CHAPTER I, Blog # 9

The Sierra Nevada de Cocuy has a reputation as a dangerous mountain range. Pressed up against the humid rainforest of the Orinoco River basin, it is usually fogged in, covered with clouds. As we laboriously traced our steps back to our base camp the clouds we had looked down upon rose and silently engulfed us in a blanket of stilled whiteness. We were in a white-out, a dangerous phenomena where everything, the snow, the sky, the cliffs, the crevasses, the surroundings are white robbing climbers of their sense of horizon and direction. Most climbers are lost to snow field white-outs, I‘ve been told. But I’m getting ahead of my tale.
While descending the fire escape steps was a personal purgatory, going up the stairs as a class was a view into an exciting still unexplored world. We’d line up two by two in rows and with the girls – ladies first, it was a time when manners mattered – in front we’d climb the stairs. As my name began with a C, I always got in the first row usually with Tommy Aires on my right and follow the girls up the stairs I would take a double step slowing the boys line allowing the girls to forge ahead one more step. Then we’d start. This angle gave us a view up the last rows of girl dresses much to our delight. A couple of the girls knew what we were doing and just let us look while a few would gather their dresses in modesty around them. During recesses, one girl, Peggy Morgan, would for a dime take a boy out by the stone wall that separate the play ground from the forest she’d lift up her dress and let us boys stare at her panties.
Pre-adolescent sexuality was strong, the boys masturbated from an early age on mostly in secret, staining our bed sheets much to the chagrin of our parents. “Playing with yourself will drive you insane or you will go blind,” was a common parental refrain.
I was to know a few crazies that masturbated but I never met a blind one.