Orienteering Each Other

One of the big lessons I learned the summer I graduated from high school was that if something is worth doing, it's worth doing even if it was your mother's idea. The Park Department was putting on a series of events for young adults, and my mother kept bugging me to go to one of them. "It will get you out of the house," she'd say. "You love the outdoors. It will give you a chance to meet people." By people she meant girls. Here I was, eighteen, and I still didn't have a girlfriend. She was afraid I'd be a bachelor all my life.

The fact is, I was dying to get out of the house. I did love the outdoors. I desperately wanted to meet girls. The only reason I was dragging my feet was because it was her idea. It began to dawn on me that this was not a very grown-up reason.

So I took a look at the schedule. One of the events was going to be an orienteering hike in Twisty Creek Park. The hikers would be divided up into teams, and each team would have to find its way around an eight-mile course using a map and a compass. It sounded like it might be fun. So I signed up. They sent me a topographic map of the park and a list of directions that we'd have to follow to get around the course.

——

On the morning of the hike, I got to the park a few minutes late. There were half a dozen cars in the parking lot, but I didn't see any people. I got out to take a look around. Another car door opened, and a girl got out. She was wearing khaki shorts, a light blue polo shirt, and a safari hat.

"Are you here for the orienteering hike?" she asked.

"Yeah," I replied. "Have they left already?"

"I don't think so. I've been here for ten minutes, and you're the only other person I've seen." She had a pretty face with freckles and light brown hair.

"Do you think it got cancelled?"

"Usually they let you know."

"So what should we do?"

"Keep waiting, I guess. See if anyone else shows up."

She got her backpack from her car, and we waited in the shade of some trees. We looked at our maps and oriented ourselves with respect to a few of the taller hills that could be seen from the parking lot. I was usually pretty shy around girls, but since we were both interested in figuring out the map, I was able to hold my own.

Eventually fifteen minutes had gone by, and no one else had arrived.

"Well, I guess we're it," she said. "What do you think? Shall we just go ahead and try to take the hike ourselves?"

It was an exciting prospect. She was friendly and pretty and we seemed to be getting along well. "I guess that's what we're here for."

So we headed out down the trail. It was a fire access road, actually, wide enough for the two of us to walk along side by side. She introduced herself as Carrie. She was outgoing and friendly and easy to talk to. She'd just graduated from the public high school. I'd just graduated from the Catholic boys prep school. We were both going to State next year.

"I thought everybody from St Francis went to some big name college," she said.

"Some do, but not everybody can afford it."

"Wasn't it weird going to a school with only boys?"

"You get used to it, I guess."

"But you had girls in your grade school, didn't you? I don't see why they separate you in high school. I mean, the real world has boys and girls both. Shouldn't high school be the same way?"

"I guess they figure we'll catch up eventually."

"But you guys did do things with Carlmont, didn't you?" That was the Catholic girls high school. "Dances and things?"

"They had dances and things. I didn't usually go."

"How come?"

"Shy I guess."

"Oh come on. You don't seem that shy. Did you go the prom?"

"Nah." To tell you the truth, the thought of going to the prom had never even crossed my mind. But now I felt embarrassed that I hadn't at least considered it.

"Because you were shy?"

"I didn't really have anyone to ask."

"Couldn't you have asked one of the girls you went to grade school with?"

"I guess I haven't kept in very good touch with them."

"Well? See? II you want to have someone to ask to the prom, it's going to take a little effort on your part."

Yeah, I got it. But I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable being in the spotlight.

"What about you?" I asked. "Did you go to the prom?"

Her reply surprised me. "Not really."

"How come?"

"Nobody asked me."

"Really? I mean, seriously. You're so pretty. You're so nice."

"Yeah, well, a lot of shy guys at my school too I guess."

——

The first few legs of the orienteering route were pretty easy to figure out. They had us going along a ridge with nice views of the creek and the hills beyond. It was a pleasant day with big fluffy clouds in the sky. We didn't see another soul on the trail.

