Chapter 35

That was the start of a phase of my life that was to last for the next several years. In the time I spent with American Schools Worldwide, I taught at schools in Kinshasa; in Bujumbura, Burundi; Cayenne, French Guiana; in La Paz, Bolivia; and ultimately back in Kathmandu, of all places.

It was an interesting period of my life. I went to a lot of different places and saw a lot of different things, but the common denominator was that I was mostly teaching pretty much normal American kids. Most of the time it was in rather uncomfortable places, and at times I had an eerie throwback feeling to Phan Loc in that I was trying to remind my students of home.

In some respects my life didn’t change much in those years. I mean, I was a teacher all the way through, and I didn’t get involved in romances or other things that would twist the river of my life into new channels. I was a temporary visitor in those countries and would be moving on when the time came, just like the kids were; when their fathers got new jobs or were transferred somewhere else, they went along with them. Usually it was to someplace better where they maintained a little isle of Americanism in the midst of strange and sometimes not very nice societies and places.

For the most part I was on that isle with them in that we tried to not let the local societies affect us too much. I’m not sure if that was good or bad, even now, but that was what was essentially expected of us. When it was reasonably safe I tried to interact with the local societies as much as I could, but in the end I was still a foreigner who didn’t have anything invested in those societies.

I don’t want to say that living in exotic though usually miserable foreign capitals jaded me, but I guess I could say that I was used to it. Some things that would have stuck out at me a few years before now were just items in passing, odd but not really surprising. Because of that I’m not going to try to detail what I did in those years very much, but just hit the high spots.

I might as well start out by saying that Kinshasa was not as bad as Mr. Logan made it out to be, at least in some ways; in other ways it was even worse. In some ways the people were nice and the living was cheap. I don’t want to say we took advantage of that, but the simple fact of the matter was that there were not a lot of good paying jobs for the locals, so you could get things done pretty cheaply. Yes, the officials were as crooked as they could be, there were frequently soldiers around armed with all sorts of weapons up through machine guns, and you never knew when one would get the idea they wanted to use them. The roads were lousy, full of potholes, and maintenance was nonexistent. Much of the housing and the city itself consisted of ramshackle slums that were even worse than any I remembered from Vietnam. The heat and the humidity were as bad as had been promised, but they had been bad at Phan Loc, too, and I got used to it fairly quickly.

I could find other negative things to say, but I think you get the idea.

When most people envision the Congo, they think of it as being mostly an impenetrable jungle, and there are parts that certainly fit the description. I never really got to any of them as I spent most of my time in Kinshasa, not because I wanted to but because travel outside was difficult and dangerous, especially in the eastern part of the country. Around the city itself for a hundred kilometers or more the jungle had mostly been cut back for the sake of farming or just building materials or firewood, so what little of it I saw was relatively pleasant.

In the not too distant past the political situation had been in an uproar, and the city had been considerably less safe than it was in the period I was there. For that reason, the company had set up a large, guarded compound that included both the school and the apartments where the faculty lived. There were not many of us there, and we soon got to know each other very well. About half of us were new to the company, while the others had been there for a while because they happened to like the Congo. I thought it was all right and that I could spend a year or three there, but I didn’t think I wanted to make it my life’s work, either.

The school sessions were not year-round; they more or less paralleled the normal American school year, and that held true at all the schools in the system. That meant we had time off in the Northern Hemisphere summer, and if we wanted to take off for milder climates and a bit of rest and relaxation we could take advantage of it. There were breaks during the year, for the year-end holidays and “spring” break, but in most cases I just hung around and put up with things until school got under way again. It could be a nice break to just do nothing. Generally speaking I spent my summers in Europe and the States, often getting in some climbing in both the places, and visiting the folks, of course, when I was in the States. For several years, when I left the country where I was working – and not just the Congo – I swore I would never be back, but come the fall, there I would be again.

Burundi proved to be even poorer than the Congo, as if I believed there could be such a thing. Again we were living in a compound, this one even worse than the one in Kinshasa, and the general conditions were even worse. It was a somewhat more peaceful place, which proved to be a little surprising since there had been a major outbreak of Tutsi-Hutu fighting and genocide a few years before. There was plenty of tension simmering below the surface, and everyone figured that it was only a matter of time before the killing began again.

But Burundi had some interesting things about it, most of which came from the fact that it was closer to a more habitable part of Africa. I just didn’t hang around Bujumbura during my short breaks, but traveled, mostly to Tanzania, next door. Tanzania featured some things I was interested in; these included the Serengeti Plains, with all of their fascinating African wildlife, and Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa.

