Northern Lights

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"

"Who was your guide?"

"This guy named Dave. He was insane. All he wanted to do was take the hardest routes with the longest, suckiest portages. I don't know what he was trying to prove. I almost didn't come back this year until Mr. K told me Dave wasn't coming back."

Eileen tries her best Tommy Chong. "Dave's not here, man."

She steps off the ledge and her head disappears beneath the water. This time it's her body that brushes against me as she comes up. I feel -- or, at least, imagine I feel -- her breast brushing against my thigh as she surfaces. She shakes the water off her head and looks at me without apology.

The loons make playful, laughing noises, a little closer to us. "I wish they would shut up," she says, kicking her legs to keep her head above water. "We don't need anyone else to wake up."

"Not much chance of that. They're down for the night." Beneath the water I reach down to adjust my cock.

"What about you/?" Eileen stops her kicking and lets her head dip below the surface. I am briefly thankful for the darkness.

"I had to pee," I say, when her head resurfaces. I only heard you when I came down to wash my hands."

Ann dogpaddles a little closer to me and grabs my arm for balance when she stops. "Eileen was going to tell you before everybody went to bed. We just didn't want Bruce to hear."

"What about Mary?"

Ann lets go of my arm, kicks, and backstrokes away a few feet. I can see the whiteness of her body just below the water. Her pale breasts break the water's surface.

"We told her." Eileen has drifted to my side, our bodies almost touching. "She just wanted to go to sleep. I think she was afraid we were going to have an orgy out here. If Brendan and Chris had asked, we would have told them, but they're just -- you know."

Ann is a few feet away from me on my right. I hear her splashing. "We saw you looking at us this afternoon."

This is the fourth day on the trail and Brian, the novice guide, has been shocked at how quickly we are going; we all probably have more experience than he has up here. This morning we covered Agnes Lake, usually a full day trip and some times a day and a half for newbies, in a matter of hours.

So we turned today into a half day (actually a 2/3 day), made camp on the north end of the lake and decided to make tomorrow our first layover day. This is about as far north as we are going to go anyway, with the rest of the trail an arc back to the base camp at Cedar Lake.

Just before dinner, I was relaxing, laying back on the rock shelf at the water's edge, dozing off. The girls -- all of them -- were swimming, in bathing suits. The wind hadn't yet picked up so I was batting away mosquitoes and helicopter-sized sandflies when my hand accidentally slapped a leg.

I opened my eyes to Eileen and Ann, standing over me, coming out of the water. Eileen, in a light blue one piece swimsuit, was standing directly over my head. I could see tufts of dark pubic hair poking from the crotch of her suit. I averted my eyes, almost certainly too late.

"You OK?" she asked, looking directly at me, her eyes snapping very quickly to the tent that had just grown in my shorts and then just as quickly back to my eyes.

"Yeah. Sorry." I shifted my legs a little to lessen the pressure in my loins.

"Love means never having to say you're sorry."

"That's the dumbest thing I ever heard," I replied, using Ryan O'Neal's comeback in "What's Up, Doc?".

She laughed just a little and kicked me with a bare foot as she passed. When Ann strode by me, I could swear she winked.

We swim, more or less wordlessly, for a while. At one point, I get cocky, so to speak, drifting along on my back, my dick a mast pointing to the stars. Ann and Eileen grab my legs and push me farther away from shore.

We are playing a game, so to speak, in which we pretend not to be checking each other out when the reality is that we are fascinated with each other's naked bodies. At the same time, though, the awkwardness of being exposed to each other has lessened and we are comfortable with our nudity.

The aurora becomes brighter as the moon begins to set and our bodies a touched by a greenish-red glow. In the soft light I see Ann standing on the shelf just before the drop off. I wink at Eileen, put my finger to my lips, and sneak up behind her sister and grab her by the waist. We both tumble back into the water, bodies pressed together, my penis flat against her lower back. It takes her a second to realize that my cock is hard against her back and she darts away, embarrassed. Even in the night-lit sky I can see her blush.

