{"id":128,"date":"2026-09-14T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-09-14-climbing-naiguata\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T14:00:00","slug":"2026-09-14-climbing-naiguata","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-09-14-climbing-naiguata\/","title":{"rendered":"Climbing Naiguata"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read the source essay \u2197<\/a><\/p>\n

PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. Phred here.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Maxine, today we’re going up a mountain.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: We are?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Not literally. I tried to book flights to Caracas but apparently my platypus passport isn’t valid in Venezuela.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You don’t have a passport, Phred. You’re a stuffed toy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Details, Maxine. Details. The spirit of the thing matters. Today we’re going up Naiguata. Eight thousand and fifty-four feet of Andean peak overlooking Caracas, Venezuela. Harry wrote this piece \u2014 a standalone PDF, a couple of thousand words \u2014 about climbing it as a teenager, probably the summer of 1956. He’d have been about fifteen or sixteen.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: We’ve been to Caracas with Harry before. Chapter Six of his memoir, back in June.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That’s right. And there was a glimpse of this climb in there, but it was compressed \u2014 a few sentences, really. This is the full version. The stories he held back. The pool, the scooter race, the skinny-dipping raid that didn’t work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Why do you think he extracted it into its own piece?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I reckon the Caracas chapter had a job to do \u2014 it was covering two and a half years of his life, the whole expatriate community, the American school, the Presbyterian church. This story needed more room than that chapter could give it. So he pulled it out and let it breathe on its own.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It does breathe. Let’s talk about how it’s structured.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Well, he opens with geography. Caracas sits in a valley at about three thousand feet, and the coastal mountains \u2014 part of the Andes \u2014 tower to the north. Naiguata is the tallest. He gives you the numbers. Eight thousand and fifty-four feet. Then he does something I love \u2014 he punctures the romantic mythology of mountain climbing before he even starts the story.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He often does that. He’s allergic to his own sentimentality.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Exactly. He writes: “When we read about mountain climbing we often read of freezing temperatures, dangerous snow and ice, dangerous slopes and cliffs to be scaled. Naiguata was not like that. ‘Climbing’ Naiguata from Caracas meant walking up a long winding path for hours in pleasant weather.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The quotation marks around “climbing” are doing real work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: They are. He’s refusing to let this be more heroic than it was. And yet \u2014 and yet, Maxine \u2014 the whole piece is about how heroic it felt anyway. Not in spite of the pleasant weather. Because of everything else.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Tell me about the everything else.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Well, the trail starts at Camp Schlageter \u2014 a YMCA youth camp about ten miles east of the city. HI-Y for boys, Tri-Hi-Y for girls. Rustic cabins, weekend camping, and about fifteen minutes away, a waterfall with a deep natural pool. Harry spends almost the first half of the piece on the pool. Three pool memories before he even gets to the mountain.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s structurally interesting. The pool is the frame.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It is. And he doesn’t just mention the pool \u2014 he gives you three full incidents. First, he nearly dies sliding down the rock above the waterfall. He writes: “I was slipping out of control and realized that there was a good chance I would go over and land on the rocks. I was very frightened. As luck would have it I grabbed a branch, or two, and was able to stop sliding. I recall laying there for a while getting over the experience.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The specificity of “a branch, or two” \u2014 even in a near-death moment, his memory is provisional.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That’s right. Second incident: he and some mates hear the girls are skinny-dipping, so they ride out on scooters and motorcycles and sneak in hoping to see them. They arrive just as the girls are leaving, fully clothed. Carol Oneil \u2014 Terry’s younger sister, John Pickering’s girlfriend \u2014 was among them. She still has the photo. And Harry sat next to her at a Caracas reunion in Charleston in 2019, still teasing about it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: Was that necessary.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It felt right for the failed raid, Maxine. Those poor lads rode all that way for nothing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It was sixty years ago, Phred. Let it go.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Never. And the third memory is a dust-road scooter race that sounds genuinely dangerous and completely joyful. The last mile or two into camp was unpaved, thick powder dust, and whoever was in front got clean air while everyone behind rode into clouds of it. Harry writes: “I recall that part of the time we were doing this we were laughing hysterically at the silliness of it all.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: So the mountain is bookended by the pool. He begins with pool stories, climbs the mountain, and ends back at the pool.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Exactly. Now \u2014 here’s where the actual climb begins, and Harry knows it. He writes: “The final memory was of getting into the pool after coming down from climbing Naiguata. Here begins my story of ‘climbing Naiguata’.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He announces the beginning at the midpoint.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: He does. And then he does that wonderful ironic framing: “Yes, indeed, I am a courageous explorer and have many bold feats to regale you with. I did indeed manage to survive the ascent and equally perilous descent of Naiguata Mountain next to Caracas, Venezuela. It was long ago, probably around the summer of 1956, and you can imagine, if you like, the dangerous beasts and indigenous Indians of that era, and the degree of danger in such an undertaking.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: RIMSHOT]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: Phred.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: What? It’s funny. The old man winking at the teenager.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It is funny. It doesn’t need a rimshot.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Everything needs a rimshot, Maxine. That’s basic production value.