The only tidbit of truth in this tale is I once went camping with a girlfriend and her sister. And no, this story does not have any sister-sister incest. It will be in two parts. The second part will follow in a few days.
LarryInSeattle took a first stab at editing. I changed a few sections after he returned it. Any remaining errors are mine alone.
As always comments are welcome, even negative ones if they are constructive.
Enjoy.
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A sure sign of impending old age is the irresistible need to give advice to people who haven't asked for it. I have no business offering advice on women, relationships or marriage. I'll try to stick to what I know.
One -- unless you are camping alone bring more than one flashlight.
Two -- fuck the forecast; put the rain fly up.
Three -- if your girlfriend's parents insist you bring her younger sister as a chaperone carefully consider your motives. Go, if all you wanted to do was camp. If you planned on more than camping, forget it and avoid the frustration.
Four -- don't punch anything stronger than the bones in your hand. Not punching anything is even better.
Let's start with the first piece of advice. When you wake, whether due to the heat, the incessant whir of the cicadas, or your aching balls, you'll want a flashlight to avoid catching your foot on a tree root and sprawling onto your hands and knees. If you only have one flashlight and that one is in the tent where your girlfriend lies as inaccessible as ever and you don't want to wake her or her kid sister, you will be forced, as I was, to stumble through the dark.
I had not been hurt in the fall. Our tents were pitched under a stand of short leaf pine trees. The ground was blanketed by years' worth of fallen needles. To imagine the tree had been placed there, decades earlier, for the sole purpose of tripping me was ludicrous. But that is how I felt at the time.
Only a few short leaf pines were left, most had been transformed into planks and plywood. Congress declared this chunk of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas a national forest during the Depression but it was already too late. The loggers had taken anything worth the trouble of cutting down. The majority of the trees in the forest were planted after it was designated a National Forest.
When we stopped to check in and pay for our campsite, I told the ranger we were looking for a nice quiet spot, one usually ignored by the car camping crowd. I took his advice even though it meant we were as far from the river as we could be and still be inside the park.
In July, in Missouri, if you went camping, it was to be near water big enough to swim, canoe, or float your inner-tubed ass in. A single road made a circuitous route through the park, giving off side branches as it went. The first part of the road ran along the river. The campsites along the river were always crowded, in fact you needed a reservation to get one. Each of the side roads ended in a service building that provided potable water, showers (with solar heated hot water no less) and flush toilets. Clustered around the service building were anywhere from three to five camping areas, each with four or five campsites. The campsites along the river had electric and water hookups. You could "camp" and watch the baseball game in an air-conditioned RV.
After the road curved away from the river the number of occupied campsites fell off dramatically. At the campground next to ours only a single site was occupied by an old Ford sporting rusted out wheel wells and a camper shell decorated with mildew. If not for the cooler atop the picnic table and the two lawn chairs I would have wondered if the truck had been abandoned and the Park Service simply hadn't had time to tow it away.
Our campground was the furthest from the river. The ranger had steered us to a beautiful spot. The ground had a gentle slope and if the ground was rocky the thick blanket of pine needles hide the fact. The showers were a couple hundred yards away and it's was half-mile hike to the river, but it was a great spot. We pitched our cheap Sears &Roebuck tents in an open area under the trees.
Another bit of advice, pine sap is a bitch to get out of your hair or off a tent and in hot weather, pine trees drip sap. Don't set your tent up right under a pine tree.
We had stopped to eat on the way down so we weren't hungry. We decided to toss our stuff in the tents and hike down to the river. Cindy raised her eyebrows as Claire moved to throw her sleeping bag in beside mine. Claire glared at her and threw her bag in the tent with Cindy's. I decided I hated Cindy.
I turned my back while Claire and Cindy changed into swimsuits. (Their parents were Carl and Carol. You might not be surprised if I told you the cat was Cora and the dog Cody.) As usual when I was nervous my brain started jumping around like a needle on a scratched LP.
"Was that cute? Every name starting with a "C"? A kid in a high chair with spaghetti in his hair was cute. Puppies are cute. Putting puppies into costumes is not cute. Those fucking stupid "Love Is" cartoons are not cute. They are stupid and trite."
I had turned my back to the girls as I shucked off my jeans and slipped on a pair of cut off 501 jeans I intended to use for swimming trunks. Flashes of distorted flesh in the chrome car bumper cut my internal musings short. I never reached a conclusion regarding the cuteness of the "C" names. The swirls in the chrome were nothing more than flashes of color, and for an instant maybe something darker, like pubic hair, but it was enough to make my dick start to get hard. I was beyond horny. If Nirvana was the extinguishing of all desire I was on the other side of the fucking galaxy from Nirvana.
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My first date with Claire was our senior prom. When we met during our junior year, dissecting a fetal pig, she had a boyfriend. They broke up over Thanksgiving the next year, our senior year, but I didn't tumble to the fact until the year was nearly over. Her boyfriend was a senior in college, a fact that afforded her a crumb of hallway notoriety. I treated the news of their breakup as a belated eighteenth birthday present and worked up the nerve to ask her to the prom. Claire was an older woman, she turned eighteen a month before I did, plus she had dated a college guy, no wonder I was nervous. If she had been just another senior chick I would have been cool as a cucumber, not that I had ever used my cool as a cucumber demeanor to ask anyone out. I was determined to go on one real date before finishing high school.
Senior prom was that date. I relaxed a little after I managed to get her corsage on without stabbing her with a pin. It was a wrist corsage and didn't have a pin but I was relieved anyway. I relaxed a little more when I got through dinner without inadvertently spitting food on her. Claire broke out the Double Mint before I had a chance to worry about post-dinner breath.
My anxiety was sedated but not comatose. It came roaring back when the first notes of "Colour My World" pulsed from the speakers. We had a DJ, live bands were for the kids in Ladue. It always bugged me that Chicago spelled "color" in the British fashion. It struck me as vaguely unpatriotic.
I wasn't sure she wanted to dance a slow dance yet. We stared at each other, then opened our arms. We both leaned in the same direction then both corrected. We looked more like we were trying to run interference than embrace.
She giggled. "I'll hold still. You come to me."
She didn't run away when I put my hand on the small of her back. She laughed at a joke that wasn't really funny. After that it was easy.
I admit I was a little nervous as the night drew to a close and I was faced with the dilemma of either trying to kiss her good night or skulk away like a total spaz. She seemed to enjoy kissing enough for me to imagine I wasn't totally fucking it up. I'd like to believe I was the one who moved on to Frenching but it was probably Claire. As an abstract concept, I had never understood enjoying someone else's tongue darting around inside your mouth. After that night I did.
I remember the faint taste of Double Mint lingered in her mouth. I haven't chewed Double Mint since we broke up.
