Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (4 page)

Hoyt must have been temporarily detached from his good senses, and in some sort of rage fugue, as he accepted the bet.

Chapter Two: The Presidentials

Hoyt had contacted Junk by mail only three days after the Beacon Hill incident, specifying a long weekend for a climb in the White Mountains. The date was only two months off. Hoyt’s need for revenge must have been like thirst for water: immediate satiety was a matter of life or death.

The press had a heyday. In a battle over honor, two handsome, wealthy society men had landed in jail. Now, they were settling the score through the new, manly endeavor of mountaineering.

Aaron Junk had no idea what “the Presidentials” were, nor did he know a thing about hiking mountains. Querying friends, acquaintances, and business associates reaped nothing. No one knew about the relatively nascent field of recreational climbing. He checked with connections in Europe. It turned out an Austrian woman he had courted for several months came from a family of climbers. Junk traveled to Vienna and consulted with her father, an elderly gentlemen who had climbed in the Alps for decades. The man suffered from dementia and so it was difficult for Junk to separate sound advice from gibberish. Clearly, a coat made of women’s hair was not preferable to gabardine in combating the elements, but the man said other things that were less easy to dismiss. Would a climb in the Presidentials really require crampons – spikes attached to one’s shoes for ice climbing? Would it really get down to thirty degrees below zero at night?

Upon returning to the States, Junk also traveled up to New Hampshire to see what lay ahead. He spoke to people in bars and restaurants. He spoke to the innkeeper where he stayed. A bleak picture was painted by the local commoners: Although the traverse was relatively simple for experienced climbers, it was no stroll through the Boston Gardens. A first-time climber should not be attempting this trek.

The Presidential Range is made up of a chain of peaks in the White Mountains named after various presidents of the United States. Among them are Mount Jefferson, Mount Adams, Mount Quincy Adams, and Mount Madison. The Traverse is a twenty-mile trail passing by a subset of those Presidential peaks, including Mount Washington, the tallest peak in the American Northeast.

The hike is not technical. No special climbing equipment is required except for crampons. An ice-climbing axe should be brought along in case of emergencies, but generally is not needed. After the initial ascent from the trailhead to the top of Mount Madison, the climb mostly follows ridgelines which also make for relatively easy hiking.

However, one cannot quantify the difficulty of an expedition purely by enumerating its technical challenges. Although her height pales in comparison to peaks in the Pacific Northwest, the Alps, and the Himalaya, Mount Washington is known to have an erratic temperament. Loose snow up to one’s chest can make for excruciatingly slow progress. Storms and high winds arise out of nowhere. The highest wind speed ever recorded on Earth was at the summit of Mount Washington, which rises to an impressive height of 6,288 feet. Deaths occur on its faces and ridges regularly, especially in winter.

Junk drove to the trailhead and viewed the mountains from the road. Walking in about a half-mile, he found the snow to be deep, at times up to his waist. At eleven in the morning, he estimated the temperature to be about twenty degrees, and that was with no wind at an elevation of only one thousand feet. There would be no backing out of this. In his forty-five years, he had never backed out of anything, and that would certainly not change when the stakes were this high. The money was irrelevant, as his dignity was on the line.

Over the next two months, Junk had two goals: Exercise obsessively and learn everything there was to know about William Hoyt. The former was no problem. Junk made constant trips to the Blue Hills Reservation outside of Boston, running through the woods with weights strapped to his back. He also spent time in the local gymnasiums. Constant walking and avoidance of a desk job had kept Junk fit his entire life. The bigger challenge would be overcoming the alien terrain that was the wilderness. But Junk made quick business of this by purchasing a tent and camping out at night in the woods. The transition was painless, actually pleasurable. He took a shine to the smell of pine trees and the sighting of a snow owl. He was escaping the cold calculus of business life and the right angles of the South End. Best of all, this “escape route” did not take him through drinking benders or other games of chance.

As for his other goal of brushing up on William Hoyt, Junk read through every magazine article and newspaper society page he could get his hands on that made even a passing reference to the sourpuss. Junk also interrogated any acquaintance at social functions who had spent even a fleeting moment with Hoyt. Not surprisingly, Junk was disgusted by the picture these sources painted. Being born into wealth was already enough to leave Junk seething. But making the package ever more distasteful was the fact that Hoyt was a teetotaler and notoriously bad in social situations. As a last strike against him, Hoyt was religious and quite active in his church. As one article put it, Hoyt “was deeply invested in his walk with Christ.” If there was one thing Junk could not brook, it was avid churchgoers. After years of business dealings with the ostensibly pious, Junk had grown sick of the hypocrisy of his clientele. For weekends in his youth he would see these devout souls in their Sunday best; yet they were the same gamblers, charlatans, and hussies he would see reeling about the night before. Junk did not know Hoyt’s sins, but he was sure they were profound if the man was “deeply invested in his walk with Christ.”

The one unassailable part of Hoyt’s background was his mountaineering abilities. At forty-four, Hoyt had already climbed the Matterhorn, the Eiger, the Dolomites, Mount Rainier, and was planning his first trip to the Himalaya, where he was going to lead an American team to the top of Nanga Parbat. Fellow climbers described him as a woefully dull man, but unrivaled in his climbing expertise. Junk, the man who always gambled the well-researched odds had clearly gotten sloppy and placed an enormous bet without doing his homework.

As young buck, William Hoyt had taken up climbing while vacation in the Alps with his lady friend Wizzy Dodge. That new avocation came to a quick end when Hoyt’s father, Spalding, forbid his son from ever climbing again. The younger Hoyt “felt like a window had opened up for a brief moment and then promptly slammed shut.” While it had been open he had seen a universe much like this one, with the major exception being it was vertical instead of horizontal. It rose to glorious heights and ranged in atmospheres, unlike the present world which made only lateral changes that meant nothing. The window had not only closed in front of him, but the shades had been drawn. No light shown through. The father had essentially told the son he was not allowed to live.

