Track Meet in Purgatory Ch. 01

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CarlusMagnus
CarlusMagnus
1,145 Followers

Vegetation in the canyon was very much like what we'd seen on the plain above: Sparse grass, mostly brown but lightly sprinkled with the green of piñon, juniper, prickly pear (in bloom down here, as it had been above on the open plain), and cholla. Once in a while, we saw the bright scarlet splash of a claret cup. Off to our left, the distance ranging from twenty-five yards up to almost a mile, the Purgatoire meandered. It was, at least for that part of our walk, well below the level of the trail, so it was a while before we got a good look at it.

We'd gone only about a half a mile up the canyon, walking together side by side, when a sudden motion on the ground in the middle of the road ahead of us prompted Lynne to grab my arm to halt me.

"Stop!" she said, as an electric buzz filled the air. "That's a rattlesnake!"

That's exactly what it was: Ahead of us, in the middle of the road, was a four-foot rattlesnake that objected to having its afternoon sunbath interrupted. It seemed even more surprised by our appearance than we were by its. And it seemed determined to be left alone.

"I've never seen a live rattlesnake outside of a zoo before," I told her.

"Me either!" she said. "Isn't it beautiful? I'd like to get closer, but that probably isn't a good idea."

"Well," I said, "if you aren't a small rodent, it's beautiful. And even though you aren't a rodent, please don't get close. We're a long way from help!"

The snake had, very politely, warned us off when we were still a dozen feet away. And we had heeded the warning, so we were in no danger unless we did something stupid. Careful not to do any such thing; we admired the creature from a safe distance for a little while before we bypassed it with a wide margin of safety.

Once we were safely past the snake, Lynne took my by the arm. "I'm glad you didn't want to kill it, Jase," she said. "Too many people want to kill rattlesnakes on sight. But if not for snakes, we'd be up to our bellybuttons in ground squirrels in this canyon. Snakes are important, and they don't bother people, if people just don't bother them."

"I've got nothing against snakes," I said glancing over at her. "And this is its home, not mine! I'm happy to let it be."

She smiled at me. I smiled back, and we continued on up the canyon, arm in arm.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We walked past old homesteads, of which little remained but disintegrating stone walls. Some of those walls still supported a log or two that had once served as rafters. I didn't wonder, until much later, where the settlers had found logs large enough for that purpose; those logs couldn't have come from piñon or juniper.

We were about halfway to our goal when she clutched at me again. "Look! There on that boulder!" She pointed back over my right shoulder.

Across the flat black face of an eight-foot high boulder we had just passed were petroglyphs. Ancient Indian inhabitants of the region had inscribed multiple carvings into the black desert varnish that covered the rock. There were stick figures of men as well as other markings that looked like the wave-trains you sometimes see on oscilloscopes in old "science" movies. Lynne's newspaper article had mentioned petroglyphs in the canyon, but had made a point of telling us that the Forest Service knew that there were many petroglyphs in the canyon, but didn't have the resources to protect them properly. Afraid that they would be damaged if their locations were too widely known, they wouldn't talk about their locations.

As we stared at them from a distance of six or eight feet, Lynne said, almost reverently, "I wonder what they meant to the people who carved them!"

"I guess there's no knowing," I replied. "They must be a thousand years old! Maybe more!"

After a bit, we shook off the trance the drawings induced. But before we moved on, we found a juniper standing on the bank on the south side of the road; we sat for a while in its shade. We each drank almost a quart of water during that break. We'd been walking for a little over an hour. In the heat and the wind, that rest in almost the only shade we'd seen was a welcome one. Had it not been for the wind, the heat would have been oppressive, unbearable. The wind cooled us, but, I was beginning to understand, also sucked water right out of our bodies.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We were about four miles from the trailhead and it was nearly four when we reached the ruin of the old Dolores Mission. We stopped, briefly, to see the remains of the church that Hispanic settlers had built in the early 1870's. Not much was left of the small stone building: The back wall still stood, along with parts of the other walls. An old rafter leaned crazily from the remains of one wall into the center of the building; another, half rotted away, stretched between what remained of the sides.

Someone, whether one of the original church-goers or a more recent vistor, I couldn't say, had nailed a couple of boards together to form a cross. It leaned against the back wall for passersby to see.