I hear movement in the water behind me and before I can turn away Eileen's arms snake around my chest. She pulls me backwards, her legs kicking at my side as we coast away from the shore. Her vulva is up against my ass, her thick pubic hair tickling my buttocks. I break away, turn around and approach her. I want to embrace her, feel her skin against mine. I reach to her, planning on tickling her, so that if she is offended I can play it off as a joke.

Instead, she moves up to me, puts her arms around my neck, and wraps her legs around my middle. Her groin presses against my abdomen, warm in the coolness of the water. She looks deep into my eyes, leans her head against my shoulder and in a flash pushes away from me.

I follow her and her sister as they make their way to the shore, wondering if I have missed any signals from Eileen up to now. It's true that they usually sit with me during meals, but so does Mary, and that doesn't really mean anything anyway, except that Bruce is an asshole, Brendan and Chris are used to being with each other, and Brian tends to kind of float around helping everyone out. It's just the luck of the draw.

On the other hand, I've probably been too obnoxious with them; if anything, I've been following Ann, the lovely, petite, blue-eyed blonde, like a dog with its tongue hanging out, practically since they boarded the bus. I made sure I sat with them during the first meal at the base camp, when they randomly chose the groups, so I could randomly be in the same group as her.

But as I think over the past few days, it's been Eileen who would sit with me first; Eileen who would laugh at my jokes, listen to me talk about movies. It was Eileen who, while paddling in the canoe next to me earlier in the day, heard me singing about flying back to Memphis to find my Daisy Jane -- America's new single -- and joined in with me.

But even then the idea that either one of them could actually like me, a gangly, somewhat nerdy high school graduate, has been beyond me. I never said I was the sharpest stick in the pile.

We crawl up onto the shore. Ann and I sit on the rocks while Eileen makes her way to the pile of clothes and begins to rummage around. The wind is warm and steady and begins to dry the water dripping from our bodies.

"Thank God for this breeze," I say in a low voice. "Otherwise we'd be being bitten like crazy.'

"I know." Ann is sitting back on my left, her palms on the rocks behind her, her legs crossed, concealing her privates. She's obviously given up on any semblance of covering her breasts.

Eileen returns and sits on my right, a small Baggie in her hand. She pulls out one of two rolled joints and puts it to her lips. Then she digs a metal lighter out of the bag and flicks it. The end of the paper glows red as she inhales. The sweet, burnt aroma wafts over us. "Lighting it is half the fun," she says as she hands it over to me.

I take a drag, hold it in my lungs a moment, and exhale. I'm not exactly a habitual smoker, but I know my way around a joint. I pass it over to Ann. She looks at it and says "What the hell? This is a night of firsts." She hesitantly takes a puff and inhales. I'm a little surprised. Bruce had passed a pipe around after dinner. I had taken a halfhearted puff but Ann had passed on it completely.

"Way to go, Ann!" Her sister says, with a chuckle. She lays flat on her back and hooks her arm under her head. Her nipples seem harder as her breasts flatten into mounds. I take a hit and pass the reefer back to her. She takes it with her free hand. We pass the shortening joint back and forth in silence.

I lean back on my elbows and look up at the sky. With the moon almost gone the lights seem to web the sky. I wonder if I should be truthful, decide it's no surprise anyway, and say "You know, I've never done this before."

Eileen shits her leg just a little. I don't even pretend not to look at the thick dark triangle between her legs. "What do you mean?" she says. "Hung out with two naked women?"

"Or even one," I confess, the grass making me a little more honest that I had planned.

She hands me what's left of the roach and lets her hand fall to my hip. "Sorry, no clip." She sits up, pulls her bare feet closer, and hugs her knees. After watching the lights dancing in the sky for a few minutes, she breaks the silence. "This is new for us, too, you know. I don't even think we've seen each other naked, even changing clothes, in -- what, Ann, ten years?"