Hot Sand: Bear Foot Lake

Bear Foot Lake. It's one of those places I think about once in a while, even though I haven't been there in years. Deep in the Adirondack region of Upstate New York, Bear Foot sits at the end of a two mile trail, greeting you, when you arrive, with glinting sunlight sparkling from the surface of its oddly green water. It's not swampy algae green, it's grayish, whitish green, caused, I read somewhere, by fine silt in the water, left over from the Ice Age.

The first time I went to Bear Foot, I was a Boy Scout. Thirteen years old, if I remember correctly. There were nine of us, just a small troop, led by our troop leader Mr. Jackson, and his assistant, a younger man named Chuck. I have fond memories of setting up our small tents on the beach — one of the few sand beaches of its size on any of the hundreds of Adirondack backcountry ponds and lakes.

I was in my early twenties when I went back to Bear Foot Lake. It's that memorable weekend that I tell you about today. I went with a female friend of mine, Linda, a girl a year or two younger than me. She was an outdoorsy type, drove a somewhat worn-out Subaru wagon, one with a rack on the roof that often had a kayak strapped to it. Most days she wore Timberland boots that had some miles on them, boots that were always untied, loose around her ankles.

Linda was fond of flannel shirts, mostly worn open, over a t-shirt, with the sleeves unevenly rolled up a turn or two, but she was softer in spirit and girlishness than some of the girls who dress that way. She's a dark haired girl, with green eyes that were always open wide, as if she was taking in more of her surroundings than most people see. That dark hair was always one of her nicest features, always shimmering and shining, moving like strands of silk blown by the faintest breath. I shouldn't admit this, because I had a girlfriend at the time, but I always loved seeing Linda from behind — all that silky dark hair hanging down onto her back, the nice hourglass curve of her waist, the curve of her sexy ass into womanly thighs, all the way down to those ever-present loose-around-the-ankle Timberland boots. She was, and still is I imagine, easy on the eyes.

Backpacking to Bear Foot with Linda was a weekend I'd looked forward to since the day she and I made the plans — a 'just the two of us' weekend, the kind of thing we, as close friends, had never done before. The planning was odd and somewhat thrilling as I recall, because much went unspoken, even the assumption that we'd be sharing a tent. We were still young, and somewhat carefree, though we were far from the adventurous free-spirit of some of today's youth, with their 'friends with benefits' arrangements. No, Linda and I were friends without benefits, mainly because I had a girlfriend, a college sophomore who was spending her summer abroad, in England, where, from her phone calls and letters, I knew she was spending lots of time with a certain young Englishman who was 'showing her around.'

Like me, Linda was in a relationship, an on-again-off-again one that was hard to keep track of, especially with living away at college mucking up the works. As far as I remember it, they were on-again at the time of our backpacking weekend, but that memory is vague. Perhaps I didn't care.

And so off we trudged, Linda and I, into the Adirondack woods, with packs on our backs that felt for all the world like they were full of lead. "Holy shit, Jeff," I remember her saying to me, right after she'd strapped hers on and stumbled backward, coming to rest against the side of her Subaru. "We're supposed to go how far with these on?"

"It's just two miles," I said. "It's easy, though. I did it when I was thirteen."

We'd arrived there, at the trailhead, on Friday afternoon, to beat any possible weekenders and hopefully get a prime camping spot, ideally right on the beach. There were a few primitive tent sites carved out of the woods — just bare patches of ground overlooking the beach and the water — but the crescent shaped sandy beach was what I remembered from my childhood, and it's where I wanted to be. With any luck we'd be the only ones there that weekend, with the whole of the small lake to ourselves.

Quite often Adirondack trailheads have a wooden box on a post, with a sign-in/sign-out sheet inside so the rangers can keep track of things. There's sometimes other information posted in the box, and on that day I was disappointed to see that 'On the Beach' camping had to be reserved ahead of time by calling the ranger's office, and was for groups only. In order to follow the rules we had to use one of the wooded sites and walk the few extra steps to the water. Not a big deal, I decided.

Linda was a trooper on that hike, never complaining, even though I knew she was struggling with the top-heavy pack's weight. I was struggling too, truth be told, my out of shape body not used to the weight of adult accoutrements, like bottles of tequila and triple sec, and of course limes and salt for our margaritas. And oh yeah, we had a tent and a stove and food and water and clothes. The usual camping stuff. Stuff that added up to untold pounds on our backs. We were both happy when we saw the sparkling glimmers of Bear Foot Lake through the trees. We'd made it.

