Bear Foot Lake. It's one of those places I think about once in a while, even though I haven't been there in years. Deep in the Adirondack region of Upstate New York, Bear Foot sits at the end of a two mile trail, greeting you, when you arrive, with glinting sunlight sparkling from the surface of its oddly green water. It's not swampy algae green, it's grayish, whitish green, caused, I read somewhere, by fine silt in the water, left over from the Ice Age.
The first time I went to Bear Foot, I was a Boy Scout. Thirteen years old, if I remember correctly. There were nine of us, just a small troop, led by our troop leader Mr. Jackson, and his assistant, a younger man named Chuck. I have fond memories of setting up our small tents on the beach — one of the few sand beaches of its size on any of the hundreds of Adirondack backcountry ponds and lakes.
I was in my early twenties when I went back to Bear Foot Lake. It's that memorable weekend that I tell you about today. I went with a female friend of mine, Linda, a girl a year or two younger than me. She was an outdoorsy type, drove a somewhat worn-out Subaru wagon, one with a rack on the roof that often had a kayak strapped to it. Most days she wore Timberland boots that had some miles on them, boots that were always untied, loose around her ankles.
Linda was fond of flannel shirts, mostly worn open, over a t-shirt, with the sleeves unevenly rolled up a turn or two, but she was softer in spirit and girlishness than some of the girls who dress that way. She's a dark haired girl, with green eyes that were always open wide, as if she was taking in more of her surroundings than most people see. That dark hair was always one of her nicest features, always shimmering and shining, moving like strands of silk blown by the faintest breath. I shouldn't admit this, because I had a girlfriend at the time, but I always loved seeing Linda from behind — all that silky dark hair hanging down onto her back, the nice hourglass curve of her waist, the curve of her sexy ass into womanly thighs, all the way down to those ever-present loose-around-the-ankle Timberland boots. She was, and still is I imagine, easy on the eyes.
Backpacking to Bear Foot with Linda was a weekend I'd looked forward to since the day she and I made the plans — a 'just the two of us' weekend, the kind of thing we, as close friends, had never done before. The planning was odd and somewhat thrilling as I recall, because much went unspoken, even the assumption that we'd be sharing a tent. We were still young, and somewhat carefree, though we were far from the adventurous free-spirit of some of today's youth, with their 'friends with benefits' arrangements. No, Linda and I were friends without benefits, mainly because I had a girlfriend, a college sophomore who was spending her summer abroad, in England, where, from her phone calls and letters, I knew she was spending lots of time with a certain young Englishman who was 'showing her around.'
Like me, Linda was in a relationship, an on-again-off-again one that was hard to keep track of, especially with living away at college mucking up the works. As far as I remember it, they were on-again at the time of our backpacking weekend, but that memory is vague. Perhaps I didn't care.
And so off we trudged, Linda and I, into the Adirondack woods, with packs on our backs that felt for all the world like they were full of lead. "Holy shit, Jeff," I remember her saying to me, right after she'd strapped hers on and stumbled backward, coming to rest against the side of her Subaru. "We're supposed to go
how far
with these on?"
"It's just two miles," I said. "It's easy, though. I did it when I was thirteen."
We'd arrived there, at the trailhead, on Friday afternoon, to beat any possible weekenders and hopefully get a prime camping spot, ideally right on the beach. There were a few primitive tent sites carved out of the woods — just bare patches of ground overlooking the beach and the water — but the crescent shaped sandy beach was what I remembered from my childhood, and it's where I wanted to be. With any luck we'd be the only ones there that weekend, with the whole of the small lake to ourselves.
Quite often Adirondack trailheads have a wooden box on a post, with a sign-in/sign-out sheet inside so the rangers can keep track of things. There's sometimes other information posted in the box, and on that day I was disappointed to see that 'On the Beach' camping had to be reserved ahead of time by calling the ranger's office, and was for groups only. In order to follow the rules we had to use one of the wooded sites and walk the few extra steps to the water. Not a big deal, I decided.
