“You’re fine,” said Paps from behind me. It was the fourth time I had halted in the last five minutes, and I stared in dismay at the steep jungle slope looming over us.
I didn’t tell him that it wasn’t the climb up that made me hesitate. It was the inevitable fall down that had my heart stopping.
Mind you, I’m not afraid of heights. I can sit right against the window in the Signature Room and peer straight down, loving how space-agey the city looks at night. And, growing up as an oil palm plantation girl, I was familiar with unpaved roads, biking down winding laterite paths that have no rails to protect the unfamiliar visitor (there have been a few instances where company cars and Land Rovers have gone off the edge in the rain).
However, in those instances, I knew I had sure footing when it was time to descend. There were things to hold on to, and footholds that you could at least stick a toe in. The path up Gunung Lambak that my father had chosen, however, guaranteed a rather sharp and pointy tumble down, no matter how steady-as-a-mountain-goat your feet might be. I couldn’t help thinking of my cousin, who had gone mountain-climbing years ago and had experienced such a fall. I quivered inside.
It was Paps’s idea to go hiking up Gunung Lambak, as a father-daughter moment since I was visiting home. Or rather, a father-children moment, since my brothers had come along as well. “Gunung” means “mountain,” while “lambak” means “heap.” So, in essence, its name translates into one heap of a mountain. Rather ironic, considering it’s just 510 meters high; I’d always thought of it as more of a hill, scarcely regarding something as a “mountain” unless it was in the four-digit level.
Woe to those who underestimate a mountain-wannabe.
Despite its being right in town, and despite my being part of high school clubs that went there as part of annual activity projects, I had never been to Gunung Lambak. This was mainly because I’d lived too out of the way in the aforementioned oil palm plantation. Then, later, I went off to college, and then to another country, so I’d never gone over to what I termed the local “hill.”
Paps, meanwhile, ascended Gunung Lambak almost religiously in recent years, needing some kind of activity to fill his semi-retirement (there are times when golf just doesn’t cut it anymore). He was still going when I came back to Malaysia to visit, and finally, one afternoon, I agreed to go with him.
I hadn’t thought it a big deal. After all, I’d always heard of schoolmates making trips there, and Paps had mentioned white-haired senior citizens with tiny tots going over for a little stroll. So I gamely tied on my blue running shoes, hopped in the car with my brothers, and went.
Let me add that even when we arrived, the mountain was deviously deceptive. There was the dark green rainforest surrounding, something that’s familiar to all Malaysians, and rest-stops to provide shade. And with a playground right by the entrance, how was I to know I should’ve braced myself from the start?
It started off effortlessly enough, with a paved cement walkway and stacked slabs. Having been away so long, I drank up the luscious greenery, holding on to the fresh, heavy scent of bark and leaves to take back with me when I leave. I kept pace with my dad fairly well, letting him show where we were supposed to go.
I should’ve known better.
See, for years my dad was a plantation manager. He made regular evaluation trips to regional estates, even all the way to the rural areas of Sandakan. By the time he retired, I half-expected him to take it easy, but Mum and I didn’t hold our breaths. It was only a matter of time before he adjusted his status to semi-retired and began making contractual trips to African plantations.
From Ghana, parts of the Cote d’Ivoire, and other places, he e-mailed about staying in mud-huts, which at one point got washed away by flash floods. He showed photos of lions and elephants from a safari trip he took on the side. I’d fidgeted nervously at pictures of him and the local gendarmes, this beaming man in his late 50s posing alongside grim, rifle-toting soldiers.
What I’m trying to say is, this is not a white-haired senior citizen who goes for little strolls.
And so there I was, staring up at a narrow clearing in the sharp slope that was little more than earth and rocks. There weren’t even handy deep-rooted shrubbery that I could rely on for balance; the plants in our way had soft stalks and wouldn’t provide much counter-weight should I have to grab on to one.
To be more precise, going up didn’t present that big a problem. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and the human brain is imaginative enough to use whatever’s on hand—or foot—to get by. It was the going down that worried me. And by “worried,” I mean thinking oh crap crap down cousin fall crap crap ow down. . . .
I couldn’t believe that grandparents took their little ones on this route every weekend. How did they possibly manage? Didn’t they know how knobbly the dive down was? Another part of me thought, This is what my dad climbs every other afternoon?
“You’re fine,” Paps said again, patiently, and he waited behind me as I ever so slowly moved a smidgen ahead, stopped, smidgened some more, then stopped again.
My dad and I may be too much alike and wind up at loggerheads from time to time, but it was at that moment that I thought how much I loved this man. He didn’t tell me to “hurry up” or impatiently demand that I get over this trepidation. Instead, he just waited, staying right behind me so that he could catch me if I fell.
After a long bit of smidgening, we were finally up and over the most difficult hurdle. We reached the halfway point, where a sign welcomed us to Gunung Lambak (more likely, I thought, congratulated us on surviving the trip). My brothers ambled over to the fountain to take off their shirts, stand about in a manly fashion, the usual sort of thing. Later they would decide to check out the upper half of the mountain, and much later they would come back down, shaking their heads in disappointment and saying there was “nothing up there.”
Paps and I, meanwhile, stayed at the halfway point, at the marble table and stools meant for visitors. Whether for a father-daughter moment, or because I was bracing myself for the inevitable journey down, it’s a toss-up. We were pleasantly surprised when a couple of old friends showed up—their dads and mine had been colleagues, and I hadn’t seen them for years. It was amazing to see them—well, us, for that matter—all grown up, catching up on what’d been happening with the other. My dad, sociable fellow that he is, told us about a special stick he’d paid an orang asli to cut down for him, which according to local legend can kill a man if you strike him with it. I was of the opinion that you can generally kill a person if you hit hard enough, strategically enough, and enough number of times with any sort of stick, but hey, that’s just me. You get the idea of the kind of conversation we had, and the grins going around.
Eventually we realized it was time for dinner. I had relaxed so much that I’d forgotten about the inevitable descent. In fact, I almost didn’t care. Almost. We headed away from the halfway point, and I repeated to myself a wordless mantra that served as some sort of distraction.
It worked so well that I didn’t realize we weren’t going the same way. Instead, we were magically at another path, this one definitely paved and more level than our previous ascent. “Let’s take the easy way down,” said Paps cheerfully.
There was an easy way down?
You mean we could’ve taken the same easy way up?
I was incredulous. All that worry for nothing? All that hesitation and clinging to rocks and smidgening for naught? I was indignant. I was chagrined. This, I saw, was where grandparents were casually strolling, their tiny tots prancing about and picking up stray twigs off the concrete. I couldn’t believe it! And I would’ve stood with my arms akimbo if I wasn’t so gosh-darned relieved that we wouldn’t have to do an unintentional somersault down the side of the cliff.
It only goes to show, you don’t have to go abroad in order to experience a Foreign Foible. Sometimes they happen in your own backyard—or on your neighborhood mountain, as it were. I’d spent so much time worrying and fretting about how we were going to climb down that I didn’t get to fully partake in the experience of climbing up.
I learned something that day. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is be in the moment. Sooner or later, you’ll find your way down, and you may surprise yourself at how resourcefully you do it (or, as the case may be, the non-need to). In the meantime, enjoy the journey up. Be in the present.
And, more importantly, clarify the details with your dad before going through such an experience again.
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