This is my entry for the National Nude Day contest.
I hope you enjoy it!
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No trees. That was critical.
Well, at least, no big ones.
OK, nothing big enough to make me have to climb eight stories of spikey branches in my altogether. That was for certain.
And not blazing hot or much below room temperature for most of the year.
And not many people there. OK, maybe some, just to make it sporting.
Good scenery would be nice during the runs. Quiet. Open.
Grass - grass would be nice, too.
That's a lot to ask for, I know. It took me a long time to find it. Where, you ask? Nope, find your own. Suffice it to say that the Bureau of Land Management has like megacres of prime real estate under its thumb. Once you know your way around the database, it's amazing what you can uncover.
Doing the necessary cross-checking into weather records, aerial photographs, topographical maps and so forth -- well, it took time.
But, hey, I found the place I needed.
By some miracle, it wasn't even on the far side of the country. Open, surrounded by mountains in the far, far distance, it had a few major piles of rocks and a lot of streams and creeks. It was, I thought, ideal for my purpose.
.
Back up.
I never was much of a girly girl. My tomboy nature was Momma's despair at times.
Heaven knows that I'm pretty enough. I like boys and I've had boyfriends. I'm no blushing virgin - I certainly enjoy sex. Let's just say that, at this particular point of my life, I preferred my own company to trying to cope with half-drunk louts in bars.
There'd been too many of those.
And too many limp-wristed mama's boys. Since when had 'masculine' become something to be ashamed of? If I wanted feminine, I'd have been walking the other side of the street.
And, while we're at it, let's get one more thing straight. I am darned well not going to apologize for being an engineer. Lady engineers are not all nerds, you know.
OK, that's not quite true, I admit.
All
engineers are nerds, almost by definition. But, looking in the mirror, this was one lass who didn't look it. Not until she put her white helmet on, anyway.
.
To cut to the chase, I'd been doing the public nudity thing for a couple of years. No, not flashing. 'Audacious unobserved bareness', maybe? That would be a better way to put it. I'd been on a couple of Nude Day bicycle rides and the idea of free-hiking was something that turned me on. But generally, it was a private gig.
I had, on a couple of occasions, stripped off and left my clothes under a bush in a public park before timidly walking around in the darkness for a while. The first time, it was just a few minutes before I freaked out and scrambled for my knickers. I got bolder with more experience, but it was always at night when nobody could possibly see and I never strayed too far from my clothes.
I'd gotten really ambitious once and locked my clothes in my car six blocks away from my apartment in the wee hours of the morning, leaving me with just my house key and the pressing need to get home without being caught. I made it, just barely ahead of a slow-moving police car. I don't think they saw me; they certainly didn't speed up to catch me.
I'd been scared out of my mind until the door lock clicked solidly behind me, then I racked up about six orgasms.
It was the excitement, the
daring
that mattered to me, I suppose.
It had all been fun, some more so than others. But it was also a bit dangerous -- more than just the danger of getting caught. Even in my peaceful, dinky town, parks and late-night streets were frequented by both cops and criminals, neither of which would be good company for my, um... experiments.
And I really
didn't
want to upset anybody. Or get my naked tush splashed on the social media for Momma's bitchy friends to see. Or -- shudder - my ΓΌber-straight department manager at work. The thought of what
that
Monday morning would be like had kept me awake once or twice after some especially risky episode. Not that it ever stopped me, but I knew that there had to be a better way. And I was an engineer -- a problem-solver, right?
Sure.
.
Then one day I'd seen a weather balloon being launched and had been inspired. As I watched it soar upwards, my libido had followed. With that in mind, I started my search for the right wilderness spot.
In between looking for a suitable location, I also starting searching for the technical stuff. The Net gave me a source for balloons - biodegradable ones at that. More research found me a source for cheap, lightweight time-delay relays. And battery-powered electromagnets, lightweight but strong enough to hold a payload until the relay cut the power.