Then one leg took us down into a big open meadow. It started off along an unofficial path that wasn't too hard to follow. But when we got down to the meadow the trail became sketchier and sketchier. Finally it disappeared altogether, and we had to bushwhack through tall grass in the general direction of the creek. The ground was swampy in places, and swarming with mosquitos.

"I wish I'd worn long pants," Carrie grumbled. Eventually we came to firmer ground, and we struck the creek right at a stand of shady sycamores. It was a pretty site with a rough little beach of pebbles and coarse sand.

According to the directions, there should have been a bridge there, but there wasn't. We studied the map, and Carrie finally figured it out. We weren't where we thought we were.

"Here's the bridge," she said, pointing at the map. "If we were there, then Grizzly Peak would be west of this hill. But it's east. So we must be over here somewhere."

"Right," I said. "And look, the creek takes a big turn here. So maybe this is where we are." I indicated a point on the map only about two-thirds of the way toward the bridge. We decided that we must have taken the wrong side trail down into the meadow. It hadn't been a real trail at all, just an animal track. That's why it had petered out in the tall grass.

"So what do we do now?" Carrie asked.

One option would be to retrace our steps through the meadow, but neither of us much wanted to go back that way again. Or we could try to follow along the creek itself, but we had no idea how rough the terrain might be.

The third option would be to cross the creek where we were and then cut across country to intersect the trail again about a half a mile ahead. That way didn't look to be as overgrown as the meadow had been, and in fact it looked like it might be our best bet. The problem was the creek. It was pretty wide here, and no telling how deep. We decided to reconnoiter a bit to see if we could find an easier place to cross.

——

Carrie bent down to tighten her shoelace and let out a little shriek.

"A tick!" she cried. It was in the cuff of her sock. She brushed it off and stomped it with a vengeance. Our instructions had warned about the possibility of ticks. The ones in our area weren't thought to carry Lyme disease, but they could carry other diseases, and they were just all-around nasty creatures, burrowing into your skin and sucking your blood.

Carrie sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree. She took off her shoes and socks and found one more tick. I stepped out of my own shoes and found one of the little buggers myself. "We must have picked them up in the meadow," I said.

Carrie was checking the legs of her shorts. She spotted another one, right on her inner thigh. "God," she said, "I've got one on my leg, too."

I was wearing long pants. "They can't get inside your clothes, can they?"

Carrie was standing up again. "They can get anywhere! We probably need to check ourselves . . . all over." She sounded very serious. She began to unbutton her shorts, but she didn't want to pull them down in front of me. So she turned her back, and then looked over her shoulder to make sure I turned my back too.

Was she really going to take off her shorts right out there in the open? Well, it was the only way to know for sure. The spot where we were was pretty secluded. We'd turned our backs to give each other as much privacy as possible.

I started to wonder if I shouldn't check myself as well. I took off my tee shirt and felt around my chest and armpits. Could they really have gotten inside my pants? I unbuckled them and tried to look down inside. It felt kind of silly undressing in the out of doors, but I carefully stepped out of one leg and then the other. I took a quick glance around to make sure Carrie wasn't looking.

She still had her back to me. She'd taken off her shorts . . . and everything else! I could see her bare, split bottom. She was completely nude! That must have been what she meant by checking herself all over.

I was shocked that she'd taken her clothes off, and I was just as shocked that she'd thought it necessary to check herself all the way down to the skin. I turned quickly back away from her. I looked down inside the waistband of my underpants. It was a rat's nest of pubic hair down there. Could there be ticks? The only way to know for sure would be to take a closer look.

Keeping my back to Carrie, I slid my underpants down. And right there on the underside of my penis, right where it emerged from my balls, was the horrid little black watermelon seed of a tick. It had already started to latch on. My heart skipped a beat.

Carrie must have heard me gasp. "Don't try to pull it out!" she ordered. She was looking right at me. "You might break it, and then we won't be able to get the head out. Hold on. I've got some tweezers in my first-aid kit."

She crouched to open her backpack, split bottom and all. Then she stood back up with the tweezers. She had breasts—real breasts—and, down where her bikini bottom should have been, a fuzzy little patch of hair. I'd never seen a girl naked before. I'd never seen the way her breasts swell so naturally from her chest, the way they sway as she hastens toward you, the way they're capped so frankly by their pink little buds.

