‘Step and Breathe...Slowly, Slowly’

Ana Vargas, a diminutive hairstylist from San Diego, used to consider it an exciting climb when the elevator had windows.

No longer. Not since July 31, when her self-image, spawned as the somewhat frail and timid one in a family of seven girls and five boys from Guadalajara, took a dramatic turn for the better.

Right now, Vargas is a Helen Reddy song. She is woman. She is strong.

You might say, these days, she is on top of the world.

Indeed, she was near to that, when, with a group of five others, she set off to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania that final day of July. The top is at 19,341 feet, the highest point on the continent of Africa and, while not a difficult technical climb nor nearly as high as Mt. Everest’s 29,028 feet, mastering it is remarkable in that any climb of near 20,000 feet is an incredible test.

Especially if you are 45 years old, 5 feet 3 and 110 pounds and tied to a job that keeps you in the great indoors 90% of the time.

While as many as 20,000 people a year attempt to climb Kilimanjaro, and slightly less than half of those make it--no technical skills are needed, no ropes and pitons--it can be lethal. Three people died on the mountain during a millennium trek this winter when 1,500 made it to the top. And Linda Sarofim Lowe, 47, the central figure in a recent multimillion-dollar divorce case in Houston, died May 12 on Kilimanjaro. She, like so many others at extreme altitudes, was stricken with high-altitude pulmonary edema, an often-fatal condition.

For the elite of the sport of mountain climbing, Kilimanjaro is a Sunday afternoon walk along the John Muir trail. For Vargas, this was pushing an envelope she never even thought about licking until recently.

Two years ago, she met a charismatic ex-Marine named Bill Creasy, a UCLA English professor, Bible scholar and popular public speaker in Southern California. Creasy attracts thousands of students weekly to his Bible study classes and, on the side, organizes adventure trips.

Before taking Creasy’s class, Vargas was a vegetarian and a workaholic at the salon that she owns and operates with her twin, Christina. She couldn’t swim, didn’t run and considered her main sport bookkeeping. She thought that nature was what she walked through to get to her car.

Like some of her sisters, all of whom now live in the United States, she has a blood condition called thalassemia, common to those with Greek or Spanish heritage. Those who have it are relatively anemic and get less oxygen than the norm in their blood, a condition not encouraging for anybody considering trekking above 10,000 feet.

“When the trip idea first came up, before I even bought any of the equipment, I went to a doctor,” Vargas said. “He told me I probably shouldn’t even think about this, that I was not a good candidate for this sort of activity, and that, if I persisted, I would really need to build up the iron in my blood and work hard to get ready.”

BC, before Creasy, Vargas would have heard this and packed it in. Now, she listened to the doctor, set her jaw and went out and bought $3,500 worth of hiking and climbing equipment. In the next few months, she broke in the equipment with a few semi-strenuous hikes, including one to the White Mountains in northeastern California.

Her sisters were amazed.

“She’s a neat freak,” said one of them, Martha Vargas of Santa Margarita. “When I heard she would go six days without a shower, I knew there was no way. I figured there must be someplace halfway up where she could get her nails done.”

*

By July 29, Ana Vargas’ nails were black, and she was at 15,000 feet. Had she stopped to think about it, she would have realized that she had already accomplished an incredible feat. A fraction of a percent of all the people in the world ever venture that high. But at that point, an almost robotic focus sets in. The mountain has a top, it is there, so it must be climbed.

Gone by now were all romantic notions.

“Before I left,” Vargas said, “I had this vision of things, kind of like Gregory Peck in the movie “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” I pictured myself in a nice folding chair, sitting outside my tent, writing in my journal, while a porter tended to my needs, maybe brought me some wine.”

At 15,000 feet, there were no nice folding chairs and certainly no wine. Only very thin air and lots of tension.

The group had started out with Creasy, age 53; his son Adam, 22, a recent graduate of the University of Texas; American guide Susan Detweiler from Colorado; and four Southern California men in their early 50s: Joe Graas, a medical lab owner from San Diego; Paul Isley, owner of Rainforest Flora Inc. of Torrance; Mike Davis, a Los Angeles consultant; and Jay Wegrzyn, a stockbroker from La Jolla. Oh yes, and Vargas.

The support cast was lead by Tanzanian guide Chambo and 12 porters. Two days before the summit attempt, Creasy had to face the harsh reality that his arthritic knee, acting up for the first time in years, would not carry him to the top. When the group left the next morning for the last camp before summit day, a devastated Creasy would have to head down. Going with him would be Davis, who had suffered from fatigue all the way up.

Creasy announced at dinner that his knee had betrayed him.

“I broke down,” said Vargas, who had been moved by her teacher’s enthusiasm and wanted to participate in one of his journeys. “I got mad, then I cried. Then I got mad again. I told him I didn’t want to do it without him, that he had been my inspiration.”

While Creasy calmed Vargas down and pumped her up for the task ahead, some interesting group psychology was taking place.

Isley, usually the first out and the fastest climber, took Vargas aside and told her that he and the group had concerns about her, about her strength and stamina. He lectured her, Vargas said, on the seriousness of what they were about to do.

“I didn’t react much, although it hurt my feelings,” Vargas said. “I had been so calm the whole time, just keeping my mind on what I was doing and going along, that I think some of them didn’t think I really understood what I had gotten myself into.”

Isley said recently, “It was tough. There was the Christian side of things, to give her credit for giving it a shot. And then there was the other side, the side that said, ‘Let’s get moving, let’s get going faster.’ The most important thing was that we knew each other and we cared about each other a ton.”

