I climbed Mount Kinabulu when I was twenty-one years young with two buddies from Semester at Sea. The part about it almost killing me is true. The rest is basically Lord of the Rings fan fiction. I laughed out loud while writing this. Enjoy.
Fellowship
of the Chicken:
How not to climb a mountain
We should have killed the chicken.
Sure, we’d made other sacrifices to
climb Malaysia’s Mount Kinabulu, the highest peak in Southeast Asia at thirteen
thousand four hundred thirty-five feet. But in retrospect, they were all far
too metaphorical and full of empty overtures to abstinence to suit the
occasion.
The gods prefer blood. Otherwise,
they’ll take your sweat, your tears, your pride-- even your mind.
It had seemed like the will of the gods when, after agreeing to
reunite my band, The Phat Hobbits on a Japan tour with some old buddies who’d
made it big, my Southeast Asia tour book fell off my coffee table and cracked
open on my apartment floor to a picture of Mount Kinabulu. As I gazed into the
image of Kinabulu’s sharp, other-worldly stone peaks veiled in crimson ghost clouds,
my three-man punk brigade watched me grip the cursed gold ring dangling from a
chain around my shoulders. We all murmured, “Mount Doom,” knowing what must be
done. We were in Seattle, our shire. We had to go to Malaysia, our Mordor.
Flying from Kuala Lumpur by way of
Osaka, we hitched a ride at the Kota Kinabulu airport with a local wearing an
old school Supersonics hat. We
Seattleites interpreted it as a sign. As he weaved through streets crammed with
rickshaws and street vendors, we broadcasted our intentions to conquer Kinabulu
(without mentioning the cursed gold ring dangling over my chest). Nodding
reverently, he described the mountain’s beauty, its power--and its danger. Some time ago, three Englishmen climbed the
mountain and were never seen again.
Intrigued, I asked for wisdom that would preclude such a fate.
“You
must sacrifice a chicken.”
Nick the drummer and Tyson the bassist shrugged
awkwardly, eyes pressing me, their front man, to lead on. I asked if the
chicken had to be a virgin in earnest, but my friends snorted. An almost fatal
mistake. The warm evening went immediately cold inside the van. The local
slammed his brakes, veered onto the grassy shoulder, and scolded us through
crooked, angry teeth that Mount Kinabulu is a mystical place, its gods to be
respected.
Go to the sacrificial chicken
ranch. Buy a chicken. Slit its throat. Only then could we begin our journey.
In that moment we became more than tourists. Nodding
silently, we looked out the window of the mini-van with our best thousand yard
stares. Blood, sweat, death… it was
on.
Outside the van at the hostel, Nick broke the spell
when he suggested just pouring a bowl of chicken Panang onto the ground,
ghetto-Shire style; one for the gods, one for the Hobbits. We laughed. An even dumber almost fatal
mistake.
The gods do not tolerate japes--and
will punish the infidels who dare.
After a long night of dancing,
karaoke, and drinking the Malaysian eight-point-five infusion, Anchor
Special Brew, we and our hangovers set off on a two-hour bus ride for the
hike of our lives, a non-technical but extreme-inclined five-mile ascent we’d
been told was more challenging than Yosemite’s legendary fourteen-mile Half
Dome hike, which I’d once completed with little difficulty outside of the
marmots that stole my summit sandwich.
The awesomely terrible kung-fu movie
blaring on the bus’s TV monitors cut off in mid-spinning-helicopter-death-kick
as we hissed to a stop. Peering through beer-soaked eyes out the window, I
experienced a species of dread only the gods can instill. Shrouded in
slash-and-burn farming smoke, the looming god mountain’s glowering stone head
and crouching green bulk suddenly made me nervous about upsetting local
deities. Bumping off a chicken seemed within bounds; breaking eggs to make
omelets, I reasoned. Even Tyson, a recently converted Buddhist, rationalized it
as not killing but cultural observation in an admirable display of moral contortionism.
At the Timpohon Gate park
headquarters we received our mandatory guide, whose unpronounceable name contained
a “G” so we called him Gandalf. The lean and quiet man could have been thirty
but was probably fifty considering the wise glint in his eyes. First thing, I
asked where we could get our hands on a live chicken.
Surprised, Gandalf informed us in
broken English that usually only locals perform the ritual and we were too late
to locate and kill a chicken properly. Tyson the Buddhist cursed.
“Dudes, the shire leaf has addled
your minds,” said Nick, a blonde marathon runner and rock climber. “We’re only
twenty-nine. Let’s stick it to this Malaysian mountain god.” Tyson and I
glanced at one another’s developing paunches and said, “Hellz yeah,” but with
about as much confidence of success as Faramir riding to meet the Orc legions.
