The White Mountain Mountaineering Club

 

      A few years back, Sir Edmond Hillary, first white boy to make it to the top of Mt. Everest, slipped off to the great base camp in the sky. I noted his passing with interest because, had certain events turned out a bit differently, Eddie and I might’ve been closer pals. As fate would have it, my career as a conqueror of challenging terrain was short and not all that sweet. 

       I was an eighteen-year-old hick with a high school diploma when I boarded the Number 45 train in Alliance, Nebraska, bound for fame, fortune, and college in Medford, Massachusetts, the tweedy almost Ivy League. Determined to become a famous lawyer of the Clarence Darrow school, I'd spent months at the mirror, practicing how to grasp the lapels of my suit coat, just so, while looking over my spectacles at the adoring jury. It was a muggy midnight in the middle of Iowa before I decided that tweed trousers were not designed for August rail travel, and changed back into Levi's and tennies.
     The highest feature of Box Butte County, Nebraska, is Box Butte, which rises majestically 300 feet above the surrounding wheat and sugar beets. I grew pubic hair in this contour-deprived tableland, and it still remains a puzzle to me why, at the long folding tables of the university registration, I signed a clipboard and became a card-carrying member of the White Mountain Mountaineering Club. Perhaps I thought I would need the experience when my future law firm purchased a small chalet on the slopes of Mount Blanc.
     The White Mountains of New Hampshire were, according to geological theory, formed four hundred million years ago, before the North American and European continents drifted apart. There are fossil seashells on the slopes. The highest peak in the Whites, and in eastern North America, is Mount Washington, at 6288 feet above sea level. The Atlantic Ocean is a hundred miles east of there. Mount Washington was named for George before he became President. It was first climbed by a person of European extraction in 1642, when Sir Darby Fields hired a couple of local folks to show him the way to the summit. 
      One week after I moved into my dormitory room and was hunkered down with a copy of Walden, I received notice that the White Mountain Mountaineering Club was to climb Mount Washington on September 15. Would I be in attendance?
     Dried vegan beef stew, water purifiers, trail shoes, dome tents, flexible-frame backpacks, and lighter-than-lead sleeping bags had not been invented at that time. Gadget snobbery, though, was as rampant in the mountaineering crowd then, as it is now, and I took a few snide hits from rich, properly equipped alpinists when I showed up at the shuttle bus in my Levi's and tennies, carrying a WWII pack full of Spam, hotdog buns, Hersey bars, and Camel cigarettes, with two of my Mom's quilts tied to the top. 
     The assault on the mountain was to be a two-overnight hike, one and a half days up, one day down. We were to make the ascent on the east slope of Mount Washington through Tuckerman's ravine, a long, rather steep valley containing a couple of icy lakes, terminating in a boulder patch and sheer wall just below the summit. On the bus ride to the trailhead, my companions were such buttheads that I determined that it might be a great service to the poor people of the world if I pushed several of my fellow members of the White Mountain Mountaineering Club off of Mt. Washington.
     The trail was wide and well maintained. I wish I could report that I scampered ahead of the pack like a mountain goat in rut, stopping only to lick the fragrant dew from wild violets and yodel my mating bleat across the pristine forest. Nope. After two hours of trudging uphill in pursuit of a bunch of guys who confused sweating with having a good time, my little jaunt in the woods turned into an ordeal, during which I summoned all my reserve of country stubbornness just to be able to put one sore foot ahead of the other. 

     That night I camped apart from the group, wrapped in my blankets, smoking, while the rest of the club told amusing stories about dating Bitsy or Megan during prep school. The second day was better. A thick fog moved in from Iceland or somewhere, disorienting Chip and Brad and Tab and the other city boys, forcing them to place all their attention to the earth three feet in front of them, much as I'd spent the day before. I was able to keep pace for the grunt to the summit, which we reached just before noon. 
     As we made the final push, I noted that there were strange, mechanical sounds coming from the top of the mountain, wheezy noises. I squinted through the windy mist, (In 1934, the wind was clocked at 201 mph on Mt. Washington.) and saw the form of a long, low, wooden building bearing a sign that read  "Summit Depot and Restaurant, Mount Washington Cog Railway." 
    I had suffered sixteen hours of gonad-mashing humiliation to conquer a mountain that had a railroad running up the other side. On top of old Mount Washington I resigned my membership in the White Mountain Mountaineering Club and torpedoed my chances of ever hanging around with Edmond Hillary. While my former comrades picked their merry way back down the cliffs of Tuckerman's ravine, I drank a couple of Black Label beers, smoked a few Camels, took a ten-dollar scenic cruise down the cog railway, then hitched a ride back to Boston on a bread delivery truck.