Transcending Perceived Limits

 

In August 1979, British climbers on Mount Kenya encountered a lone African man not far from the peak's summit. The man was shoeless, with only wool socks on his feet; he carried a sack of food, twenty-five feet of rope, a bread knife, and a Bible. For the past five days he had been living in a scrap-iron lean-to on top of the mountain; God, he said, had sent him there to pray for the well-being of the world.

Now he was on his way down. The authoritative guidebook Mountains of the World describes Mount Kenya this way: "the final 2,000 feet leap upward in tremendous precipices. . . . There is no nontechnical route up Mount Kenya, and even the easiest route involves rather difficult rock and ice climbing." It seemed impossible that a lone mystic without boots, crampons, or ice ax could have climbed it. And it seemed even more impossible that he could climb down the mountain safely; descending is much more difficult than ascending, without a rope and hardware to rappel off of.

The British climbers looked for him during their descent, but there was no sign of him anywhere; they reported him missing, and search parties were sent up onto the peak, but to no avail. Several days later, when they got to the mountain's base, long after he had been given up for dead, the mystery climber showed up safely at a village at the base of the mountain, and told his story.

His name was Ephraim M'Ikiara; he was fifty-two years old, a devout believer in both Christianity and native Kikuyu animism. This was his third ascent of Mount Kenya. His climbing techniques, as he described them, were fantastical. He hacked holds in the ice and snow with his bread knife and used his food bag, tied to the far end of a rope, as a grappling hook, throwing it up over protuberances on the mountainside and clambering up after it. Without boots or shoes, his feet could cling more easily to the tiniest, most tenuous of rugosities.

In nineteenth-century Manchuria, the Manchu shamans sought personal strength, or honed powers they already had, by cutting nine holes in the ice of a frozen river, then diving in the first hole, swimming underwater to the second, out to catch breath, back under and on to the third, and so on. The holes were far enough apart that if you missed one, you drowned; tricky business, in the dim and turbulent depths of the river.

In another aquatic marathon, a certain modern Rastafarian holy man in Jamaica, member of that fascinating sect that worships Haile Selassie, ganja, and reggae, tests himself each year by swimming straight out to sea as far as he can until he is totally exhausted; then he turns, and tries to make it back to shore alive. In this way, he replenishes himself, his strength and nerve.

Among certain Eskimo tribes of Greenland, a young man who wanted a vision was taken out to a lonely place by a shaman and left there. For days and nights the acolyte continuously rubbed a small stone on top of a large one until a spirit appeared, conjured up by the isolation, the monotony, the lack of sleep.

In Australia, Aborigine tribes still use something called Walkabout to instill strength and wisdom in their youths. Young men are sent off into the outback with little more than an atlatl (spear thrower), a water gourd, and a memorized map of waterholes, game trails, and sacred tribal places. A youth may wander for weeks, months, surviving on his own, praying at the shrines along the way; he returns with the image of the tribe's land stamped into his body and his mind. Some North American Plains Indian tribes practiced a similar kind of mystery trek: young men and women wandered solo out across the prairies, looking for something - for hunger, thirst, fatigue, and space to ignite a transcendence.

The Papago Indians of southern Arizona and northern Sonora did an arduous forced march across the volcanic wilderness of the Pinacates Desert to the Sea of Cortez. There, on the barren beaches, they gathered salt to carry back to Papagueria, and ran twenty-mile races on the blazing sand, races whose goal was a life-changing vision. Some runners ran so hard they died; the fortunate received visions of white cranes, revolving Magritte mountains, sea spirits, accompanied by magical songs. The vision and song conferred a power that was supposed to last the rest of one's life.

In 1924, Ernest Thompson Seton met a Tarahumara Indian postman in northern Mexico who trotted seventy miles a day, seven days a week, with a heavy mail sack, over mountains and barrancas.

I once heard a story from a big old retired Seabee about something that happened during the Korean War. An ancient Korean man, tiny and frail, showed up at a Seabee camp begging for oil for fuel; the Seabees jokingly told him he could take a whole hip-high drum of it if he could carry it away. They gathered to watch the fun: it took all of one Seabee's strength to get one of those drums tilted with one end an inch off the ground, and three to lift it entirely. Well, the litde man, beaming at his benefactors, unslung one of those tumplines rural Asians carry, wrapped one end around his forehead, the other loop around the drum, and adjusted the knot. Squatted down with the drum to his back, humped the huge drum (enough oil for the whole village for a year!) up onto his skinny spine, and went trotting out of camp. The Seabees gaped in astonishment, and then cheered and cheered. Twenty minutes or so later, they saw him in the distance, in the words of my informant, "going up a hill steeper'n a cow's face."

And then there was the story making the rounds in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, when I got there. Supposedly some Western climbers had chartered a Pilatius Porter airplane recently and used it to overfly Lhotse (the world's second highest peak at 27,923 feet) and photograph the huge, probably unclimbable back side of the mountain. The Westerners brought their photos back to Kathmandu and blew them up, and lo and behold, on one shot, sitting there in the middle of the Lhotse Wall, a vertical mile up, was a saddhu, a Hindu yogi, naked except for a big white Saint Nicholas beard, perched on a ledge no wider than a ballerina's wrist.

Moral:

THERE ARE NO LIMITS

only those we perceive in our own minds

by Rob Schultheis in Bone Games, pp. 50-51, 54-55, 76, 92, 116-117