June 01, 2008

the one that got away

Originally PUBLISHED June 21, 2006

I once took Dora backpacking with me up to JOYCE KILMER STATE PARK in North Carolina. She had never been backpacking before, and I was a damn fool to take her there on her first trip, because that place is one steep bitch to walk. We spent four days in the woods there, and she hung with me like a real trooper all the way.

That's the kinda woman she was.

We hiked the Slickrock Creek trail, all the way to the top of Hangover Mountain. We camped one night at Naked Ground, then went back down the mountain the way we had come. We found a good place to camp on Slickrock Creek and stayed there for three days.

That place is beautiful, but if you go there, you're gonna get rained on a LOT. That place is a rain magnet and it gets more drops per square inch every day than any other place I've ever been. I took a two-person tent with me on that trip, while I usually just tote a hammock and a tarp to keep ME dry. But I pitched that tent and managed to build a fire out of wet wood just so I could dry out MORE wet wood to keep a fire going.

We ate backpacking food, too. Rice and cup-o-soup and salt-cured ham. Snickers bars and Little Debbie star crunches. It was fun, crawling into that tent at night and zipping our sleeping bags together so that we could snuggle up tight and stay warm while listening to Slickrock Creek babble all night long.

We made love in the tent. We made love around the campfire. Hell, we fucked like a couple of wild dogs in the wilderness. Something about camping in the woods brought out the beast in both of us.

The second day at Slickrock Creek, we both admitted that we smelled of sweat, sex and wood-smoke, so we decided to bathe in the creek. I grabbed a bar of soap and we walked a short way down the bank, found a nice waterfall, shed our clothes and jumped into the water.

Holey Moley! That was some COLD water and my dick (that's back when I still had one) shrunk up like a stack of dimes thirty cents tall. Dora's nipples stood out like .30 caliber rifle ammunition. Goosebumps broke out all over both of us.

But we didn't get out of the water. We came there to bathe, and by-gawd, we were gonna do it. We did, too. I soaped her long red hair (which takes a lot of work in a hard-water mountain stream) and she scrubbed my back. Things were starting to get somewhat erotic when a troop of Boy Scouts came marching by on the opposite bank.

I shit you not. Those boys started laughing and pointing at us nekkid in the stream, but I'll give their scout master credit for one thing. (I'll also give Dora credit, too. She just stood there in the water like a red-haired goddess with stiff nipples and didn't try to hide ANYTHING.)

The scout master asked me how far it was to Naked Ground, which I thought was kinda funny, since he was asking a nekkid man that question. I told him that it was only about three miles from where he was, but that he ought to camp at the bottom of the mountain that night and go to the top the next day.

"You can't miss it," I said. "Just follow the trail until you see a creek running off the mountain. The trail heads STEEP uphill from there, and there's no water until you make it to the top. I recommend camping there and hiking the rest of the way tomorrow."

Dora chimed in. "He knows what he's talking about. That is a STEEP trail. It took us six hours to make a little over three miles getting up there."

The scout master thanked us and hearded his flock down the trail, with the boys giggling like maniacs because they saw a nekkid woman taking a bath in the stream. I don't know if they ever got where they were going, but I AM sure that we made memories of that trip that they'll NEVER forget.

I'll never forget it, either. And if I had only ONE CHOICE in my life to take a mulligan on, a do-over, a second chance, it would be ME leaving Dora when I did, the way I did. What a got-dam fool I was, especially when I look now at who I left her for. I need to be dragged off and SHOT!

But I did it. I can't take that back. You don't get mulligans in life.

But I damn sure regret the one that got away.