"Sit there," she commanded, indicating the tree trunk. Her face was full of concern, her voice charged with the authority of someone who has recently read the field manual. She knelt down in front of me. No girl had ever seen my penis before. But now I had no choice but to show it to her. I lifted it up and let her see even the underside.

She assessed the situation. "Keep the skin stretched tight," she told me. So I held my dick up with one hand and used the other to pull down the saggy skin of my balls. She held the tweezers parallel to the skin, right down touching it, to grab the tick as close in as she could get. She pulled slowly, tenting the skin at first and then plucking the tick right out. She inspected it closely. "I think we got it all," she said with freckled concentration, holding it up for me to see. She squashed it between the jaws of the tweezers, then dropped it on the ground and smeared it with a rock.

She looked back up at me, still crouched between my legs, deliberately ignoring the fact that we were both naked. "I should probably check to see if there are any others," she said, speaking still with the authority of the field manual. I could see that she was probably right. She could check me much more thoroughly than I could check myself. I let go of my dick and spread my legs farther apart.

She bent in close. She started with my pubic hair, using both her hands to curry through it. Just a minute ago we'd been hiking down the trail, chatting about high school, and now we were naked and she was fiddling around with my crotch. All I could see from my vantage were her brown tresses and her broad, bare back. But I could feel her careful probing. No one had ever touched me where she was touching me. I could feel myself starting to stiffen. There was nothing I could do to stop it. She finally had to move her head back to dodge being slapped in the cheek. I was too embarrassed to even apologize.

She kept working as if protruding dicks were nothing out of the ordinary for her. She had me spread my legs even wider so she could check where my balls tucked up against my thighs. She was still using her fingers to curry the hair, but very timidly, trying hard to avoid touching my scrotum. I don't think I've ever been so embarrassed. Or so erect.

She scrunched way down, trying to see the underside of my balls. "Um . . ." she said.

It wasn't really possible for me to lean much farther back. "What if I turn around?" I suggested.

We stood up. I turned around and bent over the tree trunk, planting my hands on the ground on the other side. I don't know if asses blush, but it sure felt like mine was as red as a beet.

She gingerly swept her hand over my thigh, first the back, then the inside, right up to the seam. Then she cautiously parted my butt cheeks. Christ! She was looking at my asshole! Not even the guys in gym class had ever seen my asshole! Then she went even further down. I tried to think what was even down there. My butt crack must end somewhere. She was inspecting places so private I'd never even thought about them before.

Finally her probing stopped and her hands withdrew. "I don't see any more," she said. I stood back up. My dick was as rigid as a fire hydrant, and there wasn't anything I could do to hide it.

"So . . ." she said, hesitantly. It was pretty clear now that the only way to know for sure whether she had ticks would be for me to check her. But she was too shy to ask. I tried to muster up some of her field-manual confidence. I gestured for her to sit down on the trunk.

I did my best to follow her example. I made myself focus on the individual sectors rather than the girl they made up. Her skin was so white and so bare that it was easy to see that there were no ticks on her chest, on her bosom, on her sides, on her stomach. I moved my focus down to her fuzzy triangle.

I knew absolutely nothing about girls down there. We'd had sex ed in school, of course, but there had only been diagrams, and pretty schematic ones at that. Besides, it had been way back in sophomore year, when sex had seemed about as relevant to my actual life as medieval history. So I was venturing into uncharted territory.

Her pubic hair was a lot coarser than I somehow thought a girl's would be, almost as coarse as mine. At the top of the patch, where it came near her faint tan line, the coverage was wispy and you could see through to the whitish skin underneath. Further down, especially along the midline, it was bushier and more concealing.

I went slowly, checking every square inch, using my fingers to gently curry the thicker spots, making sure that nothing escaped my notice. I began to see that the dimple along the midline was actually more of a gash. At first I was horrified that it was the lingering scar from some unspeakable injury. But then I began to realize that it must have something to do with her vagina, that it might even be her vagina itself. I blushed and hoped she didn't notice.