I did both of those on a Christmas break out of Bujumbura. I did not know of any other climbers in the region and I really wasn’t prepared for a major climb in terms of gear, so I arranged with a Tanzanian company that ran tours of the area; they occasionally ran groups of climbers up the huge stratovolcano. Actually, I suppose I shouldn’t say climbers; peak baggers is a better term to use, since the mountain is not terribly difficult in most respects. However, it is up there in altitude – almost twenty thousand feet, not much lower than Denali – and since the country around is flat plains and jungle, there is no easy way to get acclimatized to the altitude. That’s mostly what causes failures in summiting the mountain.

In addition, it’s cold up there. This was equatorial Africa, after all, and on the plains below the temperatures feel like Africa. You can dress up for the cold on the mountain to some extent but most people trying Kilimanjaro just don’t understand how cold it gets. It’s cold enough that there are small glaciers there, a surprising thing to find almost on the equator. I was no stranger to glaciers, of course, especially after my time in the Antarctic, but it’s something you don’t expect in central Africa.

When the group I was with climbed Kilimanjaro, I had no problems, but some others in the group did, so only about two thirds of the small group made it to the top. It was the third time I had stood on the highest mountain of a continent, if you consider Mont Blanc to be the highest in Europe. (There is some disagreement about that because there is some debate about where Europe ends and Asia begins, and a slightly higher mountain lies in the disputed zone.)

While I was in Burundi, I also gave strong consideration to a climbing trip to the Mountains of the Moon in the eastern Congo. In the end I had to give it a pass despite their intriguing names and interesting history because of tribal tensions and fighting in the area.

My French really had been pretty rusty when I got to the Congo, mostly because I’d had little reason to use it after I left Venable. But living in a French-speaking society got me back on track and my skills improved to a point where they were even better than they had been when I graduated. I taught French in all of the schools I was in; it made sense to teach it to American-speaking kids so they could get around in the society a little better than they could have otherwise. That didn’t quite hold true when I was in Bolivia, where Spanish is spoken, of course, but I still taught small classes of French there.

Later in my career with American Schools Worldwide I was assigned to Cayenne, French Guyana, on the northeast coast of South America. There were some considerable differences between there and the African posts, at least part of them because French Guyana is actually a department of France, and the currency there was the franc, the same as in the mother country. It was still a hot and humid place, but by now you would think I would have been used to it, and I was. The country is very sparsely populated and on the primitive side since it’s mostly jungle. But in some respects, it was one of the better places to be assigned, as far as I was concerned. We didn’t have to live on a compound at the school, but most of us teachers had apartments in nearby buildings.

The neat part about French Guyana was that we were very close to some famous Caribbean islands – places like Grenada, Barbados, Trinidad, Aruba and others on to the north, places that get a lot of tourist traffic because they are exotic places, places with great beaches and diving. Some of those have volcanic mountains, nice for peak bagging, and I did some of that although nothing terribly exciting. I did, however, take up scuba diving in some of those places, not that I ever became a huge expert at it. That made for a very nice break from classes.

One of the neat things that happened while I was in French Guyana was that I got a letter from Pat, the fellow climber and sometimes tent mate when Cat and I had made our summer swing through the west after our sophomore year at Venable. Pat and I had exchanged Christmas cards and the like over the years, maybe two or three times a year, sometimes not even that, and a couple times more than a year went by.

Pat knew, of course, that I had made some interesting climbs over the years, and I knew that he had also done some pretty good ones himself. This time he was proposing one that was going to be a real challenge: Denali, otherwise known as Mount McKinley, in Alaska.

Denali is right up there, roughly as high as Kilimanjaro, but rather than being on the Equator it’s almost at the Arctic Circle, so it is much, much colder and more challenging. I had only seen the mountain once, from the plane that took Cat and me to Vietnam, but I’d had it in the back of my mind as one of the places I would like to take a crack at sometime.

But it seems that Pat had a problem: he had a small group of climbers who wanted to make the hike, but one of them was a woman. She really wanted to do the trip but was a little uncomfortable with being the only woman on a trip that major with a bunch of guys. That wasn’t something that couldn’t be fixed, but they had asked several women who had to turn them down for one reason or another, mostly because it was turning into a last-minute thing. It looked like if they couldn’t find another woman that would be up to going at least part of the way, the trip was going to wash out.