Linda was a trooper on that hike, never complaining, even though I knew she was struggling with the top-heavy pack's weight. I was struggling too, truth be told, my out of shape body not used to the weight of adult accoutrements, like bottles of tequila and triple sec, and of course limes and salt for our margaritas. And oh yeah, we had a tent and a stove and food and water and clothes. The usual camping stuff. Stuff that added up to untold pounds on our backs. We were both happy when we saw the sparkling glimmers of Bear Foot Lake through the trees. We'd made it.
We chose a nice little tent site under towering White Pines, the ground soft with decades — or maybe centuries — of needle droppings. White Pine needles are inches long, soft and comfortable under bare feet, with a mahogany brown color that's lovely. It was almost as if our little spot was carpeted, unlike many Adirondack tent sites that are just bare dirt.
Our small, lightweight, two-person tent — yes, just one — was set up and I was straightening the rocks around our fire pit, scanning the woods for dead and down trees to cut with my folding saw, when I heard voices. Lots of them.
"Looks like we're not alone," I said to Linda. "Wow, there's a bunch of 'em."
-
It was about ten minutes later when a nice looking older man walked over to us, I'd assumed, to say hello. He did say that, but he had a concerned look on his face. "When I spoke to the ranger's office," he said, "they told me we'd have the whole place to ourselves. We were kind of surprised when we saw your car at the trailhead, but then we thought maybe you were day-hikers."
"Oh," I said. "He probably meant you'd have the whole beach camping area. I think that's the part that's reserved, just for groups."
"Oh, wow. Maybe, yeah," the man said, his face still somewhat tense with concern. "Here's the thing, guys," he said to us. "We're all members of a club called Upstate Swingers of New York. We're here for, you know, a club get-together. Things might get a little, uh, uncomfortable for you, unless you're cool with it."
I looked at Linda. Her eyes were open wide, even more than usual. They seemed to be smiling a little, even though her mouth wasn't. The pine-scented air was suddenly very silent, so I decided to answer the man, for both of us. "Yeah, that's cool," I said to him, trying to act casual. "As long as you don't mind us here. We don't want to, like, ruin anything for you."
"Oh, no," the man said, his face relaxing into a little bit of a smile. "Yeah, I mean, same with us. We don't want to screw up your weekend, either. But yeah, we can all just do our own thing. I just wanted to let you know, before you were surprised or shocked or something. My name's David, by the way."
Linda and I chatted with David for a five minutes or more, talking about the Adirondacks, the mountains we'd hiked, how ultralight and fragile our little tent looked, and a few other subjects. He yelled down to the beach to get his wife's attention, and she walked up the short, eroded path to our little tent site, smiling but looking a little bashful when I shook her small hand. "It was a screw-up with the ranger's office," David told her. "They didn't tell me the whole story, I guess, about these other tent sites. But Jeff and Linda said they don't mind, and...I mean, we don't mind, right?"
His wife, Annie, shrugged. "No, I guess not. You told them...why we're here?"
"Yeah, he did," I said to her, stumbling a bit with my words. "It's cool. We're cool."
"You sure you wouldn't like some privacy?" Annie said. "Maybe there's a spot at the other end of the lake."
"No, there's nothing," I said. "I've got the trailguide in my pack. It's just this end here where you're supposed to camp. They get kinda pissed if you flatten out a spot that's not already cleared."
"Oh, yeah, I guess," Annie said. I remember her looking unconvinced about sharing the beach with us, or maybe it was our tent's perch that made her uncomfortable, probably twenty feet in elevation higher than the sand where their friends were setting up camp, and only sixty or eighty feet away in total. Linda and I, as we found out soon after, had one hell of a view.
David and Annie left us, making their way down the rooty little path. As I remember it, ten, or twenty, or maybe even thirty long seconds went by in silence before Linda and I spoke to each other, awkwardly, about setting up the small butane stove so we could heat up some dehydrated soup. It seems odd to me now, to think that we didn't say a word about our new neighbors being a group of swingers there to, well, swing. But that's sort of how our friendship had been, Linda and I. We'd never talked about the deep stuff, or relationships, or our troubles. It was a light friendship, one of smiles and easy-going laughter. Having a sudden conversation about swinging would have embarrassed us both, I'm sure, so we talked about soup instead.
Then we ate some.
Then we watched a naked woman go to her knees and give a naked man a blowjob.
