Fritz’s next words to Dudley confirmed her fears: “Maybe you should come on my expedition to this K2.”*
The air in the room seemed to stop moving as Alice looked from Dudley to Fritz and back to Dudley again. She knew he was excited at the offer but, as was typical of him, he remained reserved and measured in his response, questioning whether he had enough experience to handle such a mountain.
I’ve only been climbing a few years in the Alps, Fritz. Do you think I’ve enough experience to tackle such a mountain? Dudley asked.
Wiessner assured Dudley he did. What was needed, Fritz told him, was strength, balance, endurance, and determination, all of which Dudley seemed to have in abundance. Wiessner, with over twenty years of experience, would lead the team to and up the mountain, assuring the route was secure and, where necessary, anchoring it with guide ropes to guarantee that all members returned safe. Dudley would have a qualified guide every step of the way.
Dudley mulled over the conversation as his attention was diverted to other guests. As soon as she politely could, Alice pulled Fritz aside.
“You shouldn’t persuade Dudley to go on such a hazardous trip,” she said. “He is an older man than the other members of the expedition and he would not be equal to it.”*
Fritz assured her Dudley would be fine—that he, Wiessner, was an experienced guide and that Dudley would be perfectly safe climbing with him.
Alice looked at Fritz. She could see that he was just as determined to take Dudley as Dudley was to go. She knew she couldn’t do anything more to protect the man she still loved, divorce or no divorce. With a heavy heart, she stepped away from Fritz and out of the conversation, promising herself not to burden Dudley with her concern again.
For the rest of the evening, Dudley walked through the party lost in thought. He was emboldened. He had loved the challenge of getting his small schooners across thousands of miles of wild ocean; just men and boat against forces beyond their control. This expedition, to a place and an altitude where men had never gone, would test him in ways he could only imagine. He would be out there, defining what it means to achieve a goal through mean survival, not as a pampered client in a gaming preserve or on his guide’s rope above Zermatt. On this expedition, there wouldn’t be any qualifiers to his achievement. It would be a pure feat and it would be his. His brother Clifford wouldn’t look down his nose at it and Alice wouldn’t consider him just another client of one of her many guide friends in St. Anton. And he would experience what centuries of explorers and pioneers had: the sheer joy found in hard-won success through physical endurance.
When the two men were again seated on the couch, Dudley looked at the diminutive yet powerful man sitting across from him. He suspected Fritz might be a tough leader; he had seen that type of arrogant swagger at the boatyards and on the front lines. But with his quiet resolve he had always been able to manage large, loud egos.
After several more moments, he reached across to shake Wiessner’s hand and sign up for the 1939 American Expedition to K2.
Chapter 2
The Gentleman Soldier and Sailor
Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches. Yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth. Man struggles to find life outside himself, unaware that the life he is seeking is within…
—KAHLIL GIBRAN
In Genesis it says that it is not good for a man to be alone, but sometimes it is a great relief.
—JOHN BARRYMORE
Dudley Wolfe in his French Foreign Legion uniform, 1919. (Courtesy of the Dudley F. Rochester and Dudley F. Wolfe Family)
Rockport, Maine—1907
Dudley Francis Cecil Wolfe stood at the helm of his beloved fifteen-foot sloop watching the wind change course across the water of Glen Cove inside the larger Penobscot Bay. Feeling each of the wind’s ripples in his fingertips as he teased the rudder in tiny flicks, he smoothly brought the boat back toward the shore where the family’s hired boatkeeper waited on the dock. Dudley was eleven years old and this was his maiden sail as captain.
Some children are born with a silver spoon in their mouths; Dudley had the entire mine, thanks to his grandfather, B. F. Smith.