In the churchyard, cholla tried to reclaim a small cemetery. From the road, we could see tombstones bearing the names "Padilla" and "Abeita". We wanted to explore the cemetery, but we didn't; after all, cholla is well worth keeping away from. But I do remember seeing the date 1875 on one of those headstones.

As we looked at those stones, Lynne said somberly, "I think 'Dolores' is a fitting name for a mission here in Purgatory! It's Spanish for 'sorrows' or 'pains'."

"There must have been plenty of pains and sorrows for people who tried to farm this country," I agreed.

"They settled here and made their homes. They had hopes and dreams. These ruins are all that's left of them and their dreams," she said. "It's sad, isn't it!"

I nodded in agreement, and added, "When I first saw these ruins, I thought to myself 'An ancient church!' But then I thought of those petroglyphs we looked at a while ago, and of what we're here to see. I don't think I should use the word 'ancient' in this canyon when it refers to something that isn't even a century and a half old."

She looked up at me, into my eyes. Looking back at her, I saw a trickle of tears leak from hers. She said, "I can feel the weight of the ages here. It makes me sad, but I'm really glad we came."

"Me, too!" I agreed. "And we haven't even gotten to what we came for!"

She took my arm again and gave me a pitiable substitute for a smile. "Can we move on now?" she asked. "Before I start sobbing?"

I smiled back, probably as bleakly, and said "Sure!" And so we did.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Neither of us felt like walking very vigorously in that heat, so we took our time—a commodity we were sure we had plenty of. We reached the site of the dinosaur tracks at about half past four. They were on the south side of the river, opposite us, on a broad, gently sloping rock shelf at the water's edge. The river had apparently scoured it out of the canyon floor, which here was about three feet above the water level. There was a display on our side of the river that explained some of the natural history behind the tracks. We scanned the text of the display and encountered nothing we didn't already know. Then it was time to cross the river.

We hadn't known that we would have to do that, but the discovery didn't bother us. The river was only about twenty feet wide and the brown, muddy-looking water was almost calf-deep. It flowed, of course, but not even at a good walking speed. We just took off our shoes and socks, rolled up our jeans, and waded across, feeling carefully to avoid stepping on hidden rocks. (In the East, I'm told, the Purgatoire would be called a "creek." In the arid Southwest, if wading across a stream gets you wet above the ankles, it's a "river".)

I'm not sure just how long we spent looking at the tracks. They enthralled us both. According to the Forest Service, there are about 1300 of them there, and they fascinated us. I think we looked at each and every one of them, except for a few that were probably hidden under dried mud. They engrossed us so much, in fact, that we failed to notice that the river rose considerably while we were looking at them. We paid so little attention to the water that we didn't even notice as it rose over some of the lower tracks—the ones we had looked at first.

It was nearly five-thirty when we decided that we'd better head back to the car; we got a rude shock when we saw that the gentle stream we'd waded only a bit earlier was now a raging torrent. Still not much more than twenty feet wide, it was angry, churning, roaring, turbulent, and more than two feet deeper than it had been when we had crossed it earlier!

Wordlessly, we looked at each other and back at the river. At length, Lynne said, "What're we gonna do, Jase? We can't wade that!"

We weren't outdoors people, but we'd read news stories—there are several every year in Colorado—about people who had died after stepping into streams like the one that we were looking at, and we both understood the danger.

I answered her, "I guess we're going to find a place to sit and wait for it to go back down. I don't see what else we can do. Except maybe stand somewhere and wait for it to go down!"

We found a waist-high boulder on the canyon floor and sat down against its north face, where there was some cover from the still-brilliant sun and we could see the river. We were both exasperated at this delay, but we had no idea that things were going to get a lot worse. We discussed the dinosaur prints and what the news article and the Forest Service display had said about them. When we'd exhausted that topic, we turned to what it must have been like for the Nineteenth Century settlers who'd made their homes in the canyon. We agreed that what we'd just learned about the river's behavior added a dimension to the hardships—and the dolores—that they must have experienced.

