KENT MALKOVICH: “Maybe that’s where it all started, my thinking I gotta get to the top of this planet.”
I was born in 1967, I grew up in New York City, Belgium, and Newport. I had a laissez-faire upbringing – my mom and dad were forces of nature; I was taught a sense of adventure at an early age. I loved astronomy, I had my head in the stars; maybe that’s where it all started, my thinking that I’ve gotta get to the top of this planet. But I also loved diving, so I had my head under the ocean whenever I could. Everything I like to do, I do with all I’ve got!”
A force of nature himself, Kent Malkovich, will not depart this planet without leaving his footprints on surfaces where most men dread to tread. It began as a child, climbing trees and scaling the cliffs of Newport, RI. “I would go off on my own with my buddies and we would get down to the beach from the Cliff Walk. I loved climbing trees, my mother would come look for me and find me at the top of a 150 foot elm tree. Those were great times.” Kent’s father, Mark, was an icon of Newport, RI music festivals, and his mother, Joan, was his perfect compliment. Kent has two brothers, Mark III, Erik, and a sister, Kara, all living in Rhode Island.
Kent eventually sought bigger conquests than the neighborhood elm trees and, in his late teens, found an affection for the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Those mountains spoke to him and were where he would spend time from his late teens into his early twenties and hike. “I got really good at traversing; I knew those mountains and knew that I wanted to do more.”
His final three years of high school were spent at Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island. Kent fondly remembers the Benedictine monks in their robes. “Those guys were brilliant; they could have done anything they wanted to do in life but they had a higher calling. The Benedictines are special – to them life is like a three legged stool, one each for mental, physical and spiritual; they all have to be in balance. I remember our report cards, there were 200 of us and each report card was hand-calligraphed.”
Kent went to the University of Arizona, where he majored in astronomy and minored in philosophy, inspired by the monks at Portsmouth Abbey. Upon graduation, he declined his fraternity’s scholarship offer of law school at the University of Idaho, electing instead to try his hand at commercial fishing in the Bering Straits off the coast of Alaska. He returned to Rhode Island the next year and apprenticed himself to a rigorous master plumber training program. Following his father’s career advice, Kent wanted to be the best master plumber he could be; Rhode Island’s seven year program is among the most demanding, requiring five years apprenticeship and two years as a journeyman before testing for the Master Plumber license.
While working on his plumbing license, Kent’s uncle, who lived in South Africa offered Kent a free ticket to visit for a week. “Three months later I came back!” His usual sense of adventure prevailed and he found himself in Livingstone, Zambia where he bungee jumped off the Victoria Falls Bridge over the Zambezi River below. The bridge links the two countries of Zimbabwe and Zambia; 1993 was the first year that commercial bungee jumping was done off of that bridge and Kent remembers being about the fourth person to do the 364 foot jump!
He flew into Dar es Salaam then onto Arusha in Tanzania in a tiny plane. “We spent a couple of nights in the Arusha Hotel, which was a charming old Colonial hotel, before proceeding on to the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro with a guide named Bairiki who hadn’t climbed in four years; his name meant “protector of angels.”
Mt. Kilimanjaro is 19,340 feet at the top and is an extinct volcano with three peaks.” The trip up and down took eight days total, five or six to the summit and two back down. We came down the same way we went up. That trip was when I caught the high altitude mountain bug! ”
Back in Newport, Kent resumed his plumbing work by day and ran or worked out at local gyms by night. He was recruited to join the Newport Rugby Football Club. “ I was in great shape. I played with that Club and we were really good. It was a strong club, we traveled to Bermuda, the Bahamas and Ireland.”
Although mountains close to home still exerted their pull on Kent, he had some interesting experiences with storms on Mt. Katahdin, which is the highest mountain in Maine at 5,269 feet, and Mt. Moosilauke in New Hampshire at 4,802 feet. On Katahdin he encountered sudden winds of 70 mph which threatened to blow his tent away and would foreshadow an experience yet to come on Mt. Aconcaqua.
Kent remembers one night he spent on Moosilauke when he went out of his tent in the middle of the night to check out a strange noise. It was a pack of big jackrabbits nibbling to their heart’s content under a full moon. Three years later he was on that mountain again and a squall and snowstorm came out of nowhere, so strong that he was confined to his tent for two days.
In 1999 Kent’s first Beaufort connection came when his childhood friend Chuck Ferguson, of Meridien Builders, asked him to install radiant floor heating in a house on Coosaw Island. Kent fell in love with the Lowcountry and in 2001 he decided to move down here. He bought property at Coffin Point where he built an architecturally innovative little house complete with a barn door.