We chose a nice little tent site under towering White Pines, the ground soft with decades — or maybe centuries — of needle droppings. White Pine needles are inches long, soft and comfortable under bare feet, with a mahogany brown color that's lovely. It was almost as if our little spot was carpeted, unlike many Adirondack tent sites that are just bare dirt.

Our small, lightweight, two-person tent — yes, just one — was set up and I was straightening the rocks around our fire pit, scanning the woods for dead and down trees to cut with my folding saw, when I heard voices. Lots of them.

"Looks like we're not alone," I said to Linda. "Wow, there's a bunch of 'em."

-

It was about ten minutes later when a nice looking older man walked over to us, I'd assumed, to say hello. He did say that, but he had a concerned look on his face. "When I spoke to the ranger's office," he said, "they told me we'd have the whole place to ourselves. We were kind of surprised when we saw your car at the trailhead, but then we thought maybe you were day-hikers."

"Oh," I said. "He probably meant you'd have the whole beach camping area. I think that's the part that's reserved, just for groups."

"Oh, wow. Maybe, yeah," the man said, his face still somewhat tense with concern. "Here's the thing, guys," he said to us. "We're all members of a club called Upstate Swingers of New York. We're here for, you know, a club get-together. Things might get a little, uh, uncomfortable for you, unless you're cool with it."

I looked at Linda. Her eyes were open wide, even more than usual. They seemed to be smiling a little, even though her mouth wasn't. The pine-scented air was suddenly very silent, so I decided to answer the man, for both of us. "Yeah, that's cool," I said to him, trying to act casual. "As long as you don't mind us here. We don't want to, like, ruin anything for you."

"Oh, no," the man said, his face relaxing into a little bit of a smile. "Yeah, I mean, same with us. We don't want to screw up your weekend, either. But yeah, we can all just do our own thing. I just wanted to let you know, before you were surprised or shocked or something. My name's David, by the way."

Linda and I chatted with David for a five minutes or more, talking about the Adirondacks, the mountains we'd hiked, how ultralight and fragile our little tent looked, and a few other subjects. He yelled down to the beach to get his wife's attention, and she walked up the short, eroded path to our little tent site, smiling but looking a little bashful when I shook her small hand. "It was a screw-up with the ranger's office," David told her. "They didn't tell me the whole story, I guess, about these other tent sites. But Jeff and Linda said they don't mind, and...I mean, we don't mind, right?"

His wife, Annie, shrugged. "No, I guess not. You told them...why we're here?"

"Yeah, he did," I said to her, stumbling a bit with my words. "It's cool. We're cool."

"You sure you wouldn't like some privacy?" Annie said. "Maybe there's a spot at the other end of the lake."

"No, there's nothing," I said. "I've got the trailguide in my pack. It's just this end here where you're supposed to camp. They get kinda pissed if you flatten out a spot that's not already cleared."

"Oh, yeah, I guess," Annie said. I remember her looking unconvinced about sharing the beach with us, or maybe it was our tent's perch that made her uncomfortable, probably twenty feet in elevation higher than the sand where their friends were setting up camp, and only sixty or eighty feet away in total. Linda and I, as we found out soon after, had one hell of a view.

David and Annie left us, making their way down the rooty little path. As I remember it, ten, or twenty, or maybe even thirty long seconds went by in silence before Linda and I spoke to each other, awkwardly, about setting up the small butane stove so we could heat up some dehydrated soup. It seems odd to me now, to think that we didn't say a word about our new neighbors being a group of swingers there to, well, swing. But that's sort of how our friendship had been, Linda and I. We'd never talked about the deep stuff, or relationships, or our troubles. It was a light friendship, one of smiles and easy-going laughter. Having a sudden conversation about swinging would have embarrassed us both, I'm sure, so we talked about soup instead.

Then we ate some.

Then we watched a naked woman go to her knees and give a naked man a blowjob.

"This is crazy," I said. "Do we want to be here? We could pack up, I guess, and make it out before dark."

Linda didn't answer my question directly. Instead, she commented on the scene. "Do you think they're married to other people? That's sorta what it is, right?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"He's not the best looking guy I've ever seen," she said.

"How many have you seen?" I asked, smirking.

