Mt Kenya

It was the only window I had to see the mountain this quarter. A Tuesday call to Peter turned into a list of things I’d need and a quiet understanding that by Friday, I would be climbing. Impromptu — that’s how life has always unfolded for me. One minute, I’m dreaming. The next, I’m standing at Met Station base camp, tightening laces on shoes still stiff with newness, hoping they’d hold on terrain older than memory.

I hadn’t slept. Altitude sickness had been mentioned not as a warning, more like a truth. It respects no one. Still, I could not turn back. Not after seeing Mr. Homegrown Robert, who first walked these paths in the early 1980s. Time sat gently on his face, as though the mountain itself had marked him and let him be.

The climb begins abruptly, as if the mountain is testing your intent. My breath struggled to keep up, my cold worsening. But I was determined to reach the place where the elders say God lives. The Samburu call it Ol-Donyo Keri, the Mountain of God. So do the Meru. The Agikuyu believe it too. Across tribes, across tongues, the reverence is the same.

As you ascend, the noise of the world falls away. Trees shrink into shrubs, shrubs into rock, until it is only hyrax and eagle, wind and snow. God, playing in the clouds. The ancestors, gathering to watch. I’ve been searching for them — their wisdom, their presence.

At night, the moon is impossibly bright. We gather around a kerosene stove, passing food, passing stories. Men laugh in the face of death here. They speak of new trails discovered, old ones honored. They speak of the mountain with gratitude — not as a conquest, but as a teacher.

The mountain hides its majesty in constant motion — wind, fog, light, shadow. The views shift, never offering themselves in full. The higher you go, the thinner the air, the louder the thoughts. The heart pounds. Bones ache beneath the cruelty of ice. And then it happens — that quiet knowing that you are no longer just a man climbing. You are being witnessed.