I Poached the White Elephant (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine November 2002

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I Poached the White Elephant (Cont.)

THE ONLY WAY TO GO UP Kilimanjaro is with an expedition worthy of Livingstone. The team—two guides, five porters, and I—gathered outside a small check-in hut surrounded by cornfields. The porters were from the nearby Chagga tribe, a crew ranging from a skinny, five-foot-tall 21-year-old to a thick, six-foot-tall bruiser in his late fifties. Two spoke some English, and all wore Western attire: jeans, T-shirts, and an assortment of Skechers and wing tips. Their names are changed here to protect them from undue punishment by park officials.

The head guide, whom I will call Sir Edmund Hillary, was a quiet Chagga tribesman in his forties with a wife and seven children at home. The assistant guide—let's call him Heinrich Harrer—was a happily married Masai in his late thirties. Each had about 0.001 percent body fat, and nothing but summits under his belt—more than 250 between them.

As we set off, I noticed that one of the porters was carrying a folded wooden table and a collapsible chair. This way, Sir Edmund informed me, I would never have to sit in the dirt. Another porter took my duffel and hefted it up on his head. If the edges of my miniature skis dug into his scalp, he didn't let on.

Harboring an innate American resentment toward all things imperial, I insisted on portering too. In the way that doctors call a heart attack a "cardiac event," this experiment could be described as a "load-bearing incident." Five steps up the dirt path, my trachea crumpled, my vertebrae fused, and the small muscles in my back revolted and spasmed. I threw down the 30-pound load and thanked God this was not my profession. Then and there, I decided to fulfill my coalition-building duty by stimulating the local economy with tips.

I set off carrying little more than a rain jacket and camera, saving my strength for the summit. An hour later, it began drizzling. Soon, the faint pitter-patter crescendoed into the staccato of heavy drops falling on Heinrich's poncho. The trail became a ribbon of mud; the downpour, a deluge.

Four hours later we arrived at our first camp to find both tents already erected: a large canvas A-frame for me, and a slightly larger one for all seven of them. Sir Edmund sat with me at dinner, patiently watching me slurp my fresh cucumber soup. White flowers of fog-fed heather surrounded the camp picnic table, and lingering storm clouds obscured Kibo and the mountain's lesser summit, Mawenzi. I backed into the question of skiboarding—"I heard people have tried to paraglide and ski and stuff"—and hit a wall. "Yes," Sir Edmund said, "that is illegal now."

Then I walked him over to my tent so that I could show him the Big Feet.

Sir Edmund was surprised but not unsettled. "It's OK, it's OK, Eric," he said quickly, indicating I should put them back in my pack. Twenty feet away, three rangers wearing military fatigues and toting rifles sat outside a metal yurt.

I asked him in a whisper if I could try a little "boarding" up high.

"Yes, yes, no problem. Better you tell me now. Now put them away. Don't tell the porters."

"What will happen if we're caught?"

"You pay $2,500 and I lose my license."

That raised the stakes. At worst, I had imagined a mildly embarrassing incident in which I explained to the director of Tanzanian National Parks that "pleasure devices" meant something very different in my country. Suffering a crisis of conscience, I called on my college ethics courses, specifically Aristotle's virtue theory—"An act is just if it is what a good person would do"—and joined Sir Edmund back at the table. He was sitting quietly, staring at my tent. I picked up my silverware, knowing full well that every great expeditioning dilemma is best contemplated on a full stomach. I dug into the spiced fillet of fresh fish, herb-fried potatoes, and spinach with minced onion. After dessert and before tea, I saw that I must do as Aristotle had commanded: I must be a good person and avoid trouble for Sir Edmund. While, of course, continuing my mission as planned. "This is good," I thought, slipping into third-person dreamspeak. "Eric might be OK. Sir Edmund seems to be on his side."

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