Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain by Jonathan Bloom (bookreader TXT) 📗

The final, hardly legible, tearing through the page: “Lost.

Chapter Six: The Sins of the Father

It was three in the morning when Hoyt received the telephone call from the Manhattan State Hospital. When he heard Tom Frances, president of the hospital, on the other end of the line, Hoyt was sure his mother had passed on. But she had not. Frances explained that Maddy was in a “heightened emotional state” and demanded to speak to her son. It would be best if Hoyt came right away.

Hoyt drove from his brownstone on Washington Square Park up to the hospital. As he drove, his mind probably wandered to thoughts of climbing. It often did, especially after he had been away from it for some time. Two years had passed since Everest, and life had been relatively quiet. He went to work every day of the week, spent dinner with Wizzy and the children, and went to bed at nine. This routine only varied for church on Sundays. Climbing had ceased altogether, except for an occasional Sunday hike near Bear Mountain.

He had stopped climbing for three reasons. First, his body had taken a beating on Everest. He had sent his back into constant spasms because of a tiny fall on his way down to the Southern Base Camp. His body had deviated in some subtle way from its predetermined limits, and the response was extreme. Endless trips to chiropractors (“All of them, ultimately, quacks” according to Hoyt.), stretching exercises on the floor of his bedroom and his office, employees walking on his back, but nothing worked for more than a few days. Then a routine visit to the dermatologist for hammer toe also revealed a patch of cancerous skin on his forehead. It was removed with success but not without some unpleasant procedures. Hoyt’s vision had also begun to go since the trip. He was not sure if the light in the Himalaya was any different than home, but he got headaches whenever he tried to read now, or he simply fell asleep. Old age arrives slowly and quietly for most men. In the case of Hoyt, it charged him like the Bull of Heaven did Gilgamesh.

In addition to the sub-standard condition of his body, there was the sub-standard condition of the world in 1941. Europe and Asia were already at war, and the United States was only five months away from Pearl Harbor. Fighting had closed off all four corners of the world to travel and most of the younger men who would have possibly accompanied Hoyt on an expedition were steeling themselves for looming combat.

But even more than the slow-motion collapse of his body, and even more than a world at war, there were Wizzy’s pleas that kept him home. He was fifty, and as his body brittled, each climb carried more risk. Another small slip on ice could ruin his back forever. Hoyt was in denial about that, but Wizzy was not. She wanted her husband around, even if their children were grown and off at college. She still loved him and wanted his company. He had to stop, or at least slow down. Otherwise, Wizzy would be at her wit’s end and capable of anything.

Deep down, Hoyt knew he could only stop climbing for a short while. Some day, even if it killed him and his marriage, he would return to the harsh world that liberated him from his father. It brought him the greatest joy he knew. And that urge to climb was hastened by a letter he received shortly after the Everest expedition. It came from a town in Nepal called Thame, from a man named Chhiri Tendi. Chhiri Tendi had been following the climbing career of Hoyt closely, and considered him somewhat of a hero. “I have guided many men to the tops of mountains, and all of them speak of you highly” Chhiri Tendi wrote. “They say you ‘have a gnat in your ass,’ but you rise to peaks faster than an eagle, and your decisions are wise in times of crisis. I read about your ascent of Mont Blanc when your rope broke and you saved yourself by chimneying up a fifty-foot crevasse. Definitely not the act of a sugarplum fairy, but of a real man. In addition to my great admiration for you, I simultaneously share your feeling that Aaron Junk is a prick.” These words must have made Hoyt cringe, not because of the bawdy language, but because he did not like to even think about Junk these days. But Chhiri Tendi continued, writing that he had once related to Junk because they had both lost a father early in life, both to depression brought about by trauma, but he found Junk’s stalking of Hoyt distasteful. “Not a good way to act” Chhiri Tendi wrote, “even if you did not have a father around to tell you right from wrong.”

The letter went on to explain that, oddly enough, Chhiri Tendi was climbing in the Himalaya at the same time Hoyt was making his bid for Everest. He wrote of a fascinating and terrifying experience on the mountain they called Fumu, which lay about fifty miles southeast of Everest. Hoyt knew of it and its difficulty, but not much more. Chhiri Tendi wrote he had almost made it to the top when his employer, a Mister Zachary Hoover had met a violent end. Chhiri Tendi himself had almost died as well.

“But here is the thing, Mr. Hoyt. We saw something that day just before Hoover’s head went spinning off into the air like a flummoxed football. We saw Everest below us. It was below us! Fumu is taller, Mr. Hoyt! It is the tallest. I thought you might want to know that. It seems pretty important. All of your mountaineering friends know it is a