They say to write like everyone you know is dead. Here is a story that might get me killed.
As we drove down the highway, climbing higher into the mountains, the white crests and winterkilled grass of the high plains showed little sign of letting go of the last sheen of winter. She sat in the passenger seat with her bare feet propped up on the dash. We made chit chat, but sometimes it felt strained. The last three years had been hard with this one. My first relationship since my divorce and it had been a rollercoaster of starts and stops. Even now I had asked her out in spite of a two week silence from the last time we had seen each other. Another rocky false start. Two weeks ago, I had stood overlooking a valley. I had set out at 5am to hike to Hanging Lake near Glenwood Springs after having just written a letter to her.
Me and my fucking letters.
I’m a writer. I use my words when the storms of my heart threaten to swallow me whole. The letter talked about everything I thought was wrong. How my needs weren’t being met by this push and pull. That morning as I stood on the ice, looking out at a bank of rainclouds that were about to drop in, turning the whole trail into a luge circuit, for a brief second, my thoughts went to her. My legs went out from under me and I busted my ass on the ice. I spent the rest of the day in a hot springs, talking to strangers about my life and they shared their stories too. That evening I drove back, racing a storm and she called me.
“I’m not ready to let you go,” she said. Her voice broke a little bit.
“Then don’t.”
It would have been more romantic except for driving home in a blizzard with two dried out contact lenses. My attempt at vanity had only ever caused me pain. But I was elated that she had called. Until she got the letter I had written a few days later.
“It sounds like a list of demands,” she said. “You know how I feel about ultimatums.”
I tried to explain it was how I felt. The push and pull of three years, the on again and off again, the struggle with being kept a secret. My marriage had been toxic, so this was only aenemic, I thought. I backpedaled. I bargained. I took back everything I had said.
“I need someone willing to take chances, who isn’t afraid to live,” she had said.
So, two weeks later, she begrudgingly agreed to join me on a day long road trip. I told her only one clue: bring a swimsuit.
As we stopped at the roadside to take pictures of the snowy mountains, I was certain this was the end. There had been no chemistry for the entire drive. Not even a kiss when I picked her up. Of course that might have meant we would have been seen. We got into the snacks that I had brought. A bottle of grape soda for her, a Coke for me. I had once again sworn off coffee because she didn’t like how it made my breath smell.
Just before getting in the car again, she kissed me full on the mouth. It was what I wanted, but there was still something in the back of my mind that said I had been down this path before. We kept driving until the mountains opened up again to the plains of South Park. Her feet back on the dash the way cute girls do when they need to feel cute. My breath somehow worse than her feet. Yeah.
We walked around and looked at the shops in Salida. She talked about how she had always wanted Amish furniture for her cabin. We stood on a rock in the Arkansas River and kissed for a while before continuing on. The valley narrowed and we found ourselves at the foot of a desert valley and a spine of tall mountains. The Sangre de Cristos.
When we reached our destination, she smiled at me with that sly smile. “I wondered if it was something like this? How are you feeling?”
“Nervous,” I said. We pulled into the parking lot of the clothing optional hot springs and got checked in. I had made reservations a few days before. I intended to go whether or not she was with me. Two weeks of radio silence told me I might have been getting out of my comfort zone alone.
She had been to nude beaches before on her visits to Europe. She prided herself on being unassuming, shocking once she told anyone who would listen that she had done such a thing. I guess I was dabbling in such outrageous adventures.
The initial shock of realizing where we were faded soon after seeing a tall, lanky naked man emerge from the woods as we looked for a place to park within the resort. A shaggy mane of grey hair. A dense nest of pubic hair framing a giant horse dick that swung pendular as he walked between the pines. Yes, there were naked people here and we were about to be some of them.
We took a short hike, in our clothes and looked out across the valley. Not much further to the south were the Great Sand Dunes. My heart was beating so hard. I felt short of breath. I mentioned it and got that sympathetic look that simultaneously meant she considered me weak. Patronizing.
“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
We walked back to the car and she pointed out changing tents. Why? I thought. We all wound up in the same place anyway: naked. So, I dropped trou right there behind my car and wrapped a towel around my waist because we still had about half a mile to hike. She donned my bathrobe and we started up the trail.
