Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (5 page)

It is a testament to Junk’s amazing way with people that almost every family he visited took him up on the offer. Each paid him tens of thousands of dollars for protection from the riotous hoards. They signed a contract and in return were handed a piece of paper with details about the paramilitary officer who would be summoned to their house if a strike should occur. His new customers went on to tell friends about Junk and McGee’s service, and those people immediately came looking for protection.

On the evening of September 9
^th
, as Junk predicted, the city descended into madness. The police went on strike, and the local and state governments were not able to replace the officers until the next day. Throughout the evening, rule of law was suspended. Violence broke out in every corner of the city. Windows were smashed, people were assaulted, and fires were started.

Very quietly, out of the picket lines, several hundred striking officers disappeared into the night. They individually arrived at homes with well-manicured lawns and at perfectly maintained row houses. Greeted graciously by the people inside, maybe offered a sandwich or a cup of coffee, these officers then went about the business of vigilantly standing guard outside of their employers’ homes, waiting to bash in the skulls of any rioters who chose to target their charge.

The officers were getting paid only slightly more than the city paid them, which was fine given the city had no intention of paying them during a strike anyway. Junk and McGee had little overhead to worry about. Most of the revenue went right into their pockets. Between the times Junk started selling the security services until the evening of the infamous Boston Police Strike – a period of about two weeks – historians estimate Junk and McGee pulled in almost one million dollars in pure profit.

Then Junk and McGee took their profits and bet it all - and considerably more - on the Cincinnati Reds in the infamous 1919 World Series. A friend of Junk’s named Nicky Arnstein had let him know “the fix was in” and the heavily favored White Sox planned to throw the game. Exactly one month to the day after the police strike, Junk turned one million dollars into tens of millions of dollars.

Junk and McGee were now major players in Boston. They ran legitimate business and they ran the streets between them. They drank watered down ale in the seediest dives in South Boston, and they drank the finest single malt scotch at private functions along The Commons. They had connections high and low, among public officials and private businessmen. Junk especially made waves because of his impressive social gifts. McGee often chose to lay low and attend to business. Junk was the face of their power. Everyone knew him. It would not be an exaggeration to say that by the opening of the 1920’s, Aaron Junk
owned
the city of Boston.

On the trail, Hoyt and Junk did not speak to each other. Progress was slow. Snow and slush reached to their belts. They were soaked to the bone, making everything heavier. Even good friends would have kept conversation to a minimum in such conditions. Every bit of energy was focused on moving forward.

As they ascended, the weather improved. The rain let up. The sun shined. But the temperature dropped and the wind picked up behind the departing front. The sun was setting when they reached the top of Mount Madison, and they set up camp in brutal conditions.

In the night, the wind continued to pick up outside of their tents. Junk was introduced to a kind of cold he had never known before. Every muscle he had was in a state of total rigor. As Hoyt had predicted, everything was frozen, including the wool hat Junk wore on his head as he searched in vain for dreams in his sleeping bag.

It was then things got worse. Junk’s tent, which was also frozen after sitting wet in his backpack on the ascent, succumbed to the howling wind. It did not rip. “In its frozen state, the roof actually cracked and then rose up like a drawbridge. I was suddenly looking at the tops of aspens framing a starry sky.” Humility had not been in Junk’s lexicon until that night. He simply had no alternative but to hop over to Hoyt’s tent in his sleeping bag and beg for entry. The two men spent the rest of the night in the same tent, which potentially kept them alive. Both Hoyt and Junk would return from the trip with advanced frostbite on their toes. Hoyt would lose one to amputation.

Having been cut off by his father, William Hoyt
had no home, no finances, and no family. Wizzy’s parents were fond of the young man and agreed to take him in for a few months or until he was back on his feet and Wizzy herself did not hesitate to pay for everything. Over the course of the next two years, Hoyt would marry Wizzy, enroll at Columbia Business School, have two sons, and sign up for his first mountain-climbing expedition. World War I was visited upon the United States, but thanks to climbing injuries it passed William quietly by. While colleagues fought and died in European trenches, William started up his own business concern, Daily Bread, with a loan from the Dodge family. He competed directly with the Hoyt Bread Company, the business of his own father. With his well-honed business acumen, William succeeded in routing the old man at his own game.

