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Did you know that Pierre is the State Capital of South Dakota??? Yes, it is, with a population of just 14,000 souls. But it’s still 75% more populous than the 8,000 that live in Montpelier, the State Capital of Vermont! These and thousands of other completely worthless facts are what most people believe comprise the study of Geography. Well, I’m here to straighten you out.
As one of the few living people to have earned a degree in Geography, I can tell you that nothing is further from the truth. Geography is the single biggest subject on earth or anywhere else. Properly defined, Geography is the study of the Earth AND its’ surroundings. That means the study of everything ON THE PLANET, UNDER THE PLANET’S CRUST, or SURROUNDING THE PLANET. Hey, the Universe surrounds the Earth, so outer space is part of Geography too!
I vividly recall sitting in a Denny’s restaurant one morning in North Carolina years ago and reading an article in the Raleigh Newspaper where the head of the University of North Carolina was asked by a reporter if there were any studies done to determine how much money students pursuing certain majors earned after graduation? His answer was a definitive YES… and the reporter then asked him what was the most lucrative field off study? Without a moments’ hesitation the President said “Geography!”, and the reporter asked what attributed to the financial success of Geography majors from UNC? The president said, “first of all, there are very few Geography majors, so one extraordinarily high earner can skew the result… and Michael Jordan (the basketball player) was a Geography major!”
Now, most people probably still think you can’t earn much of a living as a Geography Major, and I guess that’s true, but obviously there are at least two exceptions… that’d be me and Michael Jordan (yeah, yeah, yeah… the basketball guy). He was one of our customers, and somewhere among all the memorabilia junk I have collected over the years are some autographed hats and shirts he left for me while shopping at our stores.
I kinda hate to admit this, but I’ll risk it because I’m sure the statute of limitations has run out on this, and anyway, we sold our company a long time ago to Tabacalera, a Spanish outfit that later merged with SEITA, the French Tobacco Monopoly, that was then bought by Imperial, a British Company, and is now owned by some mysterious people in Macau. So, there’s no way anyone can sue us. So… shhhh, I’m gonna tell you a really deep dark secret that I’ve never told anyone, but just for safety’s sake, don’t pass this on. Remember the year that Michael Jordan couldn’t play basketball for the Chicago Bulls because he had cut his finger really bad? Well, I’m pretty sure it happened in our store on I-95 in Selma, North Carolina! He was using one of the plastic cigar cutters we left on the counter for customers to use, and somehow, he managed to cut his finger really, really bad!
Truthfully, I don’t really think studying Geography had much to do with either my success or Michael Jordan’s, but it did play a very significant role in one of the most unusual experiences of my life… climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa, and here’s how it happened:
About 20 years ago, my son Luke, who has travelled to more countries than anyone I know, called me and said he was planning a trip to Kazakstan, and what did I think? And I said, “Luke, Forget about it! You know I was a geography major… Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan—you’re not going to any country that has the word STAN in it, period! You wanna go to someplace with a STAN, go to California, my cousin Stan lives there!” So, after I said that, Luke said that the other trip he was thinking about was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, which I thought was a pretty cool idea. So, I said, “Who’s going with you?” and he said “nobody”… and I immediately said “You are not going to the middle of Africa by yourself!” And that’s when one of the stupidest things that has ever come out of my mouth, came out of my mouth: “I’ll go with you!”
Holy shit! At the time I was a 60-year-old guy smoking two packs of cigarettes a day… can I really climb a 20,000-foot volcano? Well, I am not one to go back on my word, especially to one of my kids, so the very next day I went into training. No cigarettes (it has been the only time in my life I have been able to quit for more than a few hours… but I did for over two months!). Then I went out and bought a hydraulic stepper that had a step counter, and the first night I did 600 steps which I thought was really good. Little did I realize that within a relatively short time I would be doing more than 13,000 steps each session and could have done a lot more. My ability to do the steps was only constrained by the time it took. I could have done it for hours on end.
Just a week or so into this training I thought, “Why not see if anyone wants to go with us?” So, I called my daughter Samantha and asked if her husband, who is a long-distance bike racer, might want to go with us? And while I was on the phone with her, she yelled out to her husband “John, John… would you want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro with Luke and Dad?” and he immediately said “YES”. It wasn’t till a few weeks later that I learned that John thought Mt. Kilimanjaro was in upstate New York. I had never asked, but apparently John was not a Geography major!
Then I thought of calling my brother-in-law Tom who was about ten years younger than me and was an excellent snow and water skier. And he jumped at the idea! Well, you know hindsight is 20/20… and calling Tom was really, really stupid. I’m talking about climbing a 20,000-foot mountain, and inviting someone from Kansas, who not only lives in one of the flattest places on Earth but also lives in an underground house where the highest elevation he gets to is when he uses a lawnmower to mow his roof. This turned out to be a real problem when we actually made the climb as Tom went catatonic at about 16,000 feet and had to be taken down an emergency route.
