I was thirteen years old, about to walk backwards off a granite cliff. It was my first Endterm at the Waring School, where I was finishing my eighth-grade year, and my science teacher and my French teacher had brought a group of us to New Hampshire’s White Mountains to see what we could learn from camping and rock-climbing. I was strapped into a webbing harness, clipped by a carabiner to a sturdy climbing rope, on an anchor built by our resident professional, a man we students knew as “Camper Dave.”