William realized he simply could not face the future without his new-found hobby. But at the same time, he could not disobey his father. He had no choice but to lead a double life. He would lie to his father, promising to never climb again. But behind his father’s back he would continue. William graduated from college, got a small flat in Manhattan, and worked for Spalding. But all he cared about was going up more mountains. Climbing became a “repetition compulsion” – something forbidden and taboo that he could not stop. Alcoholics kept whiskey in jars under the floorboards. Compulsive gamblers visited underground poker games on their lunch breaks. William Hoyt secretly went climbing on the weekends. Along with Wizzy, he took on the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the White Mountains, and the Green Mountains. Every time he went, he would take bigger and bigger risks, as if he wanted to get caught. Afterwards, he would “ride home in my horse-drawn carriage, still hungry for more and filled with a growing sense of shame as I reentered this horizontal world.”

The single-day climbs were also becoming less interesting to him. He wanted to climb higher than a day would take him. He had read of American and British teams climbing to unprecedented heights in the Andes and the Himalaya. Only a few years previous, the British occultist Aleister Crowley had made an attempt on
Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world (as far as the world knew at the time). Crowley had gotten to about 20,000 feet before an avalanche wiped out much of his party and he was forced to turn around. “I dreamed of challenges like these,” William wrote, “but knew there would be no way to hide them from father.”

If William had some deep urge to get caught, then his urge was about to be fulfilled. One summer afternoon while climbing Smuggler’s Notch in Vermont with three former classmates from Yale, William damaged himself terribly after falling twenty feet onto mossy rock. He was tied to a board and gently lowered off the notch wall with an ornate system of ropes and pulleys. He was then taken to Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury to recover from a broken arm, another broken rib, and multiple lacerations to the neck and scalp (he had landed on a raccoon).

William’s father was at a garden party held by New York Governor William Sulzer when he received word of his son’s folly. According to other party attendees, the usually-reserved man spat out his lemonade, cursed loudly, and punched a hole through the top of his straw boater. After apologizing profusely to the governor for his outburst, Spalding travelled to Vermont to visit his son at the hospital. His intent was not to comfort William.

Spalding cut his first-born son out of his will, fired him from his job at the family business, and, after the hospital bills were paid off, had no intention of funding William any further in life. William may very well have been hurt by this turn of events, but he must have also felt liberated, fearing the day his father would discover his hidden life, but unconsciously willing the event for several years. Now the storm had passed, the stale humidity of sameness had broken, and he was free.

Hoyt was also doing a background check on Junk before the Presidential assault. Climbers often have to rely on their fellow climbers for survival. There was no way a man like Hoyt was going to put himself in a life or death situation with someone he did not know. More importantly, he likely wanted to know of any possible way he could get out of paying one hundred thousand dollars if he lost the bet. The more he knew about this lush, the better.

On the day of the traverse, rain fell steadily and the temperature was unseasonably warm. Early March in New Hampshire was still winter, but this year was different. A front from the south had made its way to New England one week earlier and still stubbornly held its ground.

The uncomfortable reunion at the trailhead took place just before lunch on Friday, March 1st. The two men started fighting almost immediately. Hoyt stated his concern about the weather. Such warmth could bring on avalanches. In addition, they would be soaked early on, and once the temperature dropped with higher elevation and the approach of evening, everything they carried and wore would turn to ice. Junk would have none of it. They were going to make the trip regardless of weather. What Hoyt saw as a well-reasoned, conservative decision on his part, Junk saw as cowardice. In a letter to his mate McGee, Junk wrote, “I was hell bent, and told Hoyt in no uncertain terms, ‘One hundred thousand dollars says we walk today.’” In an effort to assist Junk in getting everything he deserved, Hoyt agreed to proceed.

Back in 1919, Junk hit the financial mother lode. The money he was about to make would go on to take care of him for years to come. Even the Fumu ascent, still but a dot on his horizon, impossibly orthogonal to his life in 1919, would be funded by events that were about to transpire.

Patrick McGee was friends with a healthy number of Boston police officers, some because he grew up with them and others because he bribed them to stay away from his crap games. Through McGee, Junk also befriended many of officers. These friendships were actually the means by which Junk and McGee avoided the Draft. When soldiers came for recruits, local police would “arrest” the two men for preposterous crimes (One form read “Practicing magic without a license”), and the soldiers would opt to look elsewhere for men to send to Europe.

The city of Boston was going through a terrible crisis with its police force. The police were underpaid and required to work under abominable working conditions. When the police tried to unionize, the commissioner, mayor, and governor pushed back. Many officers were fired for trying to organize.

Junk was born a calculator of situations, and this time he foresaw that the police debacle was going to get worse before it got better. He knew the hearts of the police officers, and from the newspapers, he felt he knew the hearts of Commissioner Curtis, Mayor Peters, and Governor Coolidge. All parties were bullheaded and had serious investments in the outcome. Junk understood – as if it were written on parchment – that this was going to end up with the police striking and the local government unprepared to do anything about it.

Junk acted fast. He remembered the names of the wealthy families to whom he had sold soda in front of the church during leaner times. He went door to door, visiting them in their homes on Beacon Hill and outlying areas. He let them know things were about to get scary in their fair town. He let them know if the police did stop working and chaos ensued, chances were high the wealthy would be targeted. Their houses burned, their women raped, their children taken from them, and their own lives snuffed out. Junk also let them know that for a daily fee, he could ensure their safety with his own security force until such a time the conflict had subsided. He ensured them this was not like mafia security. Signing up was optional, and they could stop paying at any time.