded me, but he didn’t have to. I don’t think a human being could have moved any slower unless they were dead. Which I was trying real hard not to be.
Speaking of Sammy, while I crawled down the mountain with the alacrity of my teenagers doing, well, anything useful, Sammy was running all over the side of the slope trying to find phone reception. Also kind of like my teenagers. Their energy level is entirely situational.
After I melted down in a panic the night before our summit, Sammy had changed our plans on the spot to ease my mind. But he had to find a way to get word to Moses, who would be picking us up. Otherwise Moses would show up hours earlier and hours away from when and where we arrived.
So Sammy, his own 60-year-old knees bothering him, ascended and descended, over and over again alongside my consistently downward trajectory until he could reach someone at the base. Which he finally did.
It was just the latest way that Sammy managed the externals so I could reach my goal. When I didn’t think it was possible, he made it possible. When something distracted me, he crushed it like a bug.
Like the time I told him in Swahili that another climber (a boorish Brazilian guy) was bothering me. “He’s sleeping in the same bunk room with me. I don’t feel comfortable, but it seems rude to move,” I told Sammy in classic “nice lady” fashion.
“You cannot sleep in the room with him,” he said simply, before getting up, going and getting all my things and moving them to another room.
Or the time I told him I needed to change all my clothes (I didn’t mention it was because I had bled through them) but there wasn’t a good place to do that. Sammy cleared all the guides out of their bunk room, told me to use it for as long as I needed, and guarded the door while I cleaned up with wet wipes and new change of clothes.
Or how he checked my Camelbak repeatedly to make sure I was drinking enough. Or how he assured me I could stop taking the awful Diamox, which significantly improved my performance and morale.
Or how told me over and over again, “You’re doing well. There’s no reason you can’t do this.” How I could trust his assessment.
And, of course, how he changed course according to my needs, even though it inconvenienced him.
I got bits and pieces of his story along the way. He told me how he started climbing 40 years before because he loved to show off his homeland to visitors. He told me how proud he was at his fitness compared to friends his age. He told me how the guides and porters search through bins of used clothes and shoes at markets to find gear at reasonable prices.
And he told me about his son losing his young wife suddenly to illness last year. About their kids moving far away to live with their maternal grandparents.
Eventually he told me about his knees. Because I could tell, not because he complained. I gave him some Aleve, which he declared a wonder drug.
I highly doubt Sammy has ever taken a leadership seminar or read some insufferable CEO’s how-to book. But he could teach them all a thing or two.
At bottom, leadership sits at the nexus of authority and empathy, expertise and compassion. It’s about skill and relationship. It isn’t about power, it’s about empowerment. It’s not a personal achievement, it’s giving that achievement to others, passing it on, pay it forward.
It’s investing yourself in the success of others and creating a thriving community where everyone can do their best and where everyone’s best yields something even better.
As we passed other climbers, we met up with some young guides whom Sammy had trained. As Sammy and his mentees caught up, their clients enthused about their guides, how they cared for them, how they encouraged them, how they got them to the summit.
And I thought to myself what an injustice it is that Sammy isn’t running a company or a government agency somewhere. That may be true. And there’s no doubt that Sammy has not lived an easy or privileged life of many opportunities.
But it’s also true that he has experienced and generated and shared more beauty in the world than most of us ever will, going up and down the sacred mountain in whose shadow he was born and raised, helping others know the vulnerability and power of meeting it face to face, of taking its strength and wonder with them on their onward journey.
Sammy has learned to fly.
I don’t know if I’ll ever see Sammy again. I do know I’ll never forget him.
I listened to music at various points in the climb, and as the descent grew tedious and seemed eternal, I put it my earbuds again and shuffled my mega playlist. Tom Petty showed up right on cue, as he tends to do.
Learning to fly
But I ain’t got wings
Coming down
Is the hardest thing
On this journey, I asked myself over and over again why I was doing this. Why did I want to do this. Why I didn’t take the many, many outs on offer that I feared were flashing emergency lights, the universe warning me away.
Honestly, I still can’t quite articulate why. But I think it has something to do with flying, with getting a glimpse of something higher and purer and just beyond our physical limits. The hope—for the lucky ones, the steadfast belief—that there’s something in us that can’t be bound by this realm, that will be freed from it someday.
If I’m being truthful, it’s hard to imagine that. It’s hard to imagine that I won’t just slip back into the unconsciousness from whence I came when all this is over. It’s hard to imagine a fairy tale ending in a world that
Breaks your heart.
Steals your crown.
That gives you no rest even when you reach the summit. That makes you come back down.
And contrary to what I was taught as a child, I don’t think it’s a terrible fate if this is all there is. I think there’s still rest in that, and there’s still enormous meaning here regardless. I think I won’t know the difference anyway.
But maybe to get the most out of this place, we need a glimpse of the sky. Maybe in order to really love we need to consider who we are, beyond our moral limits and selfish needs to survive. Beyond ourselves.
We ain’t got wings, of any kind. Not of birds and for damn sure not of angels.
But maybe we can still learn to fly.
And I know for certain we can still catch each other on our way down.
Bottom line, you cannot get experiences without having experiences. This is surely unique.
Really nice video - thanks for sharing it. Tom would be proud!