Northern Lights
By Richard Wark
August, 1975
Deliberately, noiselessly, careful not to awaken the four guys in the tent, I zip the door shut and take a few steps into the woods. Even with the flashlight in hand, I have to pick my way carefully through the trees and bushes. Once I'm behind a row of trees, halfway down to the lake, I snap off the flashlight, unzip my fly, and urinate. I let a deep breath go as the pressure is relieved from my bladder.
Once I finish, I zip up, turn around, and step back to the clearing. At my right are two tents; the lake, calm and reflecting the stars and the greenish glow of the northern lights, is on my left. Four canoes rest a few feet from the water's edge, spooning, it appears, on the flat rocks. In front of me are the remains of the fire, doused about an hour ago.
I breathe in the night air. There are just a few remnants of the smell of burning wood. The last few words of the song "Rocky Mountain High," about friends around the campfire and everybody being high run through my mind.
The campers in both the men's and women's tents are sleeping' I can hear their heavy, rhythmic breathing and the occasional snore. The night is warm and breezy, a welcome change from the stickiness and steamy humidity that assaulted us during the day's paddle and made the portages a vision of Hell. The breeze is just strong enough to keep the mosquitoes, the curse of the Boundary Waters, in hiding for the night.
I move toward the lake, avoiding any fallen branches and stray firewood. The stars, half-moon, and the snaking green glow of the aurora on the horizon make it unnecessary to turn the flashlight on. When I reach the water, I crouch down to rinse my hands. Off to my left I hear a quiet splash in the water. It's not unusual. The sounds of fish breaking the water's surface usually dot the quiet nights, as do the ghostly "Tooooo-LOOOO" calls of the loons. The next splash, though, is followed by muffled feminine laughter.
I rise and follow the sound. The campsite is on a small cove along the shore. I walk along the shore to my left. As I go around the bend I nearly stumble over something -- a pile of clothes; two shirts, two pairs of shorts, white panties. The soft laughter stops at the sound of my near-fall, and I hear a whisper 'oh, my God!" followed by an abbreviated giggle.
I look out into the lake. About ten feet off the shore are Ann and Eileen.
Eileen is in water up to her shoulders, her dark hair wet and plastered to her neck. Ann is a little closer, waist high in the water, the breeze blowing her still-dry blonde hair. Her arms reflexively fold over her chest as she turns to me. She is naked, the moonlight falling on her bare shoulders, the water barely covering her pale lower abdomen. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize Eileen is nude under the lake's surface. An erection begins to tug at my shorts.
At eighteen, this is the closest I have ever been to actual naked girls.
"Who is it?" Ann's voice is just a touch louder than a whisper.
"Rich."
Eileen whispers hoarsely from behind her. "Did you come out to swim too?"
Trying to make it look like I'm not looking at Ann, who has relaxed her arms, revealing her teardrop-shaped breasts. Trying to sound nonplussed. "No but ...I mean...it sounds like a good idea,"
Ann kicks backwards into the water. Before she goes under, I get a glance of thin, light-colored hair barely covering the "V" between her legs. My cock is ready to break through the front of my shorts.
"Just be quiet," Eileen voice is hushed. "We were afraid it was Bruce." Bruce is kind of the camp asshole, getting pissy with everyone and making comments to the four girls. Fortunately, four days on the trail have taught me that once he falls asleep, he's asleep for real, and mortar shells couldn't wake him up before breakfast.
"Ok," is my deep, philosophical reply. The shore begins to spin a little before my eyes and I become lightheaded as I set down the flashlight and pull off my shirt. After I kick off my shoes -- shoes are necessary on the trail almost 100 % of the time -- I glance out at the girls. They are up to their shoulders in water and looking at me.
Just as I have never been within sight of live naked women before, I have never been naked in front of live women before. What do I do? Do I face them as I take off my shorts? I mean, they're going to see me -- see my penis. How many have they seen? Is it going to be big by comparison? Small? Small enough to make them giggle? And the fact that it's massively erect -- is that going to disgust them?
My instinct is to drop my shorts in front of them, which I do. The breeze and the sense of exposure thrill me, harden me still more. There is no reaction from the girls as I step gingerly into the water. I'm already feeling better.
Eileen, the older of the two by less than a year, takes a couple of steps forward until her breasts, round and dark-nippled in the moonlight, are positioned just above the water's surface. She is silently laughing, glancing from my face to my cock and back again.
Her sister, head and shoulders out of the water, the rest of her body just out of sight, seems to be making no pretense of looking at my face, her eyes riveted on my crotch. From the middle of the lake comes a series of small splashes and the slightly haunted cry of a loon.
