Atlantic Ocean Adventure
Seven
hours after meeting five harried young woman who need a tent to sleep in (I let
them share mine) so as not be eaten alive by a freak plague of mosquitoes that
has descended on Cape Hatteras, I awake to the coffee of my whispered name.
Lucia likes to drag out certain words in her everyday speech, and already she
has tenderized my name. The way her pout-y lips say my name is just so sexy.
More than once some months from now I’ll call in sick and head north to visit
her in the Village after hearing her say my name on the phone.
“Eddie,”
she is lisping in her North Jersey accent. “Eddie . . . Eddie.”
When
I uncurl my cramped body – I mean there are five women and one man squeezed
into my two man mountaineering tent - and turn to face her, she is kneeling and
already out of her sleeping bag. She takes me by surprise with an unexpected
quick, light kiss on my lips (the first I pray of many) and then she scats as
would a skittish cat out of the tent. She is still dressed in long jeans and
red flannel shirt with tails tied to expose her midriff – as she was when we
met last night. Outside the tent, the faintest light of dawn is perceptible in
the east toward which the tent’s opening faces. I notice the flap moves a bit
with a breeze that seems to be coming from the ocean that lies perhaps a
hundred yards away.
I
pop up to follow but the zipper of my sleeping bag snags Lucia’s youngest
traveling companion Carolyn’s hair, and the tie-dyed recent high school
graduate wakes to the tug of it. “Sorry,” I whisper, then un-snag her hair. She
looks now even younger than she had last night, and her teenage bravado comes
not into play. In that instant of awakening she seems for some coy reason
embarrassed, perhaps just startled by the sight and proximity of my hairy bare
chest.
“I’m
going swimming with Lucia. Do you want to swim with us?”
“No
thanks, I’m afraid of the water. I
don’t know how to swim. Anyway, I want to sleep ‘til noon.”
I
crawl out of the tent. Lucia is standing on the path at the top of the small
series of dunes that separate the dry sand of the campground from the actual
beach. Lucia turns and sees that I am on my way and then commences to remove
first her shirt and next her shorts, underwear and all, in one deft out
stepping of it. The sun which just then pops over the horizon back-lights her
as only such scenes can be back lit. Then she disappears from view as she
descends the other side of the dune.
I
race up the dune and scan all around to see if there isn’t anyone else up yet,
anyone out walking, not out of shyness but out of caution as I had noticed the
posted warning: No Nude Bathing, on the kiosk where I paid my camping fee the
previous evening.
I
step out of my cutoffs and BVDs, leap seaward off the top of the dune, and run
after Lucia as fast as I have ever run. She has fifty yards on me when I start
after her, but by the time my feet first hit water I am but a dozen yards
behind her. She dives into the waves and begins swimming out from the beach. I
am but one wave behind her as I dive over the surf. Out past the breakers I
catch up with her. Dog paddling, she has turned to face me. I swim like a baby
to its mother, right up against her. Her breasts are buoyed by the buoyant salt
sea. Her long hair lies on the water behind her, calamari-like. I kiss her
tentatively on the lips and embrace her with both my arms. Of course, we sink
under the water and have to let go of each other to regain the surface.
We
kiss again, this time using our arms and our feet to stay afloat. Only our lips
and our tongues touch. We kiss like this for a minute or two, all the while
staring intently into each other’s eyes, as if scrutinizing irises to determine
each other’s ultimate intention, grading the effect of our kissing on each
other’s pupils, their dilation.
Suddenly
Lucia’s eyes widen and reflect an immediate terror, as if she has just
remembered something horrible, something quite contrary to the emotions of the
moment. She pulls back and cries, “The beach! Look how far out we've come!”
I
turn around in the water and instantly understand the panic I saw in her eyes.
We are a good half mile out and quite north of the campground which is receding
quickly.