Benjamin Franklin Smith and his three brothers had, in little more than forty years, created an eight-figure fortune from nothing but their own prescience, persistence, and pluck. From their family farm in the hills of Berwick, Maine, the four men set out in the 1840s to make their way in the world, eventually joining the wagon train west. But unlike the dusty pioneers with whom they shared the trail, the Smith brothers had already made enough money in publishing and commissioned lithographs to start a bank in Omaha. From those profits they bought stakes in quartz, silver, and gold mines in Colorado, one of which was the prolific Briggs Pocket in the Gregory Tailings discovered in the mid-1800s. More interested in building capital than in running the mine, they sold their gold as shares on the New York Stock Exchange at the height of the market, earning several times what the gold was worth on the scales back in Colorado, and they turned that money into real estate, railroads, and the second largest stockyard in the country.
By the time the Smith brothers returned to Maine in the 1880s to build a vast summer estate overlooking Penobscot Bay, they had amassed a fortune rumored to be somewhere between twenty and thirty million dollars—more than $450 million today. But while they were proficient in business, they were less successful in producing heirs. Their grandparents had had twelve children, ten of them boys, and their parents had had six children, four of them boys, but Francis, George Warren, and David Clifford Smith had no legal heirs.* The Smith family name was therefore left to the youngest brother, B. F., to carry on. While B. F. had a son, Clifford Warren Smith, in 1868, it was his daughter, Mabel Florence Smith, who would provide him with the heirs which the family so desperately wanted.
Mabel had the strong features of her father and uncles: dark, wide-set eyes in a square face, thin lips, and a broad forehead. Too determined-looking to be considered pretty, she had an arresting self-confidence and the look of a woman who enjoyed her place in the world. In 1891, when she was twenty-six, Mabel met a dashing Englishman dressed in the fashionable four-button long coat of the times, who offered all of the charm and mystery her life in the dusty mining towns and cattle yards of Colorado and Omaha had not. His name was Dudley Wolfe.
Expertly groomed and trim, Dudley Wolfe had the effete good looks of gentility: an aquiline nose, cleft chin, neat mustache, and startlingly clear blue eyes. After disembarking from Liverpool and filling out his immigration papers in 1888 at the age of twenty-nine, he ventured off to find his fortune in the bustling, dusty, horse-and-buggy-filled streets of lower Manhattan. Once established as a coffee and nut trader, and with a genuine enjoyment of opera and the arts, he mixed easily in the upper-class English and American societies of New York. At dinners hosted by visiting English nobility at the Waldorf, St. Denis, and Brunswick hotels, Dudley Wolfe would charm and entertain tables of rapt diners with tales of his youth in India hunting tigers and visiting the Taj Mahal. At one such gathering he met one of the richest young women in America, and on October 15, 1892, at the Grace Church in New York City, Dudley Wolfe took Mabel Florence Smith as his wife. They quickly started their family and over the next eight years had four children: Clifford Warren, Dudley Francis Cecil, Gwendolen Florence, and Grafton.
If it looked like a fairy tale, in fact that’s all it was. While presenting himself as a successful coffee importer, living on an estate in the Connecticut suburb of Harrison-on-the-Sound, Dudley was actually on the brink of financial collapse, and the year after he and Mabel married, he and his partner in the import business declared bankruptcy. Nonetheless, only months after the bankruptcy, Dudley organized the Knollwood Golf Club in Elmsford, New York, with fellow founders Oliver and H. M. Harriman, William Rockefeller, and Frederick Bull, which boasted one of the nation’s first full eighteen-hole courses designed by the famous Scotsman Will
ie Park. Dudley moved his family to the nearby town of Irvington-on-Hudson, twenty miles north of Manhattan. He and Mabel sent their four young children to the best boarding schools money and breeding could command, the boys to Hackley Hall in Tarrytown, New York, and Gwendolen to Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Connecticut.
While it was a life of privilege, it was also a very staid, almost impersonal, one. The Wolfes did not meet at the dinner table and hear of each other’s day in funny and boisterous detail. Mabel was not a warm, natural mother who easily wrapped them in her arms. They barely saw their father. When they did, he never spoke of his own childhood and memories; when they would ask of his parents, their grandparents, Dudley Senior would grow silent and withdraw even further. The children spent most of their young lives with servants and at the age of eight each was shipped off to his or her boarding school.