Our fears proved justified. Within
seconds of passing through the trailhead we realized that this wasn’t so much
an inclined path as it was a suicide run on a stair climber at level twenty.
The steep trail quickly transformed into earthen stairs, each step requiring a
hop to surmount. Within fifteen minutes I was sucking air, and begged my
friends to slow down. Regroup. Reconsider?
After thirty minutes my legs began
to wobble. I paid no heed, figuring they just needed to warm up. Determined to reach the overnight camp as
quickly as possible (fast hikers like we once were could beat four hours) I
ignored pain, fatigue and nausea as I’d done on countless northwest hikes up
Mount Si and Granite Mountain and around Mount Baker. Hell, I’d even done Ranier, a god in its own
right named Tahoma by the local tribes. Gradually my place in line dropped from
leader, to middle, to last--to dead weight.
Soon, it was not the pain in my
quads and lungs that unnerved me, but the boiling sea of Anchor: Special
Brew raging within my belly.
Noticing my pale complexion and my hand upon my chest, Nick asked if the
Eye of Sauron was upon me. Turning, I
began, “Guys I don’t feel so--” before doubling over, convulsing.
Leaning over a wooden rail, I
unleashed a flood of acidic Malaysian lager upon the green ferns and bulbous
orange carnivorous pitcher plants surrounding the trail. My compatriots turned their heads
respectfully on their fallen comrade.
“King’s Foil, Fro?” asked Tyson,
holding out a bag of salty nuts.
“We must get him to Rivendell,” said
Nick, doing annoying bouncy stretches on the cursed mountain steps. “The ring
has taken its toll.”
I tried to respond, “The fellowship
is unbroken--” before succumbing to another yellow waterfall. The Lord of the
Rings references were all that stood between abysmal despair, but I wasn’t sure
how much longer the idiomatic dam would hold against the flood of F-bombs and goddammits I so wanted to unleash.
My digestive system emptied itself
along another mile of the incline we hobble-hiked up before I collapsed against
a tree, chest heaving and sweat stinking of booze and failure. I apologized to
Gandalf for desecrating his mountain. He
didn’t seem to judge me. Sitting down, I
wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into as the ring hung heavy around
my shoulders.
Getting up was when things really
got ugly. Hiking’s cardinal rule is to
always stay hydrated. Binge drinking at
the discotheque followed by heavy vomiting constitute an automatic violation of
that rule. I quickly learned why as
steel braces locked my quivering legs in place.
Attempts to remove them from the cramped position were futile; no such position existed. My leg muscles twitched and convulsed in
grotesque waves beneath my skin, eliciting horrified oohs, aah, and stop
that!’s from the Phat Hobbits.
And two and a half vertical miles
still remained to the overnight camp.
“Maybe you’re more of a dwarf,” Nick
accused, performing a few jumping jacks for good measure. “Natural sprinter.
Over short distances, very dangerous.”
I looked to Gandalf for counsel. The
man of the mountain shrugged and smiled, sweat-less in his white sneakers and
faded jeans.
“You maybe no die if climb,” said
Gandalf. “But getting dark. Go back good idea.”
My hand went to the ring beneath my
shirt. The years in thrall to it had weakened me, but I refused to let it drag
me back down to the bottom. Not again.
Willing myself to stand, I said, “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?”
Unable to speak intelligibly, I
tried to make my heaves and grunts sound optimistic as I lurched along like a
wooden puppet, jerking my spasmodic legs up the mountain one at a time. The
pain was excruciating, but I was starting to feel like kind of a badass.
Then, strapped into a woven basket
stuffed with potatoes and dead chickens with lolling heads, a wispy-haired,
ninety-pound porter woman literally jogged by us in sandals for what Gandalf
said was her second trip that day to the summit camp, Laban Rata. Before I
could ascertain whether my manhood still remained, a British woman with a gray
ponytail and her adult son passed us and said, “Sure feels good for an old lady
like me to pass a young buck like you!”
I groaned. They chuckled. And the
gods positively guffawed.
At a jungle clearing I peered into
the smoky green valley from which we’d ascended, drinking cold canteen water
and breathing the fragrant ancient wood and the purple and gold and red exotic
flowers. It was beautiful. The base of the mountain looked small beneath us. Hope
bloomed in my heaving chest.
Until I discerned the granite peak above the tree
line. Formidable, mocking: An impossible distance. The gloom of the mountain’s
shadow crept into my heart, made darker by the gold ring swinging over it.
Repentant thoughts pierced my brain.