"You'll . . . have to check there too," she said in a brave voice, the voice she must have used in the doctor's office. She put her fingers on either side of the gash and spread it a little ways open for me. It was deeper than I had thought, and much more elaborate, with different overlapping folds of pinkish skin, like the petals of an exotic, fleshy flower.

"Is it OK to touch you there?"

"You'll probably have to."

I took a deep breath and tried to pretend that I knew what I was doing. I used just the very tips of my fingers to gently peek down between the different petals. It was pretty clear now that these were her most private, private parts, nestled away here at the very heart of her lap. It would have been obscene for a tick to even presume to enter there. I was relieved I didn't find any.

When I was done she stood up, red faced, and forced herself to turn around and present her bottom. The first thing I saw, right toward the top of her crack, was a little black watermelon seed. She heard my gasp. "Did you see how I did it?" she asked, nervously.

"I think so," I tried to reassure her. I spread her bottom with one hand and slid the tweezers along the crack. I didn't squeeze tightly enough the first time, and the tweezers slipped off. I tried again, squeezing more tightly, and this time I managed to pull it out. It looked like I'd gotten it all, but I took it around for her to double check. Then I pounded it with a rock like she'd done.

I continued my examination, but there was no way I could avoid seeing what I was seeing. There was her asshole, cuter, more feminine than I might have expected. And below it, somewhat surprisingly, her gash again, upside down now I guess, rimmed by hair, but not quite as camouflaged in this position. In fact, it made more sense this way. I could see right where a penis would go.

I didn't find any more ticks. She stood up again, still red with embarrassment. But she held it in and issued one last field-manual directive. "We should probably check our clothes too." She happened to be standing closer to my pile. "Shall I check yours? Can you check mine?"

——

I'd never paid much attention to clothes before, let alone girls' clothes. But now I had to carefully inspect every stitch, every seam. Her shorts, her shirt, her panties, her bra. Inside and out.

I was surprised by how plain and simple her panties were. I guess I'd always thought that girls' panties were silky and frilly, but these were just plain white cotton, not that different from my own. Skinnier though. It was hard to believe they would cover anything at all.

Her bra was simple too, soft and cottony, not at all like the severe harnesses I'd always pictured. Her bra and her panties were just underwear, I realized. The comfy clothes she wore closest to her body.

I emptied the pockets of her shorts. Car keys, wallet, pocket knife. I opened her wallet to make sure there were no ticks hiding inside. That's what the folds of her vagina were like—the different little pockets of her wallet. I probed them gently. Fifteen dollars in cash, her driver's license, her health plan card.

Almost hidden in the innermost pocket was a photograph: a younger Carrie with her parents and an even younger sister, outside on a sunny Spring day, laughing happily about some merriment taking place just off frame. Carrie was a bit ganglier, but just as earnest, just as pretty, just as full of confident expectation. It was in some ways the most intimate view of her I'd had yet. It made me feel as if I'd known her my whole life.

——

I ended up finding one tick in Carrie's shorts, and she found two in my pants leg. We smiled shyly and exchanged the items we were holding—my tee shirt for her bra. She didn't put it on, but she slowly brought her arm up to cover her chest. She slowly lowered her other arm to cover her patch of fuzz. She did it demurely, not as if she were trying to hide anything but just in a sort of muted acknowledgement that our excuse for being naked was drawing to a close.

I took it for granted that she must know the rules about boys and girls being naked together better than I did. So I followed her lead and tried to nonchalantly clasp my hands together in front of myself. It was a bit awkward, though, since I had to clasp them so far out in front. Carrie looked at the bra. She didn't seem at all enthusiastic about having to get dressed again.

But then I thought of something. "If we're going to ford the stream, shouldn't we wait to put our clothes on until we get to the other side?"

She had to agree that it made sense. Otherwise our clothes would get all wet. But that meant that we would have to stay naked a while longer. Apparently the field manual wasn't altogether clear about mixed nudity in non-emergency situations. So we stood there, a bit awkwardly, covering ourselves with our hands, staring at the ground, not exactly sure what to do next.