Linda got my drift, her eyes widening. "You mean, naked? I don't know. Three, I guess. Never a guy his age."

"You mean you never walked in on your dad in the bathroom?"

"No!" she said. "Why would I?"

I noticed a blush of pink on Linda's face, more than the sun had put there. Then I noticed more naked people, and others shedding clothes. Some were splashing into the water, others were spreading towels and sitting. David appeared, handing out cans of beer. He was naked, too, darkly hairy and much more handsome than the guy getting the blowjob.

"There you go," I said. "Your new friend David's not bad, huh?"

"Whoa," Linda said when she saw him. "Holy shit. This if fucking crazy. We were just talking to him and now..."

"And now he's naked," I said. I watched as his wife Annie casually stripped off the last of her garments, panties first, and then bra. "Speaking of holy shit...," I said.

"Damn!" Linda said. "They get the hot couple award, right? Those other two, I think they're together. They're kind of okay looking."

"Which ones?" I asked. I assumed Linda meant the bleached-blonde woman with the big but sagging tits, and the rough and tumble looking barrel-chested guy who seemed to stay near her, and that's who Linda pointed out. I said, "Maybe they're just fuck buddies for the weekend."

Linda blushed again, nice and pink. "Maybe," she said, glancing at me awkwardly.

I wanted to ask Linda again if she thought we should pack up and leave, because the situation was way more than a little bizarre. There were six men and six women on the beach, all of them naked; two of them near the happy ending of an increasingly frenetic blowjob; two of them lying on a towel, hand-jobbing each other, nearly ready to fuck. It wasn't just that it was stunning to see, we were beginning to hear it as well — the laughter, the moans, the caveman grunt when the very-average-looking man came in the very-average-looking woman's mouth. And maybe oddest of all was the fact that these people were doing all this knowing that Linda and I were near. Knowing that we were watching. It was nuts.

"So?" I said. "Are we staying? In another hour we're stuck here, unless you want to hike out with our little flashlights."

Linda shrugged. "I'm good," she said. "It'll be a funny story to tell, right?"

I smiled, partly because it was true, and partly because Linda was surprising me. There was something there, behind her eyes. My good friend, it seemed, was a closet voyeur, and discovering it, as I was at that moment, was more than a little thrilling.

With a fire in our fire pit, as dusk dimmed to twilight in the Adirondack sky, Linda and I ate dinner and watched people fuck. It was surreal, dreamlike, and it made conversation difficult, though we managed. We were far enough away from the action that the swingers' conversations couldn't be heard, but the sounds of the louder sex partners, women especially, drifted to our ears like the songs of rare mountain birds. As darkness fell it was even more strange, eerie and beautiful. Linda and I had gotten into the margaritas, drinking them quicker than usual. Maybe it was the dehydrated food that didn't coat our stomachs well that made the drinks go straight to our heads. We were soon commenting on the noisier swingers' sounds, and then we graduated to speculating on what was happening to them. My hard cock was bunched up uncomfortably in my bluejeans as we bantered about sex positions, mouths and tongues. It was entirely, wildly sexy, sitting there in the dark, with the glowing fire crackling, talking to my good friend Linda about such things, with the sound of orgasms floating ghostly in the blackness.

When I stepped away from the light of our fire I could see them, some of the swingers, primitively naked around their somewhat bigger fire. Some of their tents were lit from within, looking like strange little shadow theaters in the darkness. Doggy style in one of the tents was easy to interpret.

It was around that time that I heard a call that sounded like my name. It was David, standing at a distance so as not to embarrass Linda with his nakedness. My pocket flashlight guided me to him. He'd been drinking, same as me, so our quick conversation was much looser than the one we'd had during the day. When he left, I went back to Linda to tell her what he'd said.

"Oh my God, really?" Linda said. "He really...invited us down there?"

"Yeah," I said, smiling at how laughable it was. "Crazy, right? He didn't want to come all the way up 'cause he's naked."

"Yeah, I saw. So...do you want to?"

"Ha!" I said. "Are you serious?"

Linda's face looked yellowish in the flickering firelight, but it didn't look unhappy. It looked, in fact, quite happy indeed, and lovely. Her eyes twinkled as never before, and she was subtly, but noticeably, nodding. "Yeah," she said. "Let's do it. They seemed nice. What did he say to you?"