Then it seemed that Pat remembered that I was not only a climber, but I’d been up some big ones of roughly that height. Asking me seemed like a long shot to him, but he thought he might as well give it a try.

Needless to say, I was on the phone as soon as I could get a line to the States. “Sure, I’m interested in doing Denali,” I told him. “When do we leave?”

“We have reservations to fly into the glacier on the side of the mountain on the fifteenth,” he told me. “So that’s about three weeks. The other part of the deal is that you’ll have to pick up your airline fare to Alaska, and your share of the overhead expenses like food and stuff. And it’s going to be colder than snot, so you’ll want to make sure your winter gear is the best you can get.”

“Good enough, I’ll be there,” I told him. “There are a couple things we’ll need to coordinate, but there’s no reason we can’t work things out.”

We talked for a few minutes to straighten out a few of the details, and then I hung up the phone. I was going to be able to do one of my lifetime big goal trips! It was going to be a hassle because there were a few things I needed to work out, like getting better winter gear than I had. What I had was mostly at home in Simsville because no one really needs things like ice axes and crampons in places like French Guyana, Burundi, or the Congo. In fact, it seemed like the bright thing for me to do was to not even try to do anything from Cayenne, but to stop in Seattle to gear up before I went on to Alaska.

I was on a high making plans for the next few minutes before it struck me: it was in the nineties Fahrenheit in Cayenne. It would be one hell of a lot colder on Denali, and the way my schedule seemed to work I would only have about a week between the South American jungles and the glaciers of Alaskan Denali. Joan, I thought, that might not have been the brightest decision you ever made.

It was, in fact, only six days between the time that I left Cayenne and getting out of a Cessna 185 at about ten thousand feet on the Kahiltna Glacier on the route to the top of Denali. It was actually a nice, fair, warm day for that place and time of year, but it felt colder than Antarctica!

Of course, I had very little time to acclimatize for the altitude either, and I had been close to sea level at Cayenne for a year. Between the cold and the quick change of altitude, my own adaptation was a little slower than it had been when I’d done Kilimanjaro, which was the highest mountain I’d climbed to date at 19,300 feet. However, the route would need some relaying of loads upward to camps farther up the mountain, and by the time we were ready to strike for the top I was back to adequate form.

Pat had been a lover back on that summer when Cat and I roamed around the west. From time to time over the years I had given some thought to throwing up all the teaching and wandering around uncomfortable countries in the tropics, going to Montana and seeing if I could get something going with him. It was not to be; the woman on the trip he had been concerned about was Donna, his girlfriend. Dick was there, too; his wife Shannon had originally been the other woman on the trip but she had to back out due to health issues of the nine-month kind and she was in her eighth month.

All four of us made it to the summit, and while there, Pat reached in his pocket, pulled out a ring, and asked Donna to marry him. Of course, she said yes; there wouldn’t be a mixed marriage for these two.

After we got back down to Talkeetna, I spent the next several weeks just wandering around the state, doing a little climbing and checking things out. Alaska was a place I thought I could get used to if I ever thought I wanted to settle down for a while. There was no sign of that happening in my near future, and I was satisfied with what I was doing. I had been with American Schools Worldwide long enough that I didn’t automatically get assigned to the Kinshasas and Bujumburas of the world. It might be a long time before I had enough seniority to get assigned to, say, Japan, but I was definitely on the way and the job fed my desire to travel very well.

My next assignment was definitely an improvement from my previous assignments: La Paz, Bolivia. It was the first place I had been assigned where French wasn’t the local language. I knew very little Spanish at that time, but I figured that there would hardly ever be a better time to learn it, so I threw myself into it. While I never quite made it up to the fluency level of my French, I was to become comfortable in the language.

Bolivia was definitely a step up in the world for me, and in more ways than one. It is located in the central South American altiplano or high plains, but it has mountains surrounding it in most directions, so you can figure that I was in something close to heaven as far as climbing was concerned. The weather is coolish even in the middle of summer, which is December, January, and February since it’s a southern hemisphere city; it can get cold in the winter, but nothing like Alaska or Antarctica cold. There were climbers in town, both local and international, and I soon made contact with them.

In my second year in La Paz, I got a bright idea. One day along in October, I called up Pat and said, “Hey, if you guys aren’t doing anything, how about coming down here for the holidays? We can get some climbing in when it’s too cold to do it in Montana.”

“I don’t know, Joan,” he replied. “It’s a long ways away. Do you have any interesting mountains to climb?”