Even Creasy had his doubts about Vargas’ chances. In a journal he wrote about the trip, he said that when he saw all of his friends making their way back down the mountain where he and Davis were waiting two days after the July 31 summiting, he said he was thrilled and surprised. He was certain that Ana, Jay and Joe wouldn’t make it.

“I would have bet money on it,” he wrote.

On the mountain, the group dynamic changed quickly. Vargas left Isley after his stern talk, went to her tent and found herself getting a pep talk from her tent mate and climb leader, Detweiler.

“You can do it. I know you can,” Detweiler told her. “I’ll make sure you do your best.”

*

At 8 a.m. on July 30, a quiet group, minus two, headed for Barafu Hut, eight hours away and to the east, at 15,088 feet, the final staging area for a meal, a few hours’ sleep and a late-night departure for the final push to the top. Along the way, Vargas mourned the loss of her pied piper, Creasy, and drifted from sadness for him to fear for herself.

“I just didn’t think I could make it without him,” she said.

The pace of her emotions was exactly opposite the pace of her climb. While she plodded along, her backpack broke, and while it was being fixed, she set her camera down and left it behind. She mourned the loss of a crucial roll of film and the failure of her promise to Creasy to take a picture of his son on the summit. Then, when Chambo, who had backtracked to look for it, showed up with the camera an hour later, her spirits soared.

It was colder now, around freezing. Kilimanjaro is just three degrees south of the equator, but 15,000 feet brings winter conditions to summer days. The air was noticeably thinner. Muscles that were already sore, fatigued and craving more oxygen were getting less.

There was dinner, yet another briefing led by the meticulous Detweiler, then four hours of toss-and-turn sleep and an 11 p.m. departure, upward, in the darkness and cold, toward the roof of Africa.

Three hours later, Vargas was in big trouble.

Each such venture on deadly mountains at killer altitude has its moment of truth. Vargas was having hers, somewhere near 17,000 feet, a world away from home, in the cold and dark and unknown. Unlike mountain veterans, outdoors types, she had not been there, done that. Two weeks earlier, she was cutting hair and selling gel in sunny San Diego.

Now, her toes were freezing, and frostbite was a real danger. Once, she tried to take her boots off, which would have only made things worse, but Chambo, now alone with her as the others moved ahead, stopped her. Their headlamps burned out, batteries succumbing to the cold, and a tiny spare flashlight Vargas found eventually dimmed and went out, too.

She strained for oxygen. Her heart pounded with palpitations, and she thought it was going to jump right out of her chest.

“I saw it flying away and summiting without me,” she said.

Somehow, she pushed on. One step and breathe. Another step and breathe. Chambo right with her, telling her, in Swahili, “poley, poley . . .”--slowly, slowly.

“I thought about Bill, telling me as I left that I could do it,” she said. “I remembered I had promised to take a picture at the top of Adam. I kept building myself up, praying. This is when you really realize what you have done, what a risk you have taken.”

In 1971, when Vargas was 15, she came to San Diego from Guadalajara with four of her sisters and her mother, who was dying of cancer of the uterus and who wanted better medical treatment. After their mother died, all the sisters stayed, worked at first in domestic jobs, eventually learning the language and ways of a foreign country. All have prospered here.

“I kept thinking of my mother, and of my twin [Christina], who just went through a terrible divorce,” Vargas said. “I kept telling myself that climbing Kilimanjaro is nothing compared to what they went through. I kept praying and pushing and thinking of them, of all my sisters, and all we have all gone through.”

As she pondered her own fate, Vargas remembered a conversation she had in San Diego, just two days before she had left for Africa, with a man named Jerry. He had told her he had tried to climb Kilimanjaro with a friend named Wendall. Jerry got ill at around 17,000 feet and had to come down. Later, when climbing another mountain with Wendall, Wendall became ill and died. They brought Wendall down in a sleeping bag.

Vargas wondered how close she was climbing, at that very moment, to the altitude where Wendall had died. She wondered if all of a sudden, it just happened, and then they brought you down in a sleeping bag.

Chambo told her “poley, poley” and she decided to “let my body give me what it would” and not worry about it anymore.

*

On Monday, July 31, the sun came out at 6 a.m. on Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, East Africa.

Somehow, Vargas had passed the test. With daylight and vision came hope and adrenaline. She caught up with the rest of the group about an hour below the summit and thought, for a moment, that they were at the top, waiting for her.

But again, she pushed on. “Poley, poley.” Step and breathe.

At 9 a.m., on July 31, just half an hour behind the rest, Ana Vargas summited Kilimanjaro. Isley recalled that it was 15 degrees, and the winds were 40 miles per hour (a wind-chill factor of 29 degrees below zero).

There is a sign at the top. It says that Uhuru Peak is the top of Africa, 5,895 meters. Below the sign, there is a book in a metal box, and everybody who makes it signs the book. Thousands have made it, signed the book.

Eventually, the signers get a certificate with a number on it. Ana Vargas is No. 6,042 to reach the top of Kilimanjaro in the year 2000.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she said, “and I’ll never do it again.”

*

A few days after summit day, the group, safely down the mountain and recuperating in the city of Moshi, had a farewell dinner. There were some speeches, including one in which Chambo called Vargas, “A very tired woman and the queen of the mountain.”

And there was a special moment from Isley, who had feared the worst for Vargas.

“I have a toast for a lady,” he said.