In May 1908 whatever sense of family they had came crashing down when Dudley Wolfe, Sr., died suddenly. Strangely, although he was the son-in-law of the richest man in New England and the founder of a social and sporting club, his death warranted only the smallest of notices in the general death listings of the New York Times. There was no public funeral or formal obituary. He left no will, because he had no money.
After her husband’s death, Mabel Wolfe left New York and resettled in Connecticut, where, with her father’s support, she enrolled the three boys in Pomfret Academy. While each Wolfe boy was a popular classmate and member of the football squad, none excelled academically, particularly young Dudley.
A strong, healthy child with a natural athletic ability, Dudley was far better outdoors than he was in the classroom. Struggle as he might, he could never find the joy in mastering schoolwork that he did in sailing a boat, playing football, or trudging through the woods hunting elk and moose. Like many a child of vast wealth, he lacked the need, and therefore perhaps the drive, to dedicate himself to learning algebra, Latin, or the history of ancient Rome. Instead, he spent untold hours poring over old nautical journals, absorbing every detail that he could find of shipbuilding, sail-making, and the wind and water currents of the North Atlantic.
His brothers, Clifford and Grafton, also struggled to maintain the basic academic standards. Clifford’s social behavior was even worse. Fourteen when his father died, he seemed to instantly follow the course of many rich, undisciplined boys: utter rebellion. Spoiled by his doting mother and full of bravado, Clifford all but thumbed his nose at his grandfather, B. F. Smith, who tried repeatedly to get him to knuckle down. After Clifford was expelled from Pomfret for bad grades and worse behavior, B. F. stepped in and sent him to the Manlius School, hoping the strict military academy in upstate New York would whip the boy into shape. Instead, Clifford burned another bridge with his indifference and unhealthy influence on his younger classmates. After enrolling in and unceremoniously leaving four schools in twelve years, Clifford never graduated from any.
As was the custom for young, wealthy women of the time, after her husband’s death Mabel quickly remarried a solid but rather humorless businessman from a prominent Nebraska family, Joseph Baldrige,* and moved to Omaha where her father still spent his winters. To his credit, Baldrige took charge of his lack-luster stepsons and with their grandfather gave them fair warning to shape up and improve their studies or face the consequences. Dudley and Grafton struggled academically but fortunately lacked Clifford’s arrogance and sense of entitlement and were therefore supported and urged on by their headmasters. Like Clifford before them, they left Pomfret and were sent to what was by then called the St. John’s School in Manlius. Dudley was a valuable addition to the hockey and track teams, but he and Grafton lasted only a year before being sent on to Phillips Academy† in Andover, Massachusetts—a forgiving school, it seemed, since the year before the incorrigible Clifford had been thrown out on his ear after a mere five months there, leaving a string of debts his stepfather had to pay.
Dudley entered Phillips Academy in September 1913 and immediately tried out for and got onto the wrestling and football teams. He also pledged to one of Phillips’s oldest secret societies, the PBX or Phi Beta Chi. At the height of the club’s hazing rituals in early December, he began to suffer severe abdominal pains and chronic indigestion. While a “sensitive appendix” was at first suspected, his condition stabilized and the doctors at the school said he was out of danger and recommended he stay until the Christmas break in a few weeks. Mabel saw it otherwise. Having lost her only brother to a burst appendix in 1901,* she insisted Dudley come home to Omaha immediately. On December 9 he was loaded on the Union Pacific’s Wolverine Express at Boston’s South Station, headed west.
A few days before Christmas the appendix was removed and in mid-January Dudley returned to Phillips and to his new brotherhood in the PBX. Phi Beta Chi employed the usual hazing ceremonies, which involved various kinds of torture for its new pledges, from being routinely punched or paddled across a bare bottom, placed in a coffin and cross-examined, or commanded to stay all night in a cemetery with only a clay pipe and a bag of Lucky Strike tobacco. The faculty at Phillips tried for decades to “crush them out” but the societies thrived and even built large private houses off campus for their meetings.
