Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (3 page)

But enough about me and my humble aspirations . You are here to learn about Fumu, so let me take you there. But the route we must take to get there is somewhat circuitous. You see, no one can truly get to Fumu without following the trajectories of two rather unpleasant men: William Hoyt and Aaron Junk…

PART ONE: BEFORE THE ASCENT

Chapter One: Hatred on Stilts

“
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.”

-Bertrand Russell

Aaron Junk and William Hoyt loathed each other before they had even exchanged a word. Looking back at the relationship between the two rivals, it seems their hatred went to some microscopic substrate, as if their genetic compositions were designed solely for mutual destruction. Without each other for the first half of their respective lives, Junk and Hoyt were not complete as human beings. This all changed when they accidentally met on a snowy Boston night in 1935 and wasted no time getting into a rather nasty argle bargle that would portend the events of the next six years.

Junk was drinking with his old friend Patrick McGee and one other man named Simon Phelps at the Beacon Hill Tavern. According to The Boston Globe clipping recalling the trouble, William Hoyt and his party sauntered into the bar at approximately ten at night. They were returning from a three-day traverse of the Presidential Mountain Range in New Hampshire. Most of Hoyt’s group was already drunk from visiting other public houses in the area and from consuming cordials in the car. We can be sure Hoyt himself was not drunk, as the rather pious man never let alcohol pass his lips. On the topic of drink, he once said, “I may as well heat my head and strike it with a blacksmith’s hammer, forming it into the shape of an ass.”

The Globe article does not specify who started the fight, nor does it say anything about the cause, but only states that an “eight-man rhubarb” broke out in the bar and quickly moved out to a back alley. By the time it was over, five men went to jail and three others went to the hospital.

If William Hoyt’s life were boiled down to a simple sheet of facts, it would betray a pleasant enough American fellow. In his prime during the 1920’s and 1930’s, he worked effectively as the president of his own bread manufacturing company. He helped out every weekend at his local church. He was a husband and father of two. And of course he was a mountaineer.

However, festering within and between these facts lay another detail that was hardly subjective: William Hoyt was an asocial bore with a bad temper. He was perfunctory and pedantic with a tendency to snap at anyone who disagreed with him about anything. He felt comfortable reimagining his own mistakes as the mistakes of others, and he could not brook the mistakes of others. His temper was notorious among his co-workers, fellow climbers, and even his church. This unpleasant disposition might have been tolerable to others had it been paired with an equally adorable side; a Twain-ish wit perhaps, or the occasional glimpse of nurturance. But that was not the case. He was uninteresting. Hoyt remained quiet no matter where he was. His one-word responses to people’s questions hardly counted for conversation and so those who knew him avoided the situation entirely. When it came to climbing, his personality was a serious and even dangerous liability. Many of his best climbs were ones he did alone.

Surprisingly, these unpleasant traits roamed the world inside a human vessel uniquely built for great physical accomplishments. At six-foot-three and roughly thirteen stone, Hoyt was slim but powerful. Even at the time of the Fumu ascent, one year past the age of fifty, Hoyt was in better shape than most twenty-one-year-olds. He was built for crawling up mountains, with long limbs and a heart that beat as slowly as a hibernating bear’s. When most climbers were halfway up the Avalanche Gulch route of Mount Shasta in California, Hoyt was waiting at the summit, making coffee. He had been climbing for thirty years when Fumu came into his life, and he looked every bit of it. His face was thick and tough and wrinkled beyond his age. There were white splotches around his nose and forehead where frostbite had won, and a small scar on his temple where skin cancer had lost. But the overall effect was rugged and handsome. He also framed this beaten-up visage with perfectly-cut, slicked-back brown hair – a well-manicured lawn around an old landmark war cannon.

In a letter to his new friend Calvin Coolidge, Aaron Junk recounted the events at the Beacon Hill Tavern in elaborate detail. He, McGee, and Phelps sat at the end of the bar near the entrance. A group of five men came through the door. They were filthy and red from exposure to the sun. But they were also overjoyed and boisterous.