Be merciful, ye gods! I’ll mock thee
not. I’ll sacrifice a wilderness of chickens. Show pity!
Then I remembered--I’m an atheist.
Game
on, Kinabulu.
And so I continued into increasingly thinner air, cursing and muttering
at the ground, the sky, even a pretty blond passing hiker whose vague
familiarity ignited a pleasure-pain burning in the ring. There was no joy in this push. No communion with nature, no appreciation of
my excellent company, and certainly no productive inner reflection. It was a battle, vicious and primal: Me vs.
the Gods-I-Don’t-Believe-In, winner-take-all.
At long last I glimpsed Laban Rata
at the far edge of my tunnel vision. There, upon that great wooden deck
suspended over the misty green jungle abyss nearly eleven thousand feet above
sea level, we could shower, gobble Tylenol and nap before commencing the
one-and-a-half mile final push to the summit for a fabled Kinabulu
sunrise.
Nearly in tears, with over four traumatic miles and
seven excruciating hours behind me, I hobbled up the last few steps towards
sweet, level ground.
Cramping, sweating and dizzy, my body escalated its
insurrection to blind vengeance: Take that (spasm)! And that (contraction)! And
THAT (spasmspasmcontraction)!
I collapsed against a boulder, legs rippling as though in
mid-electrocution. Nick poured water
down my throat and worked my legs like a corner-man, unlocking enough
circulation that they momentarily stopped rolling on themselves like hungry
corn snakes.
Nearby, the graying ponytail lady
and her son played hopscotch. They pointed at me, waving. I crutched along on
Nick and Tyson’s shoulders to the lodge, somehow keeping my other four fingers
extended in my return wave.
My friends dropped me into a wooden
deck chair like a sack of moldy apples.
“You look freshly violated by
Boromir,” said Tyson, wiping his sweaty bush of black curls from his eyes.
“And micturated upon by orcs,” said
fair-haired Nick, groaning at the sudden twitching in my right quad. Walking
away with deliberately evil springy steps to the food kiosk, they asked loudly
where they could get in on some hopscotch.
Unable to bend my knee to remove my
steaming Timberlands, I looked up and noticed a tallvblonde lady was leaning
against the deck’s wraparound rail and staring at me. We locked eyes. With
ginger steps she treaded towards me, staring at my ruined legs. Grave concern
darkened her long, angular face, elfish and pretty despite its salty sweat
streaks.
“You alright?” she asked in a
pulse-quickening Australian accent.
“Would you believe yes?”
“No. I passed you an hour ago on the
trail. I’m a Doctor of Physical Therapy. Mind if I look at your legs?”
Hallelujah!
Damn the chickens and the gods they fed, the summit was as good as conquered!
And with it my curse, left to wither and die in that cloud of purple smoke
below us. I mouthed a thank-you to the
blue Malaysian sky as the Aussie angel pulled up a chair beside my knees.
But the Gods had been saving their
greatest prank for last, I learned, as her name rolled off her tongue and past
her straight, white teeth to shake me like thunder in a dungeon.
Sally.
Somewhere above I heard chortling,
deep and malicious as cracking glaciers. The golden burden around my shoulders
sagged as her expert fingers kneaded my flesh.
Nick and Tyson were questioning my
capacities as a hiker and a man when they stopped behind me, dumbstruck. Sally
introduced herself, and Tyson’s hand froze in mid-extension, aborting his
handshake. Nick dropped his water bottle, and didn’t pick it up as its cold
clear liquid bled onto the wooden deck. Sally instructed them to procure
electrolytes and bananas. Nick followed orders in a daze, jaw agape, but Tyson
narrowed his eyes.
“All that glitters is not gold,
Halfling,” he said.
“That’s William Blake, retard.
Tolkien said, ‘All that is gold does not glitter,’” I said.
“Stay the path, ring-bearer!” Tyson
said.
The ensuing silence swelled with a
life-long friendship’s worth of crippled promises and kidney-punched dreams. And
Sallies. So many Sallies. Tyson kept looking at us long after the silence grew
awkward.
“What?” Sally and I said together,
as though we’d been doing so for years. Something about our vocal harmony
injected fear into my friend’s heart.
“Not again, Fro. We’re here to
destroy the ring, not to wield it.” Tyson marched off towards Gandalf.
Sally continued pouring electrolytes
down my throat and rubbing the vipers out of my legs in my infirmary-like room.
A warm, drowsy blanket of helplessness and attention enveloped me as I rested
against my pillow, marveling at her. We’d showered off the Kinabulu grit and
she emerged beautiful in that severe, calculated way that Sallies always are.
There was a knock at her door.
