I'm not sure what assault looks like
Where my high school math teacher touched me in a weird way but almost definitely not what you are expecting.
Winter 1989
The night before our high school winter hike the group of us gather in the vestibule in front of the school cafeteria. The building is from the early 60s, hippy chic, wooden and skylit. We unroll sleeping bags and learn that they would never fit in the stuff sac again. We practice putting up tents that skitter across the floor without earth to anchor them. Someone laces my brand new boots. Many other people offer sympathy that I didn’t understand for my brand new boots. Who doesn’t like new boots?
We cook baked beans over the kerosene stove that our group leader has pulled from his pack.
“The biggest pack” he tells us without irony.
I ask what we were having with our beans and the older kids tell us it was beans and greens for dinner. Then they pull out seedy joints and smoke right in front of the math teacher. Only his mustache sets him apart from the students. He is 23. We are the only two who didn’t smoke.
The 8 of us squeeze into the van with our gear. Two cook stoves. Four two person tents. Eight Nalgene bottles. I hold my backpack against my front, careful not to push my forearms into the jaws of the crampons. I lay my head against the top of the pack that had flipped open and try to sleep.
Hiking. Feet slipping on damp pine needles. Puffs of air leaving my mouth in huffs. The difficulty I have standing up from the rock. The moleskin that the teacher cuts to fit around each of my five blisters. I learn that our bodies use energy to keep the pee in our bladder at 98 degrees so he encourages us to pee frequently to allow our bodies to keep the rest of us warm. While Tara sets up our dual mummy tent I stand as still as the trees thinking about as many thoughts as they do. Then I slip into the tent and breathe in the smell of the off-gassing of my brand new sleeping pad. I can feel its ridges and the slight angle of our tent on the sloped ground.
I wake to the zip of the tent and Tara turns towards me, her brown hair sticking to the chapstick on her lips and whispers. “Matt is going to come in here so I can go sleep with Joe.” I am awake now, rustling of people unsettled and settled made much louder by the silence of the outdoors. Our tent flap opens again and Matt the teacher slithers in.
“Sorry” he says flopping his sleeping bag so it wis head to toe.“Giving Joe some space.” Go back to sleep”
When I wake up my hat is frozen on my head and our breath had made it snow inside the tent. I crawl out, creaking. As we hike to the saddle of the mountain it is Matt, then three sets of two students and then me. Far behind. When I get to the top the others are sitting just beneath the crest of the saddle.
“Made it.” They tell me, without congratulations or judgement.
“Head on up, the wind is amazing.” I can only crouch on the bare rock on the stretch between twin mountain tops. Trying to stand I am sure I will be blown off. We are too high to have trees as handholds. The only living things are lichen and wind. The teacher comes up behind me. You can stand up. He takes a step closer to the edge and turns back reaching his arm and tugging me forward. “Let the wind hold you” he says and then he tilts forward and spreads his arms wide. The other kids have finished their gorp and are back to the summit. They are whooping, their voices carrying over the howling. And so I stand and lean and feel how there is no way to fall.
We break for the night about halfway down the mountain. It is too cold for a fire so we went go bed at 5:30. Tara starts out in Joe’s tent and I go to sleep beside the teacher in mine.
“How are your blisters?” He asks me, reaching out.
“I haven’t taken my socks off” I tell him.
In the navy blue of almost night I hear the sound of a zipper and feel freezing air in the narrow bottom of my sleeping bag. Icy fingers tickle the hem of my socks. Very slowly the teacher lowers my right sock and its liner then my left. Then he puts one foot in each hand and rubs his thumb in the spot between my big toe and the pad of my sole. The saddle, I think, silently hysterical. He avoids my blisters. I stay very still, learning the blurred line between care and perversion like the mountaintop wind that could have tossed me over the edge or saved me.
In the thin light of morning, knees screaming from the downslope hike, the mountain whispers. “Stay here. You can be the bones of the earth.” But I walk forward, the last of our line, on feet that are entirely new to me.