“
This Hoyt guy and his group strutted into the tavern like an ostentation of peacocks,” Junk writes, “as if this place and the women inside were their property. They spoke loudly and relentlessly. They drank a lot and flirted with every woman present, from the young bride of a local councilman to the seventy-year-old barmaid. They bought drinks for individuals they didn’t know, but then mixed the kind gesture with snide comments. ‘Barkeep! A scotch for the Harvard man’ they’d yell as they bought a drink for Petey, the half-crazed old lush in the corner. ‘Barkeep! A brandy for Sarah Bernhardt’ they’d yell as they bought a drink for Pearl, a morbidly fat woman who had been a fixture at the tavern for decades.” So it seems that Hoyt’s team fouled the room with their cheek. Then Junk’s memoir turns specifically to Hoyt. “But in the center of this fool-storm there was an eye – a man who said nothing. I appreciated him the least. He sipped tonic water with a face wreathed in silent smugness, offending my sensibilities more than his colleagues who actually spoke.”

Junk was not the kind of man to ignore the people or situations that rubbed him the wrong way. He could not simply move to another pub or go home. Junk had to approach Hoyt and his colleagues. His plan was not necessarily to start a fight, but instead to test these strangers. “They were either going to become my good friends or they were going to be brought low.”

It seemed no matter how much he tried to leave his hardscrabble upbringing behind, Aaron Junk returned to it every day. Between fits of tending to his business concerns – legitimate and otherwise – Junk waded waist-deep in ponies, women, and scotch. He enjoyed attending parties of all sorts but did not approve unless they turned into full-fledged bacchanals. To a New York Times reporter, he once claimed, “It’s not a party until all of the bodily fluids have made an appearance.” As for mountaineering, it came for him late in life, long after the vices of adolescent city living took root. But even then, climbing would never become spiritually cleansing for him. The mountains would become yet another environment full of fresh wagering opportunities.

Aaron was not a big man, but his charisma and stentorian voice made him seem much taller. He had a habit of standing very close to people and looking them directly in the eye while speaking, never breaking his gaze. Most listeners found it terrifying but exhilarating. He slapped people on the back and laughed at everything they said, as if each person who spoke to him uttered the quips of Moliere. When Aaron spoke, despite his close proximity to the listener, he spoke with the gut-vibrating alto of a cello. He would occasionally pull his listener in even closer, bring the volume of his voice down to a faint whisper, and speak to the person as if he were passing along the true name of God, even if he were just recommending the fish pasties in the next room. Being around Aaron Junk made people feel important.

Aaron loved to be seen. He attended every event in his hometown of Boston, or if the event was far-flung, he would use his wealth to get there. He went to business colleague’s daughter’s weddings in California. He attended after-parties for New York plays. He travelled by steamer and train to Berlin in order to watch the latest performance of Mahler’s 5
^th
. Aaron was at the ribbon-cutting for any new building wings that may have appeared at Harvard (often with his name attached) even though he never attended Harvard. Once in a while, he chartered a sea excursion to Bermuda to drink rum with the locals. The man was peripatetic nearly to the point of omnipresence.

Leaving McGee and Phelps at the end of the bar, Junk approached Hoyt’s group. He struck up small talk, asking the men where they had come from. Hoyt finally spoke. His responses were single-word sentences.

“
Presidentials”

…
in response to the question of where they had been.

“
Yes”

…
to the question of whether they had been successful in their attempt. And according to Junk, Hoyt avoided making eye contact the whole time he was answering. He looked at any other possible thing in the room except the person who was addressing him. This enraged Junk.

