CLIMB THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN

A TRUE AND ACCURATE ACCOUNT OF OUR ASSAULT OF MOUNT APO – WITH ONLY THE OCCASIONAL OUTLANDISH EXAGGERATION AND FABULOUS HYPERBOLE, STRICTLY FOR THEATRICAL EFFECT.

BY COLM MEANEY CSsR

24 After the intensity of preaching the Holy Week retreats in one of our retreat houses, I was sorely in need of the calm, refreshing breezes of Mount Apo (the Philippines’ highest peak). The seriousness of the solemn reading of the Passion on Good Friday had been sorely tested, fairly early on in the proceedings. The narrator had gotten us off to a sombre start, and the men retreatants and their families were suitably melancholic and grave as they listened to the once-a-year proclamation of the Lord’s Passion. The narrator had us located in Gethsemane, and the temple guards approached Jesus to arrest him. As the Lord, I solemnly enquired “who are you looking for?” With equal gravity, but with a completely unrehearsed and unexpected heterodoxy, the surprising reply was “Jesus of Arimathea”!

At that point, one can either throw up one’s hands and guffaw uncontrollably, or bite one’s lip so intensely that almost blood and water seem to flow…We got through it, but, even as the reading proceeded, I was already putting on my rucksack to scale the majestic peak.

SETTING OUT We had an Exodus-style breakfast: standing, our loins girded and the mother of all adventures ahead of us. At 7am we prepared to start; but before one foot had been put in front of the other, the first of countless photographs was taken, with our specially printed tarpaulin as backdrop: “Redemptorist Mission”.

The first few hours were easy-going – what deceptive innocence! Barely climbing, we passed a few houses clustered together, surrounded by fields planted with a variety of vegetables. At noon we stopped in a clearing and had our first lunch. Conditions were not exactly of a Ritz standard, but sufficient: we ate from whatever container we had (Tupperware, noodles dish, saucepan cover), leaning on tree trunks or squatting.

We continued and conditions became more difficult. Now we were going constantly upward – that is, apart from the times we were descending into ravines to cross streams and then ascend the far side. The paths were muddy and sodden. We had to decide how to negotiate tree trunks fallen across our path: stooping down to crawl under was difficult with the big, heavy backpack; climbing over them involved a delicate balancing act as one maneuvered across the slimy moss. It would be alright to slide and crack a rib or slip a disc – it’s the embarrassment that would be terrible.

Around 4.30pm, in the semigloom of the forest, the first hikers arrived at the campsite. I continued innocently to entertain a beginner’s notion of a Mount Apo campsite: Naïve notion: a well-maintained, evenly-grassy clearing with hot and cold showers, barbeque facilities and hopefully one or two nubile young ladies to massage away the day’s aches and pains (I was willing to do without the cinema and Starbucks outlet).

Actual reality: an empty space among the trees, not only uneven, but with branches prodding you in the spine.

By 7.30am next morning we were on our way. By 9am we were at what are known as 'The Boulders'. For Irish readers, picture the Burren at a 35-degree angle, a vast expanse of rocks and boulders, spewed out millennia ago during one of the volcano’s periodic eruptions.

We climbed over rocks the whole morning and by noon we were at our lunch site, a few hundred metres from the summit. As many other groups were also heading summitward, one of our guides decided to go ahead, so as to secure a favoured spot at the peak. By the time we reached the summit around 2.30pm, we found that many others were already camped. Our farsighted guide had secured the only natural shelter on such a remote, weather-beaten plateau: a cave-like fissure, maybe five feet in height and depth. It proved to be a most timely move. By 4pm the rain was pouring down; we had to run from our tents to the cave for our evening repast. Shivering, we ate our heated rice and humba [cooked pork]. Then we dashed back to the tents for our second night on Mount Apo: now we were pitched on a plateau at 10,000+ feet, affording little shelter from the constant rain and strong gusts of wind.

Having had a restless first night on Mount Apo, you’d expect that we’d

CLIMB THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN

sleep soundly on the second night. Think again. Perched at 10,000+ feet, with strong winds and heavy rain, we slept fitfully, and in a fog-bound dawn, were huddled around our butane-fired stoves, eagerly awaiting our breakfast of cooked-ham slices and rice.

Still, our spirits were high, because whatever about all the hardships on the climb to the peak, surely the descent would be one easy downward step after another – at least, that’s how my innocent, naïve mind was thinking as we set out. It wasn’t long before I was made keenly aware that the descent would have its own challenges. Due to the previous night’s rain, the ground was sodden and we were soon sloshing through what can only be described as a marsh. Consider a bog in the middle of winter, in the middle of nowhere, and you get the picture. With our still pristine Nike and Adidas footwear to consider, at first we were gingerly taking cautious steps along the edges of the mire; it wasn’t long before we realised that this was going to last for hours and that protecting our branded footwear was pretty low on our priority-list. So we sloshed on through the water and mud, and on, and on…

We arrived at Lake Venado, perhaps two hours from the peak, a place of stark beauty and vast serenity. Volunteers were marking out spaces for games of volleyball and other sports for later that day; it coincided with an international climb of Mount Apo. We declined an invitation to hang around till the afternoon to partake in the sports fest, and continued on our way down. It was at this stretch of the journey that we passed the gnarled tree trunks, twisted into apocalyptic shape over time, painted by Manny Cabajar (a Filipino Redemptorist, recently-retired bishop of the diocese of Pagadian in Mindanao, southern Philippines). The surroundings are so stark and wind-swept that you could imagine that it was some kind of moonscape. What came to mind was Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for mankind”, because at this stage, due to weariness and torpor, I was, if not in astronautmode, most definitely on 'autopilot', barely putting one foot in front of the other.

The jagged boulders of Mount Apo mountain

We had lunch in a clearing among the trees, and soon continued on. For me, the next few hours were an exercise in perseverance. We eventually reached the foot of the mountain, and rested for some time. We still had to walk along by a river for perhaps three hours, crossing it continually, but at least we were on the level, and the magic words “a cool, refreshing drink” were like the voice of a siren wooing a wearied traveler, in a seemingly-endless desert, to an oasis of delights unimagined. Well, not to get carried away, we eventually did make it to our final campsite, a simple but adequate resort, which had the almost sybaritic indulgence of a volcanically-heated swimming pool! I was in no mood for swimming, but simply lay supine for 30 minutes in the 20 inches of hot water, being gawked-at by the bemused locals, letting the dirt, sweat and weariness of the previous days simply and pleasingly drain away. What luxury! If our breakfast on the first morning

25 of the ascent had been Exodus-style, due to its frugality and our haste, our supper that final evening was surely eschatological, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet! To be sure, we didn’t have the Isaiah-type “choice wines and tender steaks”, but we did have the demeanor of “the saved”, and we partook of food whose succulence and scrumptiousness we could hardly have imagined during our Spartan privations on the Mountain-of-Challenge. That night we most definitely did sleep the “sleep of the just” and awoke the next morning like warriors who had successfully completed the most challenging rite of passage imaginable.

A native of Limerick city where he went to school in St Clement’s College, Fr Colm Meaney first went to the Philippines as a student and has spent most of his priestly life there.