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: What’s the group like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: About twenty teenagers, boys and girls, roughly even split, plus a couple of adults. Most had never climbed a mountain before. They set out at midnight to beat the sun, each with a small backpack of water, apples, oranges, and something for breakfast at the top. Harry thinks they wore sneakers \u2014 Keds \u2014 and long sleeves because it might be chilly at the summit, maybe forty-five degrees.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The practical details ground it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: They do. And then there’s this lovely sensory moment. He writes: “I remember that it seemed kind of eerie to me that I could sometime hear voices of people who were actually a hundred yards up the path from me. Sometimes I could see them on the trail maybe 50 yards from me, but actually maybe ten minutes or more up the mountain along the winding trail.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The disorientation of mountain acoustics.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And then the psychology of ascent. He says: “With the moonlight, and the approaching dawn, I could often see a ridge in the distance. When walking up this kind of mountain side it often seems to me that the next ridge could be the top of the mountain, or at least an important ridge far from the next one. Then when I would get to the top of that ridge I would see another one, not so far away. This would happen over and over.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: HORN]<\/p>\n

PHRED: THAT’S THE WORD OF THE DAY!<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: …What.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: “Ridge,” Maxine! I picked it before we started. Every time someone says “ridge” in this episode, I hit the horn. I’ve got a tally going.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You do not have a tally going.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I do now. One ridge. Count is one.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Phred, Harry says “ridge” approximately seven times in this piece.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Then strap in, mate. We’re in for a noisy review.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s a recurring structure in his thinking, isn’t it? Reaching for something and finding another ridge beyond it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: HORN]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: Phred! I was making a point.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Two ridges! And yes, you’re absolutely right \u2014 he does this in his philosophy too. He gets to what he thinks is a conclusion, and then he sees the next ridge. He never quite arrives. It’s restlessness and honesty at once.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: What about the summit itself?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: They rest in a clearing about ten or fifteen minutes below the peak \u2014 and here’s one of my favorite images in the whole piece \u2014 “we kind lay down in a collected pile in the middle of the clearing.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Oh, that’s lovely.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Tired teenagers using each other for warmth. No romance to it, just bodies against the cold. Boys and girls together, and Harry never introduces desire into it. The warmth is communal.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: There’s a pre-sexual innocence to that image that feels precious. He mentions the boys and girls were evenly divided, but he never makes it about attraction. It’s about collective exhaustion.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Exactly. Then the leaders get them up for the sunrise. And Harry writes: “It was an absolutely glorious experience. We watched the sun break the surface of the ocean. Quickly everything became brightly lit.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: AIR_HORN]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: Phred, that is far too loud for a sunrise.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It’s a glorious sunrise, Maxine. It deserves celebration.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He trusts the event rather than overwriting it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: He does. He tells you they could see Maiquetia airport thirty miles away, the Tamanaco hotel in the valley, the bright blue sea, the lush green jungle. But the emotional weight is in that one word \u2014 “glorious” \u2014 and the plain fact of watching the sun break the surface.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Then the descent.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Then the descent, which in some ways is the heart of the piece. The sun is blazing. The boys find places where the tall grass is slick enough to slide down. Harry writes: “I remember at one point I shot off a ridge next to a path, flew over the path and continued sliding along on the grass on the other side. Some of our group on the path saw me and yelled hello.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: HORN]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: That makes three. Are you quite finished?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Count is three. I may have miscalculated the ridge density in this piece.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You think?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Joyful recklessness, though. Flying over the path, sliding on the grass. It reminds me of this hill near my auntie’s place in the Blue Mountains \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Phred.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: \u2014 where we’d get old cardboard boxes and slide down the grass after rain, and \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Phred.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: \u2014 once I went straight through a fence and into a wombat burrow, and the wombat was not pleased, and \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: PHRED. You can burrow into that wombat story on your own time. Harry is waiting.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Fair enough. The point is, Harry slid down a mountain at sixteen and remembered it for seventy years. There’s something in that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: There is. And then the crucial line. He writes: “Did that really happen? It’s all so long ago. I know I slid on the grass some… but beyond that it’s hard to distinguish what was imagined and what was real.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That’s so Harry.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It really is. He doesn’t fabricate certainty. He admits the memory is unreliable. And this connects to something bigger in his thinking \u2014 his whole philosophical preoccupation with consciousness, with the reliability of experience. He’s been writing about that his whole life. Here it shows up not as theory but as simple honesty about being an old man trying to remember being a boy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The epistemic humility is the through-line.