It was about an hour later, around six, when we walked around that little boulder and separated to look for places to take a leaks. The river was still swollen—perhaps even more so than it had been when we'd first noticed. I looked up while I peed, and I saw a towering dark cloud in the southwest. Knowing from our Colorado roadmap that the river flowed from southwest to northeast, I said to myself That certainly explains where the extra water came from! Looking at it carefully, I convinced myself that it was going to pass to the south of us. When Lynne rejoined me, I mentioned the storm cloud; she'd seen it, too, and she also thought that it would pass to our south.

So the thunderstorm that broke at about seven didn't exactly take us by surprise. But it might as well have, because we hadn't thought things through well enough to guess that our weather forecast might have been wrong or to anticipate the danger that might attend facing a thunderstorm in the open. So we weren't prepared. And the boulder we were resting against was close enough to the river that the roar of the flood prevented us from hearing the approaching thunder until the wind shifted, the sun faded behind the clouds, and it was about to start raining.

We were just thinking about finding shelter when the storm broke. Luckily, the bulk of the storm did stay south of us, and only its northern fringe passed over our location. The canyon walls and the buttes scattered about on the canyon floor were high enough to attract the lightning away from us. But they didn't shield us from the sudden drop in temperature. Nor did they protect us from the deluge that the howling wind now drove at us from the east.

Briefly, we huddled in what shelter the boulder we'd been resting against provided. Belatedly, we concluded that its protection wasn't even close to enough. Crossing the river was out of the question. We would have to find better shelter there on its south side.

Some buttes rose from the canyon floor a few hundred yards south of us, and we scurried through the cold wind and the driving rain, heading south and west to get into their lee.

The wind and the rain intensified as we approached the boulder field at the base of the nearest butte. We were soaked through by the time we were, maybe, halfway there. The temperature must have dropped at least 45° from the afternoon's 95°.

Lynne spotted it. "There!" she shouted through the storm's uproar. "At the base of that boulder!" And she pointed to a house-sized boulder a few feet above us and thirty yards away, off to the left of the direction we were running. I saw in its western face, once she had pointed it out, the dark shadow of an opening big enough to shelter us. Hand in hand, we ran for its promise.

==||<>||==

Sleep didn't come to me. We'd been lying there for a little while, relaxing against each other, each grateful for the other's warmth, when she shifted a bit. "Jase?" she whispered.

"What, Lynne?" I asked.

She raised her hand from my chest to my face, and she stroked my cheek gently. Her fingers rasped against the stubble of my beard, and she gasped as she jerked her hand away in surprise.

"I forgot!" she exclaimed a second later. "Guys have beards!"

I could understand that; I'd had a beard for only a couple of years, and sometimes I still forgot that I had one.

Her hand returned to stroke and rasp again.

She shifted, and before I could figure out what she was doing, she pressed her lips against mine, softly, sweetly.

Hesitantly but instinctively, I responded. I had never kissed a girl before, and I'm pretty sure she had never kissed a guy. That kiss was awkward, clumsy, because neither of us was at all sure of what we were doing. But she got her meaning across! I opened my mouth under the gentle pressure of her lips and our tongues engaged for an interminable moment of divine, though tentative, sharing. She backed away, removing her hand at the same time.

But she remained in my arms. "Was that okay, Jase?" she asked, as her hand dropped from my cheek.

Her voice quavered a bit, and I felt her body tighten with new tension. I guessed that she had acted impulsively, and that now she was afraid that she had crossed a line, that she had violated the unspoken rules that governed the way we conducted our tight friendship. After those childhood games and the sex ed discussions, and except for the societal conventions that mandated that we each conceal certain body parts from the other, we had never acknowledged our complementary sexualities, even to ourselves, let alone to each other. So this was uncertain ground for us both.

But that kiss caused something to snap inside me.

'Snap'?

No.

'Pop'?

No, that doesn't do it either.

'Explode' is more like it!

The exigencies of survival were no longer paramount, and my body had begun to understand that the body that now pressed against me offered more than warmth—a lot more. Awareness that I was holding a girl in my arms exploded inside me! It wasn't just a girl, either. It was a girl of whom I thought a lot! A girl who thought a lot of me! A very attractive girl with a runner's slender figure, firm, lithe, and shapely. A girl who had just kissed me!