"He said it's nice to have good neighbors, and he should have told us earlier that we could come down and party with them if we want to."

"Should we...be dressed?" Linda said.

Surprised to see her stand up in readiness, I said, "For real?"

"Jeff, aren't you curious? This'll never happen again. You just wanna sit here and...listen?"

At that moment, Linda was the sexiest girl I'd ever seen. I'd always found her attractive, but this, this was different.

"I'm not just gonna walk down there naked," I said.

"Okay. Clothes then," she said. "Wait here."

Linda went into our minimal little tent and switched on her flashlight. I wonder if she realized that it turned the tent into a shadow theater, like the ones down on the beach. I watched her shadow form lay back on her sleeping bag and wiggle out of her jeans, and I watched her remove her t-shirt, and her bra. She pulled her t-shirt on again and stepped out into the firelight, and I realized I had been wrong — now she was the sexiest girl I'd ever seen, standing there in her tight t-shirt with her nipples aroused, in her pink panties, pulling her Timberland boots onto her bare feet.

"Damn!" I said. "Now...I look like an over dressed dork."

"Take off your shirt," she said. "You look good like that."

"Why is it so warm?" I said. "Why are there no bugs?"

Linda shrugged, looking sexy as all get-out. "It's supposed to be this way."

I wanted to ask her a dozen more questions, like, for instance, do you realize we'll be right in the middle of all the fucking? Do you realize those men are going to get hard when they see you looking like that? Kind of like the way I am, looking at you right now? But I didn't ask those questions, or the others in my head. I felt strangely calm when I took off my t-shirt, right there in front of Linda, with her oddly happy eyes watching me. She drank in the sight of me, from my shoulders to my knees, and said, "You're ready. Do I look all right?"

"Shit, Linda. You look...amazing."

"Really?" she said. "How come...you've never told me that before?"

"Now you wanna talk about this?"

She smiled an impish, smirking smile, with her eyes on the lump in my pants. "No," she said, taking my hand, leading me away from our fire, into the darkness.

It was a short walk, but I remember it like it took forever. The sounds of happy people, laughing, fucking, one woman's voice asking for "Harder!...Harder!...Fuck me you fucking animal!" Linda and I both had small flashlights in our hands, and we weaved our way through the little tent village on the sandy beach, making our way to the campfire.

"Hey, there they are," naked David said. "You guys want a beer? We're gonna make a run for more in the morning, so help yourselves."

"Oh, wow," a naked woman said to me. "Davey said you guys were cute. He wasn't lying. What's your name, hun?"

"Jeff," I said. "This is Linda."

"I'm Mindy, honey. You guys married?"

"No, just friends."

"Nice," Mindy said. "Out here for a little snuggle time in the woods?"

"No, she's my girlfriend's friend," I blurted.

"Even better," Mindy said, winking. "We're all friends, too. That's sorta how it works."

Right next to the fire, close enough to feel its heat, a woman was girl-on-top fucking a man, kissing him, with her hips moving like a pornstar's. She broke off the kiss every five seconds or so to let out a haunting wail, one that I recognized from before. Mindy caught me looking.

"That's Cindy and my guy, Mitch. She can go all night."

I nodded some sort of odd agreement. I'm afraid I had a true greenhorn look on my face, because Mindy smiled. "You'll get used to it, honey. That's Ronnie and Davey's wife Annie out in the water. You met her, right?"

"Everybody else is in the big tent at the moment," David said. "You're welcome in there, or out here, or just sit and have a beer if you want. This is officially a no pressure area. Just do exactly as you please."

Linda, silent so far, responded to David's proclamation by whisking off her t-shirt, rendering herself topless. I wondered if her pink panties would go, but she took a beer from David's offering hand and she stood there, looking into my eyes in a new way, maybe gauging my appreciation for her swift move to near nudity. A funny little smile flashed across her face and she moved close to me, stuffing her t-shirt into my back pocket so it hung there like a mechanic's rag. She stayed close, making my heartbeat thump.

"Lookin' good, girl," Mindy said to her. "You got the spirit. Now if we could get your boy-toy out of his pants we'd be gettin' somewhere, right?"

The subtle but noticeable horror on my blushing face made Mindy smile. For a woman twenty years or more older than me, she certainly had spunk, enough to make a guy forget that her body had seen better days. I say that knowing that she'd say it herself. She's that kind of woman.