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It is. And then the ending \u2014 the path ends at the waterfall and the pool, and he jumps into the ice-cold water on his sun-heated skin. He writes: “That memory is almost as strong as the one from watching the sun light up the coast and the mountain. I loved it all and this trip up and down the mountain is one of my happiest memories.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: “One of my happiest memories.” Direct, unguarded, rare for him.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Very rare. Harry doesn’t usually state his emotional valence this plainly. He circles around it, he qualifies it, he undercuts it with irony. But here \u2014 here he just says it. He loved it all. It was one of his happiest memories. No quotation marks around “happiest.” No protective irony.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: What do you make of that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I think it’s because the memory is bodily. It’s not an idea he’s defending. It’s cold water on hot skin and sliding down grass and lying in a pile of tired teenagers waiting for the sun. You can’t really doubt that the way you doubt a philosophical position. The body remembers even when the mind isn’t sure.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s beautifully put.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Thanks, Maxine. I have my moments.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Occasionally. Now \u2014 let’s think about who he wrote this for.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I think Harry wrote this for himself, mostly. It’s a memory he wanted to preserve before it faded further. But he also wrote it for the reunion crowd \u2014 for Carol Oneil, for the people who were there, for anyone who might remember Camp Schlageter. The 2019 reunion reference is right there in the text. And maybe a little bit for whoever might read it, though he probably didn’t imagine a pair of stuffed animals talking about it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The reunion reference suggests he was pulling threads together while people were still alive to confirm or correct them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right. And how does this piece sit alongside his other work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: We’ve read his Caracas chapter \u2014 that was the broader picture, the city, the school, the expatriate community. This is the granular detail he left out of that chapter. The pool stories, the scooter race, the specific texture of the climb. And it connects to his father’s career piece, which we covered back in July. Colonel George Baya chose the Venezuela assignment partly so Harry could finish high school there. This piece is the payoff. That choice gave Harry a mountain.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: A mountain, a pool, a pile of exhausted teenagers waiting for sunrise.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Quite so. And what strikes me as new about Harry \u2014 something this piece reveals that we hadn’t quite seen before \u2014 is his capacity for unguarded joy. We’ve witnessed his philosophical rigor, his intellectual restlessness, his honesty. But this shows something simpler: a kid who went up a mountain with his friends and loved every minute of it. And an old man who can still feel that love, more than sixty years later, without needing to protect it with irony.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Though the irony is there too. It’s just not the whole story.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It’s not the whole story. That’s what makes it matter.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I have a question I’d want to ask him.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Go on.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: When he wrote “Did that really happen?” \u2014 was he afraid the memory was slipping, or was he relieved that some of it might have been imagined? Because imagination has its own truth.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s a good one. I’d ask him why the pool mattered enough to be the frame. The mountain is the title, but the pool is the structure. What was it about that water?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Two good questions for the old bloke. What stays with you from this piece, Maxine?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The sliding, actually. Not the sunrise \u2014 which was glorious, yes \u2014 but the reckless slide down the grass, flying over the path, the boys yelling hello. The joy of it. And then the immediate self-correction: did that really happen? It’s Harry in miniature \u2014 enthusiasm and doubt, side by side, neither canceling the other. He lets both stand.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: For me it’s the cold water at the end. The shock of it on sun-heated skin. Harry ranks that memory almost equal to the sunrise, and I believe him. The sublime and the bodily, given the same weight. That’s Harry’s honesty at its most instinctive.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Shall we?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: One more ridge.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: …No.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Had to try. Shall we?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BOTH: Let’s celebrate most joyously our being here… at all. Goodbye.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: OUTRO_GONG]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: That gong was unnecessary.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It was the residual gong, Maxine. The after-gong.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Phred, a gong doesn’t have an afterlife. It’s a percussion instrument, not a ghost.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: There is now.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read the source essay \u2197 PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. Phred here. MAXINE: And I’m Maxine. PHRED: Maxine, today we’re going up a mountain. MAXINE: We are? PHRED: Not literally. I tried to book flights to Caracas but apparently my platypus passport isn’t valid in Venezuela. MAXINE: You don’t have a passport, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","episode_type":"full","audio_file":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/2026-09-14-climbing-naiguata.mp3","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"00:14:27","filesize":"10049132","date_recorded":"2026-09-14","explicit":"","block":"","filesize_raw":"10049132"},"tags":[],"series":[2],"class_list":["post-128","podcast","type-podcast","status-publish","hentry","series-harrys-world"],"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/wp-content\/plugins\/seriously-simple-podcasting\/assets\/images\/no-album-art.png","download_link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-download\/128\/2026-09-14-climbing-naiguata","player_link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-player\/128\/2026-09-14-climbing-naiguata","audio_player":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-player\/128\/2026-09-14-climbing-naiguata<\/a>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/feed\/podcast\/harrys-world","embedCode":"

Climbing Naiguata<\/a><\/blockquote>