“Hey Fro, lights out. We’re
summiting in a couple hours,” said Nick, poking his head into the doorway.
Tyson joined him and they entered the room.
Sally nodded at me with the stern
prompt of a nurse, and I said, “Guys, I’m done. Dr. Sally says it’s too
dangerous. Bad things could happen to me. Things with lots of syllables.”
“Is Dr. Sally staying bedside?”
asked Tyson.
“Yeah, I got some wicked blisters.”
Sally wiggled turgid pink bubbles on her big toes. “Go on. I’ll take care of
your friend.”
Awkward silence, then, “What?” Sally
and I said in unison.
They chanted, “Come back, come back,
to Mordor she’ll take you.”
And they wouldn’t stop chanting, not
when I threw my pillow at them, or my shoe, not until I threw a half-empty
Gatorade bottle that bounced against the door frame did they leave.
“You’re a lot more mature than your friends,”
Sally said (as Sallies often do), straddling my knees to rub my thighs. “Is Fro
really your name?”
I groaned at the exquisite pleasure
and pain of her touch.
“Sort of. It’s Fernando. Long story
short, we’re Lord of the Rings dorks. Hence, our band name, The Phat Hobbits.
We got kind of quasi-big locally back in the day after high school. I’m the
front man so people started calling me Fro. Oh, and I’ve got a pretty sweet
afro if you didn’t notice. Anyhow, we’re reuniting to dive head-first into
early mid-life crises. Kind of lucked into a last-minute gig opening for some
old friends around Japan. Could be our big break.”
“I admire you artistic types. Never
had much imagination myself. But I find that fantasy stuff kind of stupid.
Here, how’s that? Does it hurt when I press here?”
Of course it didn’t. Like her
predecessors, she knew nothing would hurt until my final, inevitable amputation
from her life. Then the pain would explode all at once.
Each Sally--all four of them since
middle school, like some many-headed preppy serpent, each my older, smarter and
wealthier better--nursed me after a bizarre injury. The last Sally--Professor
Sally, seven years and three university degrees my superior--rushed to the
stage after Tyson knocked me out with an ill-advised samurai-bass-chop.
The timing was catastrophic. We were
opening for a band whose label promised to sign us after the tour. Tyson had
quit his cushy video game programmer job and Nick had left his neuroscience
lab. Saying adios to Starbucks wasn’t
exactly tearful for me.
But within a month, Professor Sally
and I were innocently saying “What?” in unison to questions like: You’re not making the tour? And you’re
leaving the band? And you’re moving in together? You’re getting married? And
moving to Boston? And going into Sally’s father’s real estate business?
She’s leaving you for a divorced tax
attorney with three kids and a hairpiece?
Whatwhatwhatwhatwhat?
I lied when I said I was an atheist.
I believe in goddesses, and their names are Sally. But like Galadriel, with a
ring they’re Beautiful and Terrible as the Morn: All shall love them and
despair! Well, me at least. Tyson and Nick tried repeatedly to bludgeon me back
to my senses with foam swords, but I just blabbered, “She’s a professor you jamokes! She knows what’s
good for me!” Gives us the precious!
“Ever been to Sydney?” said Dr.
Sally, unwinding the piano wire-tight IT bands stretched between my knees and
hips with her strong thumbs. “We’ve got an ace music scene. I’m heading back in
two days to move into my new place. You should come. Here, how’s this?”
“Oh. Oh, wow. That’s good. Why would
a girl like you be moving into a new place alone?”
Dr. Sally began confessing things to
me, many of which I’d heard one Sally ago, concerning fatigue of academic types
and of men being intimated by her brains. Then it progressed to deeper
insecurities, like how Dr. Sally had started wearing turtlenecks to cover up
the deepening wrinkles on her neck. Wrinkles she was pulling down her shirt
collar to display, allowing a glimpse of the white pink wonderland beneath. I
understood this signified her intentions to wear me for similar purposes for at
least two years, maybe five. The glands of failed musicians are renowned
amongst Sallies for their anti-aging properties. Grinding our guitars into
paste yields a potent aphrodisiac.
“Down under?” I said, eyes closing,
submitting to the power of the massage, the glory of her will. “Never even
thought of it until now. But… Maybe?”
Part of me knew that things would go
south soon after going down under. That I would feel compelled to explain why
her taste in music, movies, and art was so shockingly awful it precluded
friendship with cool people. She, in turn, would castigate my dreams while
milking dry my own urban insights until the night when, years or months later,
she would regurgitate them at a gathering of shiraz-drinking pseudos that would
include an older, established, unattached professional standing inappropriately
close to her.