In the early spring of April, the water that runs off to the valley is heated from a bone-chilling 36 degrees, just a few degrees above slush, to around 80 once it hits the springs. The upper pool is remote and secluded, but was also occupied by three students. They had a glazed over look like they were rolling on Molly. Two young men passed the girl back and forth, floating, whispering to each other. Those of us in their forties sat apart from them until they left. We watched a doe and her newborn drinking from the pool below. Then we began to kiss, letting ourselves be taken by the moment. The feel of the cold water and the pebbled bottom heated by deep fissures miles below the surface a sensation of contrasts.
As dusk approached, we left the warmth of the upper pool and hiked back down to the resort. We sat in the sauna for a while and then waded into the darkness of a pool. There were no artificial lights here unless we brought them. So we managed to find the entrance to the pool without incident. The bottom was black pea gravel, giving the hot pool a sheen like a black mirror. The stars shimmered on the silvery surface. Natural rocks cropped up underneath, giving swimmers a chance to sit. A few others were in the pool as well, sticking to their end and us to ours. I carried her from rock to rock, nearly weightless. We listened to their conversations and sometimes commented under our breath. Bats skimmed the water at just about head level, snatching miller moths out of the air.
The touch of her was intoxicating. The feel of having nothing between yourself and the water is much like having cold water thrown on you. The intensity of exposure yet concealed under that anonymity and darkness. The feel of the pea gravel on your feet. The chill of the spring breeze on whatever skin is exposed above the water.
“In the summer,” one of the boys was saying, “this place is nearly shoulder to shoulder with people.”
“And they are all naked?”
“Most of them, yeah. I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. You tell someone that and they’ll think you are weird.”
“There’s nothing weird though. Not when you are in it.”
“Oh, totally,” the first kid said. “It’s not a sexual thing. Not unless you make it that way. It shouldn’t even be weird.”
I had thought about a buddy of mine who I had told my plans to. He jokingly called us Hylas and his water nymph. He had spent a lot of time in the buff at places such as these.
“People who don’t know think it’s an orgy or something. It’s not. Sure, people have sex, but that’s not why you go. If somebody scoots off to the woods for a quickie, it’s not anybody else’s business. It’s freedom.”
The strangest thing for me about the experience was how people’s hair looks. We style our hair to match our clothes and without those, we look silly. The other thing too is that none of us are centerfold material. Each of us has a goofy looking body to some degree when we are naked. We have rolls and folds and moles and freckles and flab and body hair and cellulite. Those things are more characteristic of who we are and our experiences at life than the clothes we wear. They are the things we keep hidden.
We headed home late that night, having stayed longer than I had expected. We would go to another naturalist resort, this time more built up. Less…feral. At that place I saw a more disturbing side of the culture. A red-haired man insisted on visiting with us, standing just enough out of the water that each ripple rolled up his leg and tapped the underside of his bulbous red-laced scrotum. Eye contact is a necessity, but damned if periferal vision isn’t still very effective. Jeez, buddy, pick one side of the water or the other!
The water nymph and I wouldn’t make it to the next summer together. That spark was only enough to rekindle another three months. Then another four of waiting for the end. Always so busy. Always the wrong time. Another six months and she was engaged. Then married. I felt myself relax. No longer was there the yo-yo and rollercoaster and unfulfilled plans and promises. The panic attacks and wondering why it was Friday night and she was out with people I would never meet. Finally over. Had I chosen that March morning to not pick up the phone and just keep driving in that blizzard, who’s to say how things would have been. I think in those days, I need to follow through with the lesson to see where the road would take me.
I heard someone say once that the moments you share with someone are often just that: moments. They don’t mean anything past that. I think that is true for some. I do know that what I got to keep from the experience is being able to say non-chalantly that I have been to a naturalist resort and had the full experience. I’ll probably even be smug about it because being naked with a bunch of strangers now means I’m cultured.
I might do it again one day, but it really lost its mystery. Underneath our clothes, we are all naked. Every day. Everywhere we go. I feel more exposed recounting this tale than I ever did in that hot spring.