September 28, 2012, at 10:32 p.m.

Mt. Kilimanjaro Base Camp, Africa

15,553 feet above sea level

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OUT OF NOWHERE came a train roaring above the clouds, almost three miles north of sea level. A sudden, violent, loud wind train, about to rip through my tent. My eyes flip open. I grab my headlamp and flick the switch, lighting the wildly flapping tent sides. Wind, sweeping up from the Karrunga Valley below, is shaking and pounding the brown canvas, a Cat-1 hurricane roaring outside, threatening to blow me and the rest of my family off into forever. I'm lying there on full alert, stuffed in my four-season sleeping bag on a cliff outcropping, dressed in three layers of summit gear, ready and weary and excited about the long hours ahead on our summit march, unable to sleep, and now this. All it would take is a couple loose stakes, a mighty gust, and there we all would go, all our tents—mine, David's, Lenny's, Chris and Mark's—pulling free of the tenuous dirt and loose rock and suddenly we go all weightless, as the fall begins, in slow-mo, over a dark cliff, unseatbelted, tumbling into oblivion, crushing on one another, pulverizing one another in our flying tents, in a flight over ancient volcanic rock, rolling and mashing and bloodletting, for a hundred, two hundreds, five hundred yards, a family meat blender, until a sudden final thud, or thuds. I don’t know how we’re going to survive this, if those stakes start to loosen ... if the banshees screaming at my tent sides take us down, down, down. It’s so wickedly loud, the wind, the flapping, the chaos. We’ve traveled halfway round the world to get here, to this moment, to base camp before a full moon summit up Mt. Kilimanjaro, a lifelong adventure dream of mine since reading Hemingway as a kid. Since I got seduced by the leopard mythos, seeking something unworldly atop Kili, he froze there ... dead ... the whole Hemingway short story about a guy dying on this mountain, a symbolic mystic-popsicle leopard, and I was romanced by it all ... and now I'm here, and the sickle is swinging outside my tent, and I don't wanna die. Not today, not up here. I'm at the edge of my dream, and now a freak windstorm threatens to blows us off into a valley grave, because we relied on African teenage porters to pitch our tents. I let teenagers pitch my tent on the edge of doom. What the fuck was I thinking. And just as quickly as it began, it stopped. A good fifteen minutes or so of fear and loathing and waiting to go weightless into the abyss, and it was over. Like somebody'd flicked a switch and simply turned all-hell-breaking-loose off.

          I laid there, breathing again, thinking about Hemingway. You know, he never got this high. Not to the summit. Not even to base camp. Truth be told, Hemingway enjoyed basking in the metaphor but he never saw the dead leopard. A pastor-adventurer named Richard Reusch spotted it frozen, in 1928, on his second trip up to the summit. He and his guide placed the leopard on the rim of the crater, presumably for future climbers to see, like some gargoyle in the church rafters, and then he cut off the leopard's popsickle ear as a souvenir.

          Even as a teenager and twenty-something wannabe novelist, I vowed that if I couldn't write like Hemingway, I could at least one day climb to the top of mountain that he immortalized in his short story. Forty-five years later, here I was. Nearing midnight, full moon rising outside. The banshees quiet again. And I could hear other hikers already on the move outside my tent, shuffling by.

          Summit time.

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