Junk offered Hoyt a drink in celebration of Hoyt’s success in a last-ditch attempt to make peace. According to Junk, Hoyt responded to the offer by taking the drink and placing it on the bar without a sip. He then uttered the following words: “Proverbs…‘Stay away from drunks. Their eyes are bloodshot and they have bruises that could have been avoided.’” Junk responded with a punch to Hoyt’s jaw. The blow removed Hoyt from his stool and landed him on the floor. One might have expected the other men from Hoyt’s party to descend on Junk and beat him mercilessly. But as had always been the case, Hoyt had not made very good friends with those around him. Now it seems that his bible quotation had offended the inebriated sensibilities of the climbers who had come into the bar with him. They had had quite enough of their tough and humourless leader. Junk’s assault satisfied them deeply. They paused for a few moments after the blow before cheering and hitting mugs together.

Hoyt rose slowly from the bar floor, wiping blood off of his lip with his sleeve. Junk’s chums Phelps and McGee sauntered over. Now seven men stood around Hoyt and laughed uproariously. According to some bystanders at the bar, Hoyt started to chuckle as well, raising his shoulders, hands upturned as if to say, “Oh bother! You got me!” The palm of the right upturned hand suddenly jerked forward and hit Phelps in the nose. Phelps reeled backward in a spray of blood, falling and hitting his head on a barstool. He was out cold. Hoyt must have seen the elephantine Phelps as literally the biggest threat and wanted to remove him from the equation. McGee and Junk moved quickly, taking Hoyt by the arms and collar and walking him outside and into a back alley. Hoyt’s party, now having turned on him, followed along with a hunger for vengeance in their eyes.

What happened in the alley is less clear. All Junk recalled was that Hoyt actually fought back despite the odds, knocking down two people before he himself took a punch. The police arrived at that point and drove everyone down to the precinct except Phelps and the two others Hoyt had beaten down. They had to wait for an ambulance

As if they had wanted some entertainment, the police at the precinct put Junk and Hoyt in holding cells across from one another. Junk simply stared at Hoyt for hours and Hoyt stared at the floor. The latter must have been in shock over his fate. The inside of a jail was alien to him. Certainly, he had seen businessmen arrested before - the bread business was quite cut-throat and illegal dealings occurred every so often – but Hoyt was not like that, nor was he a lowlife like the man in the cell across from him. He prided himself on being the opposite of these types. He wanted to be good with God’s Law and good with Man’s law, not festering in a jail cell redolent of urine and teeming with future denizens of Hell’s fire.

Junk on the other hand had seen the inside of a jail before, once for gambling and another time for counterfeiting, a charge he contested until the end. “I don’t deal in bunko,” he swore to the papers on more than one occasion. Per his mother’s wishes, Junk tried to stay legitimate. He had moved further and further away from floating craps games and was more involved in legal dealings like land and retail. But Junk knew that the nature of his circumstance - the streets he grew up on, his earlier careers choices - required occasional violations of his mother’s code.

The silence in the jail lasted for hours. Finally, one of Junk’s ex-wives came and posted bail for him and his familiars. Hoyt would have to wait until his wife Wizzy could wire money to the Boston police from New York City. According to a
Boston American
interview with Junk, Hoyt finally came alive in the last few moments before Junk was released.

Junk recalled:
“
He started yelling at me, calling me names that would make a hooker blush. My response was to bad-mouth his hobby of mountain climbing. I think I called it “the business of goats.” How was I to know at the time that those were the exact words his dad used to say to dissuade his kid from climbing? All I know is that the words seemed to set off an explosion in his head. He started trying to grab at me through the bars. He was screaming for my neck. ‘
Give me his neck! Officers, give me just a moment with his neck!’
There was spittle on his lip. He was temporarily nuts. I continued anyway, saying if ants could climb then what’s the big deal? His so-called accomplishments were not worthy of praise.”

Hoyt regained his composure enough to insult Junk, saying if Junk tried to traverse New Hampshire’s Presidential range in winter, his remains would be food for bears come spring.

The gambler in Junk awoke. As he was walking out, he turned to Hoyt and bet him one hundred thousand dollars he could traverse the Presidentials, and he invited Hoyt to join him on the trip. He added, “And spare me any hot air from Proverbs about the evils of gambling. Are you in or not?”