04-JAN-B-6
THE
January 21—22, 2006
I am just now back, dripping wet, spreading out everything in my backpack which has also been saturated—I believe that is why it is called a “rainforest”---and not one designed to be user friendly.
“I have
been to the mountaintop! I can report to
you what I saw there: it looks a lot like the inside of a marshmallow might if
one were stuck in it for twenty four hours.”
I was “weathered in” at the top and spent my time reading the book about
the next mission in
We set off
at five in the morning with a team that would have included three of us form my
group (there is no way that Monique or Lindsay could ever hope to try this
out—and they were going to go with Alison to Cagayan de Oro where most of their
planned activities were also rained out.)
All night Lesley Keck had diarrhea.
As a good sport she came to me and we gave here rehydration lasts and
some meds and said she might go with us to the mountain base to see how she was
doing. Not well, is how she was
doing. She turned back, and despite the
cell phone call that sent a truck to get her, she found a motor bike and got a
fast one hour ride back to
We arrived
over hard packed clay slick roads up to the base and navigated the boulder
strewn path in a KIA which got stuck several times. Three other people came along, one named Tony,
who is half Filipino, a product of a Peace Corps Father and a Malaybalay mother
whose grandmother had a stroke and is hospitalized in coma at BBH—the reason
for his first-ever trip to the Philippines to see his grandmother before she
died and the site of his mother’s home. Another
joiner is Toby a German nurse with a large Canon digital camera and an odd
affect, who is very reluctant to go back to
IN A WET, VERDANT, SLICK RAINFOREST
We came to the base at 7:00 AM from which Lesley turned back a bit later for her precarious ride to BBH. I tried to get the GPS functional, but it kept trying to tell me it was looking for where the satellites would be at PM rather than AM, understandably figuring that I was resetting the watch an hour rather than thirteen and the date by a lost day forward. When I had got all that factored in, the KBASE = 08* 02.46 N, and 124* 55.48 E. The altitude at base is about 3,850 feet, which means we would have to be going up at a steep angle hanging on to roots, lianas and trees which would drench us when we grabbed them for support, to rise up almost two thousand meters or 6,000 feet elevation in very little more than a couple of miles. So, we set off, slipping as we swung our way up, admiring what views we could as we skirted the steep fall off to waterfalls and plunging cliffs of heavy vegetation, sporting huge tropical varieties and floral surprises. The “trail” was deeply grooved and eroded through the slippery clay, and at a few points near the base, and many more at the summit, there were steel staircases built in to the mountain with a steel cable along side to pull oneself up. If your idea about Benjamin Franklins’ observations on a key on a wire to a kite in a storm is as good as mine, you would have touched that cable as often as I. It goes up to the top, where it also serves as grounding for the TV and microwave radio relay towers. There were wooden staircases placed here a few years back and their remnants can still be seen, but they lasted just over a year before they rotted and mildewed and were cannibalized like everything else in this green wet profusion of life, much of it “detritovores.” So, now there are ten steel staircases anchored to the mountain, splashed liberally with Rustoleum paint. Their life expectancy is longer than the wooden stairs, but not a lot longer than a steel ship lying around in tropical salt water.
AND ESCAPE TO A CEMENT BUNKHOUSE
ADJACENT TO THE RADIOP REALLY TOWERS,
WHICH DISAPPEAR OVERHEAD IN THE THICK
DRIPPING CLOUD COVER
Kinte and I
were ahead of the pack and summated at three hours and fifteen minutes. I had been told that it would be five hours
up and two hours down. It turned out that
down was harder and took almost as long as the steep up slope. We got to the top in a perpetual drizzle and about
three meter visibility, Kinta got a key
to a bunkhouse which was spare but reasonable since it got us in out of the
rain, and there was no letup to that. I
plugged in my GPS and mapped it at 08* 08.23 N, and 124* 59.58 E The impressive numbers are that we were now
only 1.87 miles from KBASE as the Great Circle would have it, or 3.25
kilometers but had gained almost 6,000 feet to 9,986 feet for a very steep
slope. So, mark me down for summiting on
the
A Japanese plane had hit this mountain
somewhere near here but it would be impossible to go exploring for it, or even
to venture out of our bunker to see more than a few meters. Besides, being wet, and very muddy up to our
knees, I tried to wash off the mud, and found it was likely to be impossible to
dry out anything, so just pulled my fleece from the pack and curled up pin the
sleeping bag to warm up even if wet. I
emerged to eat a few of the Ramon type noodle dish for lunch as we also ate the
small packet given to us by the guides as a carry up lunch. I then remembered the Rwanda book and read a
lot of it, remembering that I had been weathered in on the high slopes of
Talkeetna in Alaska which had caused me to read the short stories of Mark
Twain—twice—the only reading matter in the tent for the “quality tent time” put
in for several days sleeping in the bag at an exorbitant cost per day. This time I got deeply immersed in the
Hutu/Tutsi struggles in
RETURN SLIPPERY,
MUDDY SLIDE DOWN THE MOUNTAIN
Several dogs had clustered around us at the summit, since they seemed to live off the table scraps of the maintenance men who are stationed up there to service the radio towers. The whole of this area is a national park, but there is still a bit of poaching. We could hear the waterfalls around even when we could not see them. I put the muddy boots back on and strapped on the backpack, thinking I had protected many items like my notebook and a couple of cameras and other items in something semi-waterproof, but it rained perpetually on us and we were drenched form outside and inside out as we slipped and slid down the slopes. We covered the return in three hours, with much more hazard on the downslope—as is usual in climbing risks.
We arrived at the base, and I saw a large yellow flower looking a bit like a sunflower. I looked in to it, and saw a nearly perfectly camouflaged spicier in the petals. I returned to tell the others, and as I returned, a wasp had approached and stung the spider and there was a short period of struggle before the spider lay still and was getting juices extracted form it. This is a small field of battle and the interactions of the many component parts in this complex tropical ecosystem are hard to grasp all in all—but this one particular “flower in a crannied wall” may tell the balance of a large and competitive system which still cannot be seen “all in all” because of its complexity, but a rare insight without sentiment or anthropomorphizing is contained in that one brief glance into a yellow flower in a teaming tropical rainforest.
I had just read a true statement in the Rwanda book “The Land of a Thousand Hills” with which Rosemary Carr opens one of her paragraphs: ”In all the years I have lived in Africa, I have never known anything to go exactly as planned…..” and that would seem to go for everywhere else, anytime else—and life itself.
So, being prepared to experience something, anything, that might befall us, and living in the moment to enjoy and appreciate it may be the lesson from the mountaintop, where we may have to focus close by to see that sometime we may be the spider and sometime the wasp, sometimes in the sunshine and sometimes in the rain, but always in the beauty of a world of bright yellow sunflower!