I pause and splash water on my chest and legs to get accustomed to the cold water. The girls continue to watch. I hear Ann say something to Eileen in a low voice; I can't tell if Eileen replies. I am a bit self-conscious about them watching me. I realize at this point that it is possible, even likely, that, like me, they have never seen someone of the opposite sex live and nude.
The yearly trips to the Boundary Waters in the last couple of years have seen an increase in female attendance. My first trip was four years ago, when I was fourteen. Mr. Kravouchek, one of the teachers at my high school, had some property and a fledgling outfitting business in Northern Minnesota. About thirty of us, maybe a few more, took a bus from the school parking lot in Chicago to Ely, spent the night at a base camp, were split into groups of nine or ten, and were assigned a "guide" (usually a college kid with little or no outdoor experience).
We then spent ten days canoeing and portaging through the Superior National Forest, into Quetico Provincial Park in Canada, making a wide loop back to the base camp. My head was -- and is -- filled with back-to-nature-man-in-the-wilderness-Jeremiah Johnson-Thoreau-John Denver and I went willingly and thirstily.
My first trip was an early summer trip, cold, rainy, buggy, all guys, and thoroughly miserable. When I finally got home and shaved the ten days growth of beard and soaked off the ten days accumulation of mud and slept in a normal bed for the first time in over ten days, I made an oath that I would never return; that my outdoor wilderness days were over.
However, a little more than a year later I found myself back on the Canadian Wilderness bus -- this time in July, not early June. I was smart enough to realize part of my misery was because the weather sucks earlier in the summer. This time there were six or seven girls on the trip. Mr. Kravouchek had expanded his business enough to include people from other schools and not just Brother Broderick, my Catholic boys' high school. And the trip was far better.
Now, senior year over and freshly 18, I am on what I assume will be my final trip. It's an "advanced" trip. Everybody on this group is a little older and has been up here before, or at least has some experience camping and canoeing.
It's a smaller group than usual. There are a total of eight of us, including the guide: four guys and four girls. My canoe partner is a sweet but kind of spacey girl named Mary, a junior at St. Claire's, probably not more than seventeen. Ann and Eileen are in a canoe together, when we are on the trail. Brian, the guide, and Bruce are canoe mates, because nobody else can stand to be with Bruce. Another pair of siblings, a brother and sister who are both a little older than the rest of us but are small enough to look like early teens, man the fourth canoe.
Ann and Eileen are, for the next month, both eighteen, we discovered early on in the trip. Eileen is older by, I believe she said, ten and a half months. The term is "Irish twins," which I suppose means their parents really like sex. Eileen has finished her first year at Daley College; Ann just graduated from St. Claire's, the "sister school" of my now ex-high school.
We have, along with Mary, become sort of "lunch buddies" and dinner companions, generally finding each other at meals and sitting together by the lake, watching the moon, the shooting stars, the nightly northern lights, talking about music, movies, books, God, and cafeteria food. I enjoy hanging out with them.
It's not like there's much chance of anything happening between us, anyway, my subconscious self keeps whispering in my ear, killjoy that he is.
The cool water rushes over my body as I dive into the water. I had expected the cold water to shrink up my dick, the way a cold shower would, but the feeling of the water gliding along my naked flesh seems to caress and excite me. As I come up, my right side brushes against someone's body.
"Watch it" I hear Eileen's voice as I surface. "Just because we're naked out here doesn't mean we're grabbing each other."
I begin to mumble an embarrassed reply before I realize she was less than half serious. She is still standing, facing me although not looking at me, making no effort to conceal herself, cupping her hands in the water, bringing them up to her neck, and letting the water run over her breasts. Ann is slightly behind me, where rock shelf drops off into deeper water, still covered up to her shoulders.
Far behind us, in the middle of the lake, two loons are skimming the water and calling out to each other. We turn and can see their shadowy shapes as they beat the surface with their wings. Past them, in the night sky, a green and purple glow snakes its way just above the tree line on the other side of the lake. Our experience so far this trip has been that the northern lights start strong and fade as the evening progresses; this time it seems to be getting stronger and lighter.
"That is really cool," Ann says.
"Haven't you seen them before?" I ask, in a low voice. "I thought you'd been up here before."
"Last year. But it rained every night, I think."
"You must have come up in June." Of course, I'm trying to sound like some kind of expert. "I was here in August. The weather was great. The lights were out every night. After a while, we barely noticed them. It was like 'Oh, yeah, there they are,' and then we forgot about them. We were too tired anyway"