Now, us Geography Majors are pretty smart, and to prove the point I called Altadis, a giant tobacco company, and told them I was going to order an entire new cigar brand made for us, Montecristo Afrique, and to introduce the new brand in our wholesale, retail, and mail order operations, I was going to assemble a “crack team” (sure I was… me, my son, my son in law who thought Mt. Kilimanjaro was in upstate New York, and my brother in law that lived in a hole in the ground in Kansas!) and climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, and plant a Montecristo Afrique flag on the summit—and all they had to do WAS PAY FOR THE EXPEDITION! Being the greedy pricks they were and salivating at the thought of an immense initial order, they said “No Problema!”
So, I hired Thompson Expeditions, the most well-respected guides for the Kilimanjaro climb, and booked first class tickets for the four of us on KLM to Amsterdam, then Dar Es Salam, and then finally Arusha at the base of Kilimanjaro. Then we all went to the closest REI to where we lived and bought every conceivable scientific piece of climbing gear in existence, and water purification stuff, and all kinds of snacks, and a veritable mountain of toilet paper. Hey, too much is way better than too little when it comes to toilet paper… and off we went!
It was a really long trip to get to what turned out to be the veritable asshole of the world. From JFK our first stop was Amsterdam, an airport that is roughly the size of Rhode Island, and as we shlepped all our gear through the airport to check into our next flight I was already thinking… hmmm, what if this terminal was up the side of a mountain instead of dead flat? Can I really do this? Have I lost my mind?? Well, the security at Amsterdam was way more intensive than anything we had ever seen in the USA, but remember, back then there were all sorts of terrorist activities going on… a guy with a bomb hidden in the heel of his shoe, women with bombs hidden under their burqas, people aiming lasers at planes, ISIS in the news every day, and so every person getting on that next plane was carefully interviewed by security agents and the process to board took forever. Once onboard, I took a couple of 5mg valium and don’t really remember much of anything until two flights later when we landed in Arusha.
Well, it kinda turns my stomach to ever utter Donald Trumps’ name, or even worse, admit he was right about something. But, you remember when Trump said certain places were shithole countries? Well, he was dead right on that! Tanzania was an absolute shithole, and I should have known that much earlier from all the injections we were required to get before going there. The only recreation in Arusha was about one bar for every 5 male residents, and a reptile farm. So even though we got there a day before the climb was to begin, we stayed pretty close to the hotel grounds, except for a quick trip to a gated gift shop that was guarded, I kid you not, by a 7-foot guy with a spear! On the way there we passed dozens and dozens of women with baskets on their head carrying what I would estimate to be 50 to 75 pounds of gravel a mile or so to a roadwork crew. And there were an equal number walking in the opposite direction with empty baskets, I assumed to get an additional load. At the hotel I asked the manager how much those women were paid to haul the gravel all that way, and in what he converted from Tanzanian money to U.S. money and I was astounded to learn that each trip which took over an hour back and forth hauling that gravel on their head paid the equivalent of ten cents… A DIME! So, an entire day of backbreaking work paid them less than a dollar. Truly, if there ever was such a thing as a shithole country, we had arrived there!
The next day it was on to Kilimanjaro! In the truck on the way to the base camp, we passed these huge earthen mounds about the size of a one bedroom house, and I remember commenting that they looked like gigantic Mallomars, my absolute favorite cookie, especially if they’re frozen (If you haven’t tried frozen Mallomars yet you should stop reading this right now and go out and get some). And as we passed those mounds I was thinking I wish I had suggested to Luke that we make a trip to the Mallomar factory in Toronto, Canada instead of coming to this G-d forsaken country! Anyway, after we got home, I did some research and learned that the mounds here were actually termite hills – hills made from billions of termites. And what’s even worse is that the termites are a favorite food of the people in Tanzania! Maybe Tanzania isn’t a shithole country, maybe there’s an even lower rung on the scale of shittiness… if so, this was it!
So, the climb began, us, three porters and a head guy who spoke English. For the first five or six hours we were essentially picking our way over knurled tree roots that were above the ground, and which we had been warned could easily cause twisted or broken ankles, and a quick end to our ascent. Because Mt. Kilimanjaro is really a volcano whose slopes were formed by various eruptions and lava flows over millions of years, the terrain is a series of up and downhill slopes, so that you might climb 2000 feet in the morning, then descend 1500 feet into the next chasm, and then climb a thousand feet to the next crest. So, for those of you who may be math impaired, you end up having climbed and traversed a total of maybe 4500 feet, but at the end of the day you are only 1500 feet higher than when you began! For this reason, all the ups and downs, it is a five-day total climb to the summit.
These five days are filled with absolutely nothing to see. Not an insect, not an animal, not a tree or a bush, there is absolutely nothing but endless rock. Although some of the rocks do have this hideous orange goop on them which we were told forms anywhere a person has previously touched a rock with their bare hands and left bacteria there to grow… yuck! The ascent seemed pretty strenuous to me at my age, but I did my best to conceal it as it would have been pretty embarrassing to complain while I was wearing all this scientific climbing stuff and carrying just a bottle of water and some snack bars, and the porter climbing next to me was wearing flip flops, smoking these fat Russian cigarettes, and CARRYING A FREAKIN’ DINING ROOM TABLE ON HIS HEAD!
