Member-only story
The Climb Day Two: Let The Benevolent Forced Feedings Commence
“I don’t know how much I’m really going to be able to eat at this hour,” Carrie said to me. She sat across from me in the dark little green dining tent intended to cocoon just the two of us as Amos, the team server, darted in and out with plates positively heaped with food. He presented them to us, one by one, making an impassioned speech about how deeply, truly his heart wanted us to fill our stomachs.
It hasn’t been hard to eat the food presented to us. The team cook has done a shockingly good job preparing three hot meals a day in a mysterious army beige tent set discreetly back from camp. We’d had no difficulty satisfying Amos’s desire to see us stuff ourselves to the gills, but this morning, there was clearly more to it. He just wasn’t saying what.
“At higher altitude you might feel sick and start to throw up,” Prosper told us. Delightful. “We want you to get calories now because you might not be able to later.”
Once he finally just told us that my running joke that we aren’t really on vacation but have been kidnapped by the nicest people on the planet who endeavor to give us a really lovely vacation while our families at home (without direct involvement from the State Department of course) work to raise our ransom didn’t seem that far off. But we signed up for this and in doing so…