The sky is just beginning to darken when Noodle and Bradley return to camp. Down by the stream I had found a few larger sticks and the fire is blazing brighter than ever; we all sit and watch it quietly. I am surprised that there are no mosquitoes or flies; no insects of any sort seem to be attracted to the fire nor to our flesh.
We turn in before the sky goes completely dark. I ask if we should extinguish the fire but Babe says no, it’ll burn itself out by morning.
The trees are much blacker than the sky when I crawl into my tent and zip the flap shut. I think this must be the earliest I’ve gone to bed since I was a kid, but I’m so tired I don’t want to do anything but sleep.
Lying in my huge tent alone, I think about the possibilities of bears, murderous fugitives, devil worshippers... what if we’re murdered in our sleep, our bodies buried deep in the woods, not to be found until years later? I think of The Blair Witch Hunt, Deliverance, Grizzly Man… I know I’m just being paranoid but I’m still a little nervous. I’m amazed at how silent the night is. Every once in a while I hear the call of a bird, but other than that it’s absolutely quiet. I don’t fall asleep for a while and wake up dozens of times throughout the night, unable to get comfortable on the pine needle floor.
The next morning ‘m woken up by Bradley calling my name. I sleepily unzip the tent and stumble out.
“She’s gone,” he says. “And all her stuff’s gone too.” He’s really upset and paces back and forth restlessly. I tell him I’m sure she’s fine, that she probably just headed out for an early start at the springs, but there’s no convincing him. We clean up the camp and pack our things as fast as we can, then set out to find her.
We cross the creek, careful not to slip on the wobbly rocks. On the far bank we are met by an enormous German shepherd standing protectively beside a tent that was definitely not there the night before.
“I got up early,” Bradley explains, “and when I saw that she was gone I came over here and thought that was her tent. I saw the dog and thought, oh, she found a dog.”
The tent flaps part and out step a man and a woman.
“Sorry if I woke you up this morning,” Bradley says to the couple. “I mistook you for our friend. She has that same tent.” I look at the tent. It doesn’t look anything like Noodle’s.
“You took our favorite spot!” the woman whines. Then she breaks into a smile. “Sorry. We crossed the creek last night and found your tents in our spot. I hope the dog didn’t wake you up.”
“No, we didn’t hear anything,” I say. “It’s a great spot over there alright.” They watch us scale the loose dirt of the ravine and ascend the path back to the hot springs.
The forest is completely still. Every couple of yards I stop and listen: all I can hear is the light tramp of Bradley’s hiking shoes on the packed dirt ahead of me. The morning light is uniformly blue, with no light and no shadow. I hear a crow caw once and then stop.
We find Noodle alone at the baths, basking in the steam of a water-filled log.
“You had me worried,” Babe says, easing off his pack. “I thought you’d left.”
“What? Why would I leave without you?” Noodle asks, her brow wrinkling in annoyance.
The bath house is littered with soggy matchbooks and the melted stubs of candles from the night before, along with the occasional empty can of Olympia beer. We all take a nice long soak in the tubs.
As I climb out for the final time, I notice a single brown pine needle floating on the surface of the water, spinning wildly like a compass in a magnetic storm. I sit on the bench and carefully dry my sore foot and get dressed.
Hiking back we each talk about the weird dreams we had the night before. I had long, convoluted dreams about a city that incorporated elements of all the places I’ve ever lived. I could actually feel my brain trying to integrate all the people and locations into one coherent whole. Bradley dreamed about a war in which there was a mix of soldiers from Iraq and the American Civil War as well as the Revolutionary War. He woke up just as a British general was about to cut off his head with a long sword.
Noodle seems reluctant to share what she dreamed. Finally she says she had a dream in which she was raped by her father. I picture her father’s craggy John Wayne face, his squinty, crinkled eyes. He was always an extremely reticent, super-masculine man. I always sensed that he didn’t approve of me. Walking through the woods, Noodle tells us he used to hit her with a broom. “Not with the side of the bristles, but with the ends of them. They would leave little red dots all over my legs. In the dream, my whole body was covered with those same little red dots.”
The hike back to the car seems much shorter than the hike out had been. I wonder why this always happens. For some reason I think it should be the other way around; having nothing to look forward to on the way back, I would think the return trip would seem gruelingly long, but it never does.
As we emerge from the forest, I am relieved to see that the car’s windows are all still intact.
The next stop on our trip is Breitenbush. We’ve made reservations to spend the day and night; there’s an entire retreat center rather than just a hole in the ground with hot water running out of it. I couldn’t find decent directions anywhere on the internet, but I have a hunch the highway we took to get to Bagby might lead us in the right direction.
We are all much chattier than we’d been on the way to Bagby. I’m getting used to being around them again, perhaps the soak has made me more relaxed. I mention how strange it feels to be naked in public for the first time.
“Babe was naked all the time in public when he was a kid,” says Noodle, munching on what looks like a seaweed Slim Jim. “Right, Babe?”
With a little coaxing, she gets Bradley to talk about the neighborhood he grew up in. His parents both worked so he was raised by his schizophrenic grandmother. There was a big pack of kids in the area and they’d all play together.
“One day, we just all got naked,” he says in that low, deliberate voice of his. “I don’t know who started it, but all of a sudden we were all running around naked in the yard.”
