Ray Bradbury: The Kilimanjaro Device

Ray Bradbury's "The Kilimanjaro Device"
a short story found in the collection  I Sing the Body Electric


Did the title jog your memory a bit?  Perhaps remind you of another story by an American writer?  Who does the following quotation from the story suggest?

     "Oh, he had readers all right, all kinds of readers.  Even me.  I don't touch books from one autumn to the next.  But I touched his.  I think I liked the Michigan stories best.  About the fishing. I think the  stories about the fishing are good.  I don't think anybody ever wrote about fishing that way and maybe won't ever again.  Of course, the bullfight stuff is good, too.   But that's a little far off.  Some of the cowpokes like them;  they been around the animals all their life.  A  bull here or a bull there, I guess it's the same.  I know one cowpoke has read just the bull stuff in the Spanish stories of the old man's forty times.  He could go over there and fight, I swear."

One last clue:  The narrator refers to "the old man" as "Papa."  Of course, the style Bradbury adopts in this story is also a clue:  short declarative sentences, usually the straightforward subject-verb-object form.  Everything is concrete and definite.

But the point of the story is rather unusual, which isn't surprising since it's a tale by Ray Bradbury.  The narrator is on a mission, which is why he has come to this small town where the "old man" is buried.  He reveals his mission to a local hunter, the one who was quoted above.



     "'You  been up to the grave yet?'  asked; the hunter, as if he knew I would answer yes.
     'No,' I said.
     'Why not?'
     ' Because it's the wrong grave.,' I said.
     'All graves are wrong graves when you come down to it,' he said.
     'No,' I said. 'There are right graves and wrong ones, just as there are good times to die and bad times.'
     He nodded at this.  I had come back to something he knew, or at least smelled was right.
     'Sure, I knew men.' he said, 'died just perfect.  You always felt, yes, that was good.  One man I knew, sitting at the table waiting for supper, his wife in the kitchen, when she came in with a big bowl of soup, there he was sitting dead and neat at the table.  Bad for her, but, I mean, wasn't that a good way for him?  No sickness. No nothing but sitting there waiting for supper to come and never knowing if it came or not.'"



As you can see, the story is going in a strange direction.  What does this have to do with the grave on the hill that is the wrong grave?  The grave is that of Ernest Hemingway, although it is never stated.  However, the clues given above clearly suggest it is Papa Hemingway, who committed suicide in 1961 and was buried in Ketchum, Idaho.  There's also  a time machine involved, sort of a "psychic time machine" that is.

Time machine stories generally fall into two broad categories.  There's type in which the time travelers go solely as observers, fearing to do something, anything  which would change history and perhaps eliminate them.  Frequently though, they end up doing exactly what they feared.  Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of  Thunder" is a variation of that type of story.  The travelers go back, intending to hunt dinosaurs, but they kill only those dinosaurs that will die within a few minutes anyway, thereby reducing the risk of changing the future.  But.  .  .

The second type of time traveler is the one who goes back intending to change history.  There generally two types of these.  One type involves those who go back to kill someone who had a major and deleterious effect (in their minds anyway) on history--I have read several stories in which someone goes back in order to kill Adolf Hitler, thereby reducing the possibility of WWII and the holocaust.   A second type depicts the efforts of those who attempt to save someone from being killed--Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy, for example.

But, neither of these is exactly what the narrator has in mind.




SPOILER:  The following reveals the story and the narrator's mission.  











The focus in the story is on dying at the right time.  As I mentioned above,  Hemingway committed suicide after living several years in pain and ill health, the result of an hereditary disease that affected several members of his family, some of whom either died from the disease or committed suicide.  Another contributing factor was the injuries he suffered in two plane crashes.  He and his wife had flown to Africa, but the plane crashed on landing.   He and his wife survived, but with some broken bones and tissue damage.  They attempted to fly out to get medical treatment on the next day, but that plane's engine exploded at takeoff.  Again they survived.  Eventually they did get the needed medical help, but Hemingway suffered health problems after that.

The narrator has a time machine, but he doesn't intend to use it to stop Hemingway from killing himself, nor does he intend to prevent the two plane crashes.  Instead, he goes back in time and meets "the old man." 

The narrator explains that the truck can possibly go back to 1954 (the date of the two plane crashes) and possibly can turn into plane.   The old man then asks him if he could land the plane a little bit differently, a little bit harder and that he "be thrown out but the rest of you okay?"
The narrator answers, "I'll see what I can do."

The old man "gazed back down the road at the mountains and the sea that could not be seen beyond the mountains and a continent beyond the sea. 'That's a good day you're talking about.' 
      'The best.'
      ' And a good hour and a good second.'
      'Really, nothing better.'"

Death is inevitable, but there are good deaths and bad deaths.