405. The Climb

For her honeymoon, Jo Piazza and her husband climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. Not only was it a physical feat, it was the first test of their new marriage.

Jo Piazza is an author, podcaster and journalist. Her latest book, The Sicilian Inheritance, is on sale now and it’s SO good!! Jo also hosts the podcast Under The Influence, about social media marketing and how we all interact with it.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Jo Piazza:    I’m Jo Piazza,  and it’s going to be okay.  My husband Nick and I did a crazy thing for our honeymoon.  I’m not a particularly fit person. Uh, he is. He is the kind of person who climbs mountains and dives from cliffs. That’s not me. But, uh, I did want to do something adventurous on our honeymoon, so we agreed that we were going to try to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. 

I know, it seems crazy.  And I was in, I was in fine shape, just like maybe not hike in a mountain shape, but people told me it was, It was just like, just walking, you know, just walking up a hill. It’s not crazy. It’s not technical, but I was scared. I was, I was nervous. And Nick and I made this pact that if one of us couldn’t make it up the mountain for any reason, the other was gonna keep going because it’s expensive to fly to Africa and to climb Kilimanjaro. 

I was like, seriously, dude, if I get tired or sick or, or hurt, you, you go. You, you climb that freaking mountain.  And Nick was also like, yeah, no, if I can’t climb, if I fail, if I can’t make it, then, then you should go too. But I didn’t think that was going to happen because Nick doesn’t fail at  anything.  So we get there and I start walking.

I looked at the steep inclines and I just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.  Nick kept the pace with me, he carried my pack, he even stole a salt shaker from the mess hut so I’d stay hydrated, and he took napkins from the other trekkers so I’d never run out of toilet paper.  That is love. 

He kept saying pole pole  to the guides, which means my wife needs to go slow.  I, I was, I was very slow. I mean picture the movements of like an arthritic septuagenarian. That was pretty much the pace that my body preferred. We, we fell in step with a group of geriatric folks from Japan who were all wearing ski goggles.

Our guide told us that he’d seen couples of all ages climb the mountain together, and he told us that climbing the mountain is actually a good metaphor for succeeding in marriage. He said, you know, what you have to remember is that both the mountain and a marriage can be completely different in the afternoon from It’s like in the morning and you can’t predict what it’s going to bring.

Trying to predict it is just going to bring you unneeded grief. You have to try to enjoy the parts that are wonderful and not worry about anything else.  As we kept going, as I kept getting more and more tired, Nick invented this ridiculous song that made no sense, but it had a rhythm that matched the click, click, click of my walking sticks.

It goes, oregano, oregano, gotta keep it moving, gotta keep it moving. All right, all right.  By the close of day three, going very slowly, I felt really good about myself. I thought, I’m like, all right, yeah, I, I can do this. I was taking a thousand selfies with the peak, which was finally in view. We were about to climb to the top.

And that distracted me from the fact that my husband, my husband who doesn’t fail at anything, had slowed down.