It didn't take an engineering degree to figure out. Any high school dumbass with a soldering iron could have done it. But this was me.
Well, me and my supercharged, just-slightly-bent sex drive.
Along the way, I discovered that a couple of federal agencies had regulations about balloons, but I figured I could stay under their radar if I kept mine under six feet in diameter. With helium, that would give me just about seven pounds of lift to cover the weight of the balloon, the parachute and the release mechanism - as well as my clothes. (See where this is going?) Actually, the regulations said I wasn't allowed to drop
anything
from a high-altitude balloon, but I figured I could work around that because I wasn't intending to send anything very high at all.
Then there was the regulation giving a hard limit of six pounds max for the payload. That limit I figured I could tap-dance around if I kept close to it.
The bottom line was, I decided, that what I was planning wasn't too illegal, nothing too likely to get Momma's little girl into trouble - provided that I built it right and kept everything on the QT.
But six pounds... Weighing an outfit at home, I decided that wasn't very much, considering that it had to cover clothes, a parachute and everything else.
So, unless somebody official-looking was likely to be around, both 'six feet' and 'six pounds' became moving targets, so to speak.
And it turned out that helium wasn't cheap, either. Once I got some prices from suppliers, I was surprised to discover that it would cost me about $100 per launch. OK, in one sense that was a lot. On the other hand, what would getting ready for a night on the town cost me, with a visit to the stylist, maybe a new dress and maybe, eventually, really crappy sex? I figured $100 was no worse than that. In any case, this was something catering to
my
fantasies, not somebody else's. It was worth trying, at least once.
Getting more and more excited, I experimented in my garage as the bits and pieces arrived in the mail.
An electronic time-delay release would control a one-inch electromagnet holding on to a simple iron washer fastened to the balloon. I was confident of getting a virtually certain release of my package, with timing accurate to a tenth of a second.
Together, the wiggly-amps parts, including the battery, would all weigh less than half a pound and cost maybe $50 on top of what the helium would set me back. If things went as planned, I would be able to reuse just about everything but the balloon itself. If not, well, that would be the cost of doing business, so to speak.
And I could make my own parachute. The commercially-available ones used Kevlar cord and ripstop nylon. I did some number-crunching and figured a trimmed-down industrial-strength orange garbage bag and some 20 lb fishing line would do just fine. After all, if it failed, there would only be non-breakable stuff falling, right?
I started doing dummy runs in my garage.
I covered the window first, of course. I wanted to make a point of being naked when working on the project. It was the principle of the thing, right? But years of household nudity had me very aware of potential neighbourly sensibilities. Oh, and very real neighbourly snoopiness, too - what is it with some people?
Laying out the pieces, I assembled them and hung them from the beams. Everything worked per spec in my garage, everything but inflating the balloon and I couldn't try that inside. I was ready for real-world trials.
I headed out to the area and did a dry run with a dummy load. It worked. The balloon soared away with amazing strength and speed as it drifted to the east. I watched it go, my heart beating.
Two minutes later by my watch, precisely on time, I saw the balloon jerk and shoot steeply upwards as the payload cut loose.
The simple home-made parachute opened very nicely, thank you, and I had no trouble following the descent of the bright orange canopy. It floated down out of sight several hundred yards away.
The winds were light and while the heaven-bound balloon was soon out of sight, the parachute and its attached bundle hadn't gone very far; it only took me maybe 15 minutes to get to where it had landed.
Looking around, triumphant, as horny as I'd ever been, I thought of rubbing one off right there. In the end, I decided not to ruin the opportunity for a perfect first time -- the real thing, without clothes. I waited until I'd got off Bureau land before I pulled over.
As a bonus - time spent in research never being wasted - I'd also found a good camping spot.
I was ready.
.
The weekend after that was solid rain and I was frustrated beyond belief. I decided to keep my fingers off myself and left Big Bob, my battery-operated boyfriend, sulking and neglected in my drawer for the weekend.