“Didn’t anyone notice?”
“I guess not. I mean, we were little kids, like nine or ten years old. Maybe they thought it was normal.” He paused. “Then sometimes we’d play doctor.”
Noodle laughs. “You played doctor?”
“Oh yeah. There was this girl, and she and I would go in the backyard and she’d lie down like on a hospital bed, and I’d say what’s wrong, what hurts, and she’d point to it, and I’d say I need to look at it. And we’d act all serious and upset like we saw adults act.”
“Did you, you know, do anything?”
“No, we just looked. I think I touched her belly button once. It was an outie. I’d never seen one before.”
After driving for less than an hour we see clearly marked signs for Breitenbush. I am surprised at how easy the trip has been. Our spirits are high. It’s another gorgeous day out.
The road leading from the highway to the retreat center is extremely narrow and lined with ferns and trees that have turned grey as ash from all the dust kicked up by the tires of passing cars. We park in the gravel parking lot and stroll down a tree lined path to the main lodge to check in.
The lodge is a large wooden building fronted by a long porch with a balcony festooned with bath towels hanging likes prayer flags along its length. Meals are included with our overnight fee, but lunch won’t be served for a while, so Noodle and Bradley head off to explore. I sit at a picnic table on the long porch beneath a Douglas fir and take out my blank book to try to do some writing.
In a little while a plump, very attractive woman comes out of the lodge and asks if she can share my table. She sits diagonally across from me, takes out a journal and starts to write in it. As usual I look for a wedding ring and notice that she wears an enormous chunk of pale amber on her left ring finger.
I steal little glances at her and suspect that she senses this. She has short, frosted blonde hair and a very pretty face. She is dressed all in white. I want to talk to her but my mouth is dry. After the seclusion and isolation of Bagby, I realize I am really feeling socially awkward here where there are so many other people walking around, and pretty girls on top of it. I feel exposed and self-conscious.
After a few minutes she closes her book and gets up to go. I glance at her as she does. She comes around to my end of the table and says, “Your handwriting is quite beautiful.”
I thank her, smiling. “It’s not always legible though, even to me,” I manage to stammer. She is standing very close; I smell overpoweringly strong perfume.
“Well, all that matters is that you get it out, right? That you express yourself?” she says. Her voice is light and sweet as honey.
I think about it a moment before answering.
“No, I think it’s important to make it legible, too,” I say. “Because I want it to be read, I want it to communicate something. Otherwise what’s the fucking point?”
A blank look flashes across her face for a moment but quickly gives way to a smile. She grabs my arm warmly, then releases it and walks down the steps and across the lawn. I see her sit down heavily on a bench in the shade.
Noodle comes up the steps and, looking over her shoulder, says, “Well, she’s cute! Is it lunchtime yet?”
It’s not, so she wanders off, and when 1:00 rolls has not reappeared, so I’m left to eat by myself; I’m too hungry to wait for them. It’s a vegan buffet and all the food is pretty good. I sit on the edge of the room where I can watch everyone, hoping to see the blond woman come in, but she doesn’t, and I feel a twinge of regret that I didn’t try talking to her more.
When I’m done there is still no sign of my friends, so I decide to brave the hot springs myself. I head on down the path and pass a sign that reads HEALING WATERS. I come to a series of small stone pools set into the side of the mountain. There are people in the first one so, feeling shy, I take the second one, which is empty. I strip down, feeling very vulnerable at the edge of the meadow overlooking the forested hills. Everything’s much more exposed here than at Bagby. I slip into the water and try to relax. No sooner have I done so than I am joined by an old man who sits at the water’s edge across from me. I nod hello and he smiles.
He tells me he’s only been a nudist for a couple of years but that “Once I got started, I was instantly hooked.” He says that he goes to the nudist beaches on Sauvie Island in Portland and at Rooster Rock in the Gorge. We sit for a while in slightly uncomfortable silence until he slowly gets up and walks away without another word.
I get out and wander aimlessly; the sun is beating down, much hotter than the day before. Outside of the forest and the camping area, there isn’t much shade here. I decide to cool off in the river. On the way I run into Noodle and Bradley, who are sluggishly looking for some shade to sit and read beneath. I tell them I’ll meet up with them later and continue on my way.
There is a new-looking wooden bridge crossing the river, which is actually more of a wide stream. I cross the bridge to the other side where a gently sloping bank of rock leads into the water. my feet are pretty much numb from neuropathy and therefore a poor gauge of temperature. I reach down and dip my fingertips into the icy cold water, then roll up my pants legs and step into the rushing current.
Though the water is crystal clear, it’s impossible to gauge its depth; the bottom fluctuates wildly, dipping down suddenly before rising up to form bumps that look like they’re hollows. There are also deep pockets filled with small river rocks that slide around when stepped on. It’s slow going. I hold my books up high to avoid dunking them. The stones hurt my feet even through my pool shoes.
The creek seems much wider once I’m out here in the rapids. Once I reach the middle, I stop to rest and gaze upstream. The forested hills rise above me, their tips threatening to pierce the cloudless sky. The roar of the river is deafening. I look at the far bank; it seems impossibly distant. How pleasant it would be to just give in, to let the current carry me along with it to wherever it’s going How wonderful it would feel to just give up, to stop fighting the pull of the endless gallons of water pushing against me.
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