Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain, Jonathan Bloom [best ebook reader TXT] 📗

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.

Interlude: August 23rd, 1937

The Nazis loved to climb. In the time leading up to World War II, Nazis and Nazi sympathizers flocked to the climbing clubs of Germany and Austria. Germany had enjoyed a rich tradition of mountaineering before and after the war. But during the 1930’s and 1940’s the ranks of these fine mountaineers were tainted with others who espoused fascist, racist rhetoric.

In 1933, the Nazis took power in Germany, smothering opposing leftist, socialist sentiments with brute force. At the time, Europe was between wars, but Hitler still had something to prove to the outside world. As the author Jonathan Neale points out in his book Tigers of the Snow, climbing was a perfect means by which the Nazi party could show the world the dominance of the Aryan race. They may not have beaten the British during World War I, but they could do one better and conquer Mother Nature herself. Clive Steinkraus, an SS soldier and avid climber, proposed another likely reason for the Nazi tendency to climb: “There are fewer Jews at high altitudes. They seem to be partial to city life and journeys of introspection. That is fine. It gives us a chance to escape to a place pure, white, and free from usury.”

Whatever the reason, either for pride or prejudice or both, the Nazi government funded several expeditions in the Alps and also the Himalaya. Neither the Germans nor the British had yet succeeded in topping any