The competition only lasted a few months. Spalding Hoyt died of acute constipation in 1920. His constipation had been so acute in fact that it attracted the attention of doctors around the world. The blockage backed up to his duodenum, the valve below the stomach. The case was infamous in medical circles. Many of the groundbreaking methods the doctors used to understand Spalding’s condition would go on to inform the methods used today for studying the physics of automobile traffic patterns.

William and his brother Randolph attended Spalding’s funeral, but spent most of their time ensuring their mother Maddy – who had gone quite mad with early onset dementia - did not blurt out comments about Woodrow Wilson’s secret life as a vampire. Like Maddy, William was not in a mental state that allowed him to shed tears at the passing of Spalding. “I was certainly full of emotion, but the emotion did not have a name. My heartbeat, breathing, and thinking were rapid. My face was warm. That is all I could say about it.”

Now t
he millionaire bread maker took on climbing with an insatiable zeal. He went on to not only climb Mount Rainier but to forge his own route, now named after him, halfway between the Fuhrer Finger Route and the Ingraham Headwall Variation. He took on McKinley. He traveled to Europe, the war now over, and completed the first known solo ascent of Monteviso in the Italian Alps. He was the talk of the climbing communities on two continents. His reputation for adventure also penetrated financial and social circles. People did not much like to be in his company as it was much like to trying to strike up conversation with a shoe, but they made sure to be seen with him anyway. A few minutes of miserable dialogue – or monologue as the case often turned out to be - were a small price to pay for a photo opportunity with the world’s greatest mountain climber.

Now a mother, Wizzy could not and did not want to join her husband on his climbs. William’s time with Wizzy and the children diminished. She begged him to save the climbing for when the kids were older, but he could not oblige. The weight of his father was gone. He did not want it to be immediately replaced with his family. “Please do not play that role in my life,” he once asked her. Out of deep love for her husband, Wizzy Hoyt – the woman who had run topless through Times Square, sprayed Calvin Coolidge with seltzer, and climbed many portions of the Pyrenees large men feared – acquiesced and stayed at home with her children while William climbed the world.

To be sure,
William Hoyt was living out his dream. He had no idea a man was out there waiting to turn his dream into the kind of stinking, violent hallucination one experiences at the height of sepsis.

Junk hiked in front. They were now completing the main portion of the Presidential traverse which occurred on Saturday. Aside from suffering through the bodily harm they had received the night before, the day went quite well. The weather was cold but otherwise harmless. Junk showed himself to be fast and fearless. Deep snow, sheer ice, and nerve-wracking heights seemed to have little effect on him. He actually basked in it. Hoyt had to concede the glorified street urchin was a good match for him in terms of speed. “We would get separated by at most a few hundred feet, but then he would catch up
within a few minutes.”
After a day of solid hiking, they dug bivouacs and settled in for the night. Although cold, the situation was not nearly as bad as the night before. Their clothing had dried and the snow caves kept them relatively warm. Also, Mount Pierce is not as tall as Mount Madison where they had camped the night before, so the temperature remained slightly higher.

The final day of the trip had the potential to be short, painless, and possibly even pleasant. They simply needed to descend Mount Pierce and both men would have cars waiting for them, one driven by Wizzy, the other by McGee. As they descended, the two actually made some small talk. “I remember we discussed the delightfully sunny weather, New Hampshire history, and that socialist cripple Roosevelt,” recalled Hoyt. “I would not go so far as to say we experienced a moment of liking each other, but for a short while, we felt our adversarial relationship may not be worth it.” These are surprising words from Hoyt given that in roughly two hours – should events continue unabated - he was going to be relieved of one hundred thousand dollars.