During those first few days the only people we saw were two groups coming down the mountain who had apparently gone up several days before us. What was truly remarkable about the groups approaching was that, and I swear this is the G-d’s honest truth, we could smell them coming long before we could actually see them!
Sleep at night was close to impossible. The porters had set up individual tents for us, but the cold night air caused the water vapor from our breath to condense on the inside of the tents over our heads and drip down on us as ice cold droplets. One of the many things you learn in Geography is that the air cools at 4 degrees per thousand feet as you ascend, so ascending 20,000 feet results in a temperature drop of EIGHTY DEGREES! Yeah, Kilimanjaro is right on the equator, but it is freakin’ cold up there! Cold enough that as you exert yourself climbing, and trek through moist layers of cloud cover, the sweat on your arms can crystalize into ice and fall off your arms in chunks! This cloud cover was one of my major disappointments as I had assumed that once we got to some real high elevation, we would be able to see forever. Maybe not all the way to New Jersey, but at least for hundreds of miles. Not so. Once above the clouds, our view was essentially what everyone sees on most airplane flights… the tops of endless other clouds.
Our meals each day always had some sort of protein-based food and this stuff we called “the red paste”. To this day I don’t know what it was, but apparently it has something to do with preventing altitude sickness. Right before we embarked on the climb, we had made an agreement about altitude sickness. If three of us thought that one of us was getting sick, that person would have to start back down the mountain to a safer altitude. Well, at breakfast one morning we were on a plateau at just short of 16,000 feet dining on toast and red paste, and my brother in law Tom (the guy who lived in a hole in the ground in Kansas) had this glazed look about him and each time we would say something to him, the response, if there was one, would come like 30 seconds later.
I spoke to the head guy, the one that spoke English, and he said Willard (the dining Room Table carrier) had come down an emergency route from this point a year earlier when a climber had broken an ankle. He could send Tom down with Willard and he thought they could get down to about 10,000 feet in 6 or 7 hours of steady trekking where the lower altitude should make Tom comfortable. In the meantime, he would call the base camp and have them send a Land Rover as far up the mountain as possible to meet them. Well, I couldn’t let my brother-in-law go off alone in Africa with some guy who didn’t speak two words of English, so I said I’d go down the emergency route with them. This trip down could be the subject of another entire story, but to summarize it simply, as we descended Tom got stronger, but it was a murderous ordeal and to make it even worse we encountered the most violent downpour I have ever experienced in my life. There were times when the three of us could not see each other even though we were just a few feet apart. We were absolutely drenched when we happened upon an outcrop of rock where we could seek shelter, and even though we had to wade through absolutely massive spiderwebs hanging from the outcrop that looked like a scene from Indiana Jones and The Lost Arc, we brushed them aside and went in!
About twenty minutes after the downpour began, it stopped as suddenly as it had started, and slipping and sliding we continued down the mountain for a few more hours… hours where each one seemed like an eternity. Then, as darkness approached and with it our growing fear of being stuck out there in the dead of night with whatever beasts of prey inhabited this awful place, we heard this terrible growling and screeching. It was this mud splattered ancient Land Rover 110 clawing its way up the mountain! A more welcome sight we had never seen in our lives. Even Willard the porter had a big shit eating grin on his face. I couldn’t believe any vehicle could climb that mountain and was convinced at that moment that the Land Roover could even climb a tree!
On the ride down, which was pretty perilous in itself, I told my brother-in-law that as soon as we got back home, I was buying one of those trucks… and I actually ended up buying two of them on E-Bay! One was owned by Jimmy Buffet the singer, and the other was a rare Land Rover that had been converted from standard shift to an automatic… but that’s another story for another time. By the time we finally got back to the hotel we were so exhausted that the doorman at the hotel had to help us up the curb. We could not lift our legs even the six inches to reach the sidewalk!
We plopped down in a couple of chairs in the lobby, and after bumming a cigarette off a couple of guys sitting there (my first in months) I used the hotel’s telephone to call home and update my wife on all that had transpired in the past five days, but she already knew everything! Back then there was no cell phone service in Tanzania, but… from the top of Kilimanjaro, above the clouds at 20,000 feet, Luke and Johns’ cellphones worked just fine. They had reached the summit, planted the Montecristo Afrique flag, memorialized it with a picture, and called home from there! Two days later, John and Luke arrived back at the hotel, and a long, tedious, and stressful trip home began… but that too is another story for another day!
Here’s some pictures from the Montecristo Afrique Expedition!
This was the crew from L to R
My son Luke, my son in law John (who thought we were going to upstate New York!), my brother-in-law Tom (who lived in an earth sheltered home below ground level, and me.
Me, smokin’ a Don Diego Royal Palm near sunset at about 10,000 feet.
Watch your step that first slip is a real Mother F #%ker!
It’s hard to believe, but this glacier at the top no longer exists – it’s gone!
Planting the Montecristo Afrique flag at the summit and trying to light a cigar at 20,000 feet!
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Smoke Inn, its employees, or its affiliates.