In the meanwhile, “I was getting ready to do another mountain and I saw a magazine article or a television show” that led Kent to South America in December of 2002, to scale the summit of Aconcaqua. “Before you even get there, before you even get on the plane to get there, the paperwork, the permits, the shots, everything it takes to prepare for any of these trips is thousands of dollars and lots of bureaucracy. I flew to Mendoza, Argentina. Mendoza was so beautiful!” Aconcauga is situated near the Argentinian/Chilean border at a height of 22,841 feet; it is not only the highest peak of the Andes and South America but also the highest point outside of Asia.
Kent and a friend began the ascent without benefit of a guide. On the second day, his friend got altitude sickness and had to go back down to the base camp. Kent noticed a ring around the sun and that night a “vieto blanco” or white wind, which is a meteorological phenomena characteristic of this mountain and is actually fog that mixes with high winds blowing snow, raced in with 70 mph winds and temperatures of 70 degrees below zero. It lasted for two and a half days while tents wrapped up around themselves and many blew away. Kent had one of the two tents that stayed secure. Even the people on the level above them changed their plans and scurried down the mountain after that storm but Kent and another climber stayed true to their desire to reach the summit. They went on up to an emergency shelter, which Kent likens to a large dog pen, leaving their tents behind to travel light. They slept in the shelter until midnight when they got up and began the final ascent under the full moon. Just before noon, after climbing the scree slopes where they took two steps forward and one step back because of the loose shale on a 30 degree angle, they reached the top. They spent fifteen minutes on the top celebrating their victory before they headed back down. Kent explains. “Going down can be harder than going up but it depends on the circumstances; you’re gaining oxygen. You need to be constantly aware of your body’s circumstance; make sure nothing is too tight, open vents if you are sweating, be aware of your hands and feet.”
When asked what one of the biggest issues is for mountain climbers, Kent soberly replies “Most people probably shouldn’t be there. It takes intense physical conditioning and an adventuresome spirit and a lot of dollars are involved. A permit alone to climb Everest is about $70,000.”
Kent’s next conquest came in May of 2002 in the form of Mt. Denali in Alaska. Denali is known as the coldest mountain in the world and is North America’s highest peak at 20,320 feet. Kent understood that “Denali acts different because of its barometric pressure.” What that means is that barometric pressure in northern latitudes affects the ability to acclimate. He explains, “This is an Alaskan long climb, you have to go with a group because you go over so much glacier. My friend Steve, knew this Iron Dog guy, Bob, who was a friend of a guide who was putting together a team. It was a 33 day event for 6 of us. We went on 30 meter leads because of the crevasses. It was a treacherous time of year – busy, and the crevasses could be open. We went over the top and back down into the park. One night, on the way up, we had to stake ourselves into the side of the mountain and dig platforms out of the ice so we had a place for our tents where we lashed them to the side of the mountain. At one point, when we were on the glacier and we had to cross the McKinley River, it took two days to get across, we tried each day for five hours but the current was so strong that we couldn’t cross.”
Undaunted, which is no surprise, in August of 2003, Kent undertook reaching the summit of Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe at 18,513 feet. Situated just inside Russia, Elbrus is one of the world’s deadliest mountains. Kent left Boston, MA on August 1 and arrived in Russia via Munich. To begin the climb, you can take a chair lift up to the area where the climb actually begins. It rained and snowed for the first two days; time was of the essence as he had only allocated one week for the trip, so he then made the climb in two days. Once again he had gotten up at midnight and the ground was frozen so he had to pick his way up. He hadn’t allowed sufficient time to acclimate so that morning he began to hallucinate from altitude sickness. “I thought there was a Lego fire engine guy on the path in front of me, so I tried to pick far to either side to avoid hurting the imaginary fire engine guy.” As one can imagine, it took him a bit longer to reach the summit than it would have otherwise.
Kent sees two more mountain peaks in his future: Mt. Kosciuszko, the highest in Australia, and Mt. Vinson Massif, the highest in Antarctica. But for the moment, Kent is quite content in Beaufort, his business is booming, he loves his garden, going fishing with his friends Red and Debbie Johnson and their children, and often just staying at home and cooking with his beloved girlfriend Lisa. That is, until the next mountain bug bites.
Story by MARY ELLEN THOMPSON
Photography by PAUL NURNBERG