Some time between that brief dialogue and the end of the trail, they became separated. Hoyt arrived at the trailhead but Junk did not. Whether Hoyt deliberately sped ahead is unknown to this day. Whatever the reason, Junk became lost in the woods with only a half-mile left. “I wandered like the Hebrews of old. There was no sign of a trail, a road, a human. I couldn’t follow any tracks because the low-lying area had flooded due to warm weather. The ground was slush, mud, and tiny rivers of run-off.”

Junk was lost for several hours. When Hoyt and a team of local police found him, the sun was going down and Junk had already set up his ripped tent and was trying to start a fire with wet tinder. He was seething; convinced Hoyt had ditched him intentionally. “Junk said nothing to me, only to the police. I knew what he was thinking, and I was appalled. My parents raised me properly. Risking another man’s life in order to save oneself money is not what humans do. The man got lost due to his own sloth.”

Nonetheless, the possibility did exist that Hoyt abandoned his foe unconsciously. One hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money by today’s standards, but in the 1930’s, in the middle of the Great Depression, one hundred thousand dollars meant considerably more. Hoyt may have allowed himself to pick up speed at the end using some alternative reasoning, like “This is the final sprint.” That reasoning could work as an alibi when speaking to others and when carrying on an internal dialogue. And that is the alibi he used.

When the party of police and climbers arrived at the road, Junk finally asked Hoyt about delivery of his winnings. Hoyt said there would be no money because Junk did not traverse the Presidentials successfully. He got lost and required aid to get out. Junk responded - loudly - that he was standing at the end of the trail at that very moment. No one had driven him there. No one had carried him. He had used his feet to go from one end of the trail to the other. The sheriff asked both the men to calm down, but it was no use. Hoyt yelled that the “Presidential Traverse” was the name of a trail and Junk had lost the trail, requiring the assistance of others to save him. What’s more, no one had shaken on the bet. They had both been confined to jail cells when the agreement had been made. “You lose, Aaron Junk. You lose.”

Holding a crampon in his left hand, spikes out, Junk ran at Hoyt. He took one swipe at his target, but Hoyt was ready. “I grabbed the arm that held the crampon,” Hoyt said. “I then employed a move I had learned on a trip to the Orient. I turned around - the attacker now behind me – while putting the offending arm over my shoulder, elbow down. Pulling the arm downward and bending my back, the victim has no choice but to heave himself over me, in essence flipping himself. The alternative is to suffer a broken arm.” Junk was no exception from the laws of physics. He was lifted up over Hoyt and ended up on his back, looking up at his foe. But he was quickly on his feet, fighting again.

The police descended. Had the two men stopped fighting right then, they would have simply been sent their separate directions. But the fight continued and the police had to struggle to pull the two apart. One officer received a misguided punch to the side of the head. For a second time, Hoyt and Junk spent an evening staring at each other from separate jail cells.

Upon his release, Junk returned to find his business concerns were suffering from neglect due to his absence and McGee’s lack of intelligence. The experience of the past several days had also left him rather uncomfortable physically. But that was not the worst of it. At the Beacon Hill Tavern the first night home, Junk received the word his mother had died. The nightly beatings he had received as a youth were now definitively over, but then again so was the unspoken love and pride Junk had to believe were there in the meals she prepared and shelter she provided. Now he would never know.

Despite these horrible circumstances, Junk seemed in good spirits to those around him. Mountain climbing had come into his life. He wanted to do something like it again. Nay, he
had
to do something like it again. In what form, he did not know. He was above being a common bridge builder. But he would find some way and some excuse to scurry up things. Even after only one experience, Aaron felt climbing was not a metaphor for something else. Everything else in his life was a metaphor for climbing. Strip the poetry of the world away, and there was simply up, down, back, forth, left and right. Upward and forward were good. Everything else was pointless. He did not yet know how, but Aaron was destined to go upward and forward.