The Herndon Climb for The Baffler alongside words by Jasper Craven.
Every spring, on the coastal grounds of the U.S. Naval Academy, a twenty-one-foot obelisk honoring fallen Navy commander William Lewis Herndon is coated in shortening and enveloped by a writhing pyramid of the school’s freshmen, otherwise known as plebes. Shoeless and often shirtless, they crush their bodies against the cool granite and each other, rushing to scale the slippery monument and place a sailor’s cap on its tip.