I tightened my arms around her. "Yes," I assured her, "that was okay." I paused, and she relaxed a little in my arms. "But 'okay' is the best we can say for it." I paused again; her tension began to return. And then I went on, "I think we need more practice!"

"Oh, Jason! You dope!" was all that she said.

Neither of us could see a thing, there in the darkness, but each of us found the other's cheek with a searching hand; and we guided our lips to each other a second time. Our re-engaged tongues danced, in and out, in and out of each other's mouths. This kiss was much less clumsy than our first one had been. Nor was it the least bit tentative, though I knew, well before it was over, that we were going to need more practice! A lot more practice!

As our second kiss extended, awareness rose in me, for the first time since I had looked the other way before dark, and in a completely different way, of her tits. Separated from me only by our fleece warm-up jackets, they pressed against me. And, I realized, her crotch pressed against my thigh. Yes! I told myself, Lynne is definitely a girl!

My cock stiffened and expanded so that my otherwise loose-fitting warm-up pants, which had ridden up as I sat there on the ground, now constricted it. When we broke off that second kiss—a kiss we would both remember for the rest of our lives—I unthinkingly reached down to adjust myself more comfortably.

She felt me move, and she guessed what I was doing. She asked, "Did that… Did I give you an erection? What do guys call it? A 'stiffy-on'?"

"Yeah," I said, "It did! You did!" There'd been no embarrassment in her voice—only curiosity. We really could talk to each other about anything. This was just something we'd never found any reason to discuss before. So I wasn't embarrassed, either, and I had answered her clinically. I went on, still clinically, "And guys call it a 'hard-on' or a 'stiffy.' but not usually both at once. A 'boner' is another thing we call it sometimes."

Well, maybe there was an undertone of lechery in the clinical tone of my voice… But this conversation should surely eliminate any remaining doubts that we were both nerds.

"I've never made a guy have a stiffy before," she said, unnecessarily. I knew that her love life was just as non-existent as my own. "Is it bad for you? It makes me feel good to know that I made that happen to you."

"No," I answered, "it isn't a problem. It makes me feel… well, pretty good, too. And I'm glad that you wanted to kiss me. That makes me feel good, too."

"I'm glad!" she said. "I'm happy that you wanted to, too. But I think you were right about practicing." And she reached to kiss me again.

Our lips met another time, and we kissed enthusiastically. As our tongues played with each other, I reached, almost automatically, for one of her tits. I found it and cupped the mound of firm flesh through her jacket; I could feel her nipple through the soft material. She moaned into my mouth at the touch and caressed my cheek. Encouraged by her response, I explored her tit with my fingers. Finding her nipple again, I tweaked it gently through the fleece. She moaned again, and pressed herself more tightly against me.

When that kiss ended and we separated a bit, we were both breathing heavily, whether from excitement or lack of oxygen, I didn't know. "Jase," she said, breathlessly, "when you touch my boob that way, it feels really good!"

"I like it, too! You feel really nice," I said. My cock throbbed in my pants as I thought about how good her tit felt. "Maybe I should…" I stroked down along her side from her boob to the bottom of the jacket, reached under, and began to reach upward. She yelped as I touched her skin. Chagrined, afraid that now I had overstepped, I started to pull back.

She grabbed that trespassing hand before I could remove it and clamped it against her belly, effectively stopping my withdrawal. "It's okay, Jase! But your hand is cold. It surprised me, and I yelled. But I like it when you touch me! Can you just keep your hand where it is for a little while? Until it warms up?"

And, as she clasped my hand to her body, she reached to kiss me another time. As our tongues encountered each other again, the thought occurred to me that I was living one of my fondest dreams. I was making out with a girl! Making out! With a girl! And it was a girl who seemed to think that making out with me was a good idea!

She moved a bit, releasing my hand from her grasp while trapping it between our bodies and under her jacket; I delighted in the feel of her soft, smooth skin. Only a few minutes could have passed before my hand warmed up, but it seemed forever. As if to compensate me for the delay, she kissed me repeatedly while her hand stroked my cheek. When my hand seemed warm, I again undertook my interrupted reach. She made no objection this time, and it was only another moment until I had achieved my goal: Her naked tit filled my hand. The firm button of her nipple pressed against the center of my palm. I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven!

CarlusMagnus
CarlusMagnus
1,145 Followers