Though Dudley’s stomach distress had coincidenced with his pledging, he nonetheless survived the hazing, was inducted, and was eager to return to school. Mabel and Joseph weren’t so enthusiastic about his membership and wrote to the headmaster that they feared Dudley’s involvement was “not very conducive to faithful study.” Evidently it wasn’t.
For the next two and a half years, Dudley fought to gain his academic footing, but, like Clifford, his grades went from poor to unacceptable. After he repeatedly failed several subjects, the school threatened to expel him. Unlike his older brother, Dudley wrote a series of earnest letters to the principal, Mr. Alfred Stearns, insisting that he was applying himself and that with proper tutoring he would be able to master the two subjects which particularly dogged him, algebra and German. Signing each, “I am, Respectfully yours,” Dudley tried to impress on Stearns that he was “ready to do everything and anything” to meet the standards of Phillips Academy where he had spent, “believe me, the happiest three years of my life.” Meanwhile, Dudley’s stepfather wrote to Stearns commenting that while he didn’t think Dudley was a “dullard, the boy is in fact very slow.” (One can only hope Baldrige didn’t share his opinions with his stepson.)
In the end the appeals failed; the school reluctantly refused to let Dudley return for the 1916–17 academic year. While Stearns acknowledged that the young man had made every “faithful, conscientious effort,” Dudley utterly failed to meet their scholastic requirements. Writing that he didn’t “know of any boy who has left us in recent years who will carry with him a fuller amount of good will and affection,” Stearns expressed the heartfelt regret of an entire faculty at the school’s losing Dudley.
Defeated and depressed, Dudley returned to Maine for the summer, where he worked at Old Orchard Beach in one of his grandfather’s businesses. Twenty years old, overweight, and miserable, all he could think of, as he watched the tourists walk on the pier, was how to avoid a permanent move to Omaha. He realized his best option was to join the war effort in Europe. After following Mabel and Joseph back to Omaha in the fall, Dudley was turned away from five branches of the US military, each time with his papers stamped “4-F” because of his poor eyesight and flat feet. Finally, and with few options, Dudley set his sights on the French Foreign Legion, a fighting force created for foreign nationals wishing to serve in the French armed forces. A combination of idealistic volunteers and hardened mercenaries, the men of the Legion had fought and died side by side in wars dating back to 1831. It was a perfect solution for Dudley. After he sent letters and telegrams inquiring into how an American could sign up, he discovered that the Legion had a long waiting list and he wouldn’t be able to join for at least a year. Still determined, he applied to the American Red Cross’s ambulance corps, which would at least get hi
m out of Omaha and over to Europe.
With a stack of glowing recommendation letters from former teachers and headmasters, including Mr. Stearns at Phillips, Dudley easily got into the ambulance corps and talked his wastrel older brother, Clifford, into going with him.
On October 24, 1917, Joseph Baldrige, Mabel, Gwen, and Grafton all waved from New York’s South Street pier as the two brothers sailed for Europe. With them on the SS St. Louis were six surgeons and thirty-five nurses, all bound for the front lines. The crossing was a boisterous affair of late nights in the ship’s parlor singing patriotic songs at the piano, hard drinking, and close dancing with strangers, as they all enjoyed their last civilian revelry before the horrors of war became a daily routine.
Over the years Dudley Francis Wolfe had grown into an attractive, quiet, dignified young man with a shock of curly dark hair above the high forehead he had inherited from his father. He was friendly but reserved, and while he had an engaging smile, he more often looked out upon the world with a steady sober gaze from behind his round glasses. He was considered stout and would struggle throughout his life with his weight. At five feet ten inches, he weighed anywhere between 180 and 220 pounds, his heaviest being after his expulsion from Phillips at what was probably the nadir of his life. Once free of that failure, he grew up, got back into sports and steadily lost the weight, developing the solid, athletic build of a running back rather than the lithe agility of a sprinter.
The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 Page 2