“There are a few,” I told him. “There’s this one that’s a few hundred miles away that you might find pretty fun. It’s called Aconcagua. It’s even higher than Denali.”

It did not take long to talk him into it after he heard the word “Aconcagua.”

The two showed up as Christmas was approaching, bringing with them Dick’s wife, Shannon – it was Donna’s turn to stay home with the nine-month flu.

Aconcagua is actually several hundred miles south of La Paz, in Argentina, so we were a while getting there, although it was a very pretty drive and we did some other climbing along the way. Although at 22,800 feet it’s somewhat higher than Denali, it’s considered a relatively easy climb since there is no technical climbing required. Although it was snowy and windy, it was not nearly as bad as Denali, or even wintertime in Montana. After spending months at La Paz’s elevation, I had absolutely no acclimatization problems and barely noticed the altitude; Pat, Dick, and Shannon weren’t far behind me since they lived pretty well up in the Montana high country themselves.

I was sorry to see the trio head back to the States. They were moving on with their lives, and in recent years their climbing had been dialed way back since they had things like jobs and family that also concerned them. We were all getting older, and once again I felt like I was falling behind in my life.

During this whole period I saw Steve and Cat most years when I was home for the northern summer. Usually my stays were not long, but it was good to spend a day or three just hanging out with them, catching up on what was happening and watching Dale and Sally grow up. They got bigger astonishingly quickly, and were now both in elementary school. How had that happened?

They were no longer in the Washington area; in fact, they left shortly after I met them there on my way back from Nepal that time. A job had cropped up suddenly in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Despite the name, there wasn’t much “Mount” to it, and the Appalachians were far away. But it was a nice place to live and they had a nice house. Cat was back to teaching since the kids were both in school by this time, and they seemed to have a pretty good life together.

I could see that Cat still yearned for the high country, and I thought about inviting her down for a week or two in La Paz, just to let a little of that repressed climber get out. I think she realized the dangers in that and reluctantly turned me down before I could even make the offer. Although she was still my best friend and would remain so, we had definitely become more distant as the years passed us by.

Although a part of me wanted to stay in La Paz, I realized at the time that being an American was getting a little more distant for me. I had spent a lot of time out of the country in the past few years, much of it in places that were pretty grubby. More and more I felt the need to reach out and touch my roots for longer than I could manage on a brief summer visit. Besides, Mom and Dad were getting close to retirement, another “how had that happened?”

It was time for some home leave. Since we American Schools Worldwide teachers were under contract, not exactly employees, we could take an unpaid year off without any problems – in fact, home leaves like that were the main reason that we tended to move around so much, since there were continual openings. While I liked La Paz, and would have been willing to stay there for years longer, I also could see that if I took a year off there was the possibility of being assigned somewhere else, somewhere more interesting, somewhere new.

So I did. In spite of occasional distant climbing trips to places like Denali, my bank account had been continually growing, and I could easily afford to take a year off, do some traveling and climbing, and still have some money stuck back when I went back to teaching. I spent much of the summer in the west, some of it climbing with Pat, Dick, and their wives, and got to some other places I had never been before, like the North Cascades.

However, as fall came, I decided to head back to Simsville to spend a little time with my parents. I had only seen Joey briefly in the last several years, and I barely knew Cindy and their little girl, Anita, at least in this timeline. By this time Joey was just getting started with the routine transcontinental truck runs that would fully occupy him for the next few decades, and we had become increasingly distant. It was very hard for me to believe that his life had once been mine so many, many years ago.

Other than catching up with everyone, there wasn’t much to do around Simsville, and I grew increasingly frustrated and restive as the days went by. It was clear that even though I wanted to bask in the family life for a while, I was going to go nuts if I had to be there until next fall when I could go back to teaching somewhere.

Then, along in November, Jonas Logan came to my rescue. He had my parents’ number, and one day he called me up. “Hey, Joan,” he said. “We’ve had a problem come up, and I’m wondering if you would be willing to fill in as a temp for a few months.”

He had me pretty well sold right there without further information, but I figured I’d better see what this was all about. “What happened?”

“One of our teachers has a problem pregnancy, and she’s had to come back to the States. We need a temporary replacement for her, and we need one in a hurry. She plans on being back before the term ends in the spring, though.”

“Where at, Jonas? Don’t tell me Bujumbura.”

“How does Kathmandu sound? I know you’ve been there.”

“Jonas, you talked me into it. I’ll be on the way as soon as I can pack my stuff.”