We
both start swimming hard – with survival in mind - toward where we had entered
the surf. We soon realize, however, that we will make better progress if we
swim toward the beach at an angle northward. Believe me, the terror of our
situation is real. The water
behaves differently sixty miles offshore than it does where it meets the
mainland. Even as we make our way toward the cape, the area of water that we
progress in moves independent of our efforts away from land. With each advance
west, we drift north. There’s no time now for anything but strong swimming and
after intense effort we are back to the swell of the waves just east of the
breakers. I swim next to her and touch her shoulder with my hand. She turns her
head and looks at me. From under the water her hand finds its way to my chest.
She holds me at arms length for a moment and then turns sprinting freestyle
toward the beach. We both catch the next wave and body surf the last thirty
yards. We are adrenalized when we hit shore. Unfortunately we are almost a mile
north of where we started. And naked. And between us and our clothes there are
surely going to be people.
By
now the sun is a good twenty degrees above the horizon and high noon’s scorch
and blaze and bake are augured in the warmth that our wet white bodies suck out
of the atmosphere. I’m strolling naked with a naked young woman along the beach
of a dangerous shore. Many are the people who have drowned in this area. Lucia
and I, ourselves, separate yet together, just underwent a test of our strengths
and our mutual luck, perhaps a test of our stupidity, and abreast of one
another we have passed. Running Bear and Little White Dove maybe wind up not
drowning after all; maybe they just move further up-river, much the same way
that we had drifted north along the cape. Lucky we are that we hadn’t been part
of a volume of water rolling eastward.
A
threesome, I assume they are a family of husband, wife and daughter, approaches
us from the south. A white sheep dog makes passes at the waves while bounding
in front of them. It’s fetching a frisbee the child is throwing.
Lucia
is still walking toward them, perhaps unaware of her own nakedness, although
I’m sure like me she is as aware of mine as I am of hers. It’s extraordinary
and not often one gets to walk naked with someone they’ve just met, having just
survived some Poseidon misadventure, except, perhaps, when the name of the game
is love quest, at stake, the rule-less worship betwixt lovers, the whole kit
and caboodle, marriage and the baby carriage, fire, liar, co-conspire, rattle
them random the odds about this.
As
we draw close to the family, I bump and direct Lucia toward the water. It’s not
that I don’t want them to see me, I just worry about being hassled, after all,
it is some US Department of Something sanctioned campground. It isn’t a nudist
colony.
“Lucy,
Lucy, Lucy, . . . let’s just hang in the water and let them pass by. I promise
I’ll keep my feet on the bottom.”
As
the family passes by us we stand, in the raging surf, our feet sinking first
this way then that in the sand, slammed up against one another, kissing again,
this time with more than our lips touching. From a short distance past us, the
wife looks back and waves as if inured and used to seeing naked people kissing
in the surf. A lot of people are up ahead now so we fight the undertow and surf
the last half-mile as we progress south, waist-deep in the water, to the area
of the campground. It isn’t so much that the water hides our nakedness, it is
just that we remain distanced from the beachcombers and dog walkers, the
distance a function of our growing awareness of our physical selves, our animal
selves, the attraction of each to each.
Eventually
we get back to the vicinity of where we think we left our clothing and casually
stroll the last hundred yards across the open beach to retrieve it. We ascend
the dune and step smack into the plain view of dozens of people who are
stirring below us in the campground, watching the dawn, going toward and from
the john, just lounging, boiling water for coffee, and other early-morning
campground things. We’ve stepped
naked onto an elevated stage of anyone looking eastward, as most are. And our
clothes are gone, or so we think, until Lucia spots the red of her flannel
shirt some distance away, on a further dune, on the other side of the trail
from the campground to the beach. Perhaps perked by the titillation of
exhibitionism, we saunter slowly down one dune and up the next, dress on top of
the hill as casually as if we are putting on hats, and zigzag our way in the
direction of my tent. I walk aside Lucia, not hand in hand or anything like
that, for it is as if we know our acts together only mean something to us.
Prior to this morning I have never been naked in such a public way. An
appreciation for the lifestyle of hot springs and hot tubs will come later.