As Dr. Sally massaged my thighs with
her palms, I knew I would sacrifice everything for her while guzzling a Mickey
Finn of admiration, sexual gratification, and deep pity for the frozen hole in
her core. Gradually, my testicles would vanish and I’d shrivel into a hunched
and spiteful thing, religiously polishing the ring to which I would be bound.
But who am I, a Phat Hobbit, to refuse my fate as ordained by a Goddess?
“I live alone in that big house. And
my dad always needs top salesmen for his mining equipment business…”
My
name is Fro, and I am a Goddess addict. Each drop of suffering on Kinabulu
obviously represented the final stages of Goddess withdrawals. I’d heard those
can be deadly. Perhaps the expedition--the whole tour even--was merely the
cruel joke of a divine bully with a magnifying glass atop a mountain. Perhaps
this Sally would be different. This Sally was my savior. This Sally was my
fate.
My finger ached for the ring. And
the numb relief it promised.
Dr. Sally removed her shirt. Crawled
into my bed. Her door blew open. Drawing the covers to her chin, Dr. Sally
screeched as Nick and Tyson entered, followed by Gandalf, who was holding a
plucked chicken carcass wrapped in ketchup packets like a profane suicide
poultry bomber.
“Come on Fro,” said Tyson, tall and
hefty. “I can’t carry it for you. But I can carry you!” He pulled me thrashing
feebly from Sally’s arms.
“Kill the chicken, Fro,” Nick said,
handing me a metal butter knife on which he’d scribbled in black marker, Sting. “The mountain demands sacrifice!”
As Sally hollered, Gandalf solemnly
laid the naked avian offering on the plastic bedside table. Holding my eyes
with ageless Malaysian wisdom, the man of the mountain nodded while my band
chanted like Elmer Fudd: Kill da
CHI-cken, kill da CHI-cken, kill da CHI-cken, killdachicken!
I raised the butter knife, but
paused when Sally screamed beside me, “Your friends are idiots! You can’t reach
the top! Come back to bed you moron!” My hand wobbled.
Precious!!!
I drove the knife deep into the
chicken’s ketchup-packet heart, over and over, splattering red upon the white
walls, over my face, even on Sally. I stopped when I heard no more screaming or
chanting. Only my ragged breath. The chicken resembled a slashed and battered
red heart with a ludicrously grinning beak.
Gandalf nodded as my friends dragged
me from the room. Sally made to get up, shirt or no shirt after me, but Nick held
out the mangled chicken carcass like a talisman, stomped his foot, and
bellowed, “None shall pass!” Sally
stared on, pulling the white sheet back tight against her chest. Darkness
filled the expanding space between us like the rush of ocean between a freed sailor
and his siren. The pain returned to my legs as I hobbled back to my own room.
Exhaustion clubbed me into dreamless
space. Waking up sucked. Every cell in
my body--my very soul--begged to stay in bed.
But succumbing to such trivialities as altitude sickness,
sleep-deprivation, alcohol poisoning, severe cramping, chronic dehydration,
depression, and, quite possibly, post-traumatic stress and a re-fractured heart
was no longer an option.
My friends hauled me into my
stinking boots as my quadriceps bubbled and writhed in protest. Gandalf led us
on, pensively chewing on grass.
My memory of that final climb is vague. Thin, elusive air. Some ropes; slipping on
bare rock; surprising cold; a sensation of floating high above other living
things. For a few hours we were
suspended within the stars, our chorus of labored breathing the only indication
of things besides the mountain and the gods.
And then we reached the highest peak
in Southeast Asia for sunrise. As the
eastern sky reddened in crisp flame, a full moon descended on the opposite
horizon. Silhouetted against the rising
sun, Mount Kinabulu cast the shadow of an ethereal pyramid directly beneath the
moon, a geometrically precise rendering of the all-seeing-eye on dollar
bills. The Eye of Sauron, come-to-God.
Staring into that big silver orb, I stopped cursing.
In that superimposed image of setting moon and rising
sun on the eternal mountain, all of us climbers intuited cosmic balance, a
truth. The English lady shared her M&Ms with me, laughing. I casually removed
my old gold wedding band from around my shoulders and flipped it to Gandalf,
who smiled and playfully punched my shoulder for the gift, worth roughly his
year’s salary. Nick and Tyson just breathed with me in synchronicity.
Every cramp, every humiliation, every drop of sweat
was forgotten in that moment. Sitting in
the freezing winds at the peak, I did not feel cold. I hated no one, nothing. For a brief moment I was at total peace,
humbled before the eyes of the gods.
And somewhere in the heavens, I
heard laughing.
