by Jayne Louise
from Jayne’s Nature:
Close call .
by Jayne Louise.
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A Kindle™ e-text.
Surf City Source
New Jersey
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Close call
Text © 2004 by Girls Of the Dove LLC.
All rights reserved.
No part of the manuscript or artwork included in this e-text
may be reproduced, stored or transmitted by any means
without express written permission from the Publisher.
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Text edited by Melissa Stockhart.
HTML edited by The Girls of The Dove.
From the original America Online journal of June 2005
Surf City Source media group
New Jersey
www.surfcitysource.com
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Foreword
The following adventure is actually true. My journal from which these stories come does name real places and real people, but for this edition I have left out many details that might embarrass someone, or give too much of my private life away, or reveal the exact location of places that are better kept secret. The stories aren’t for people to come looking for me and stalk me. They’re for letting people know that things like this really can and do occur and that nothing here is really anything terrible at all. My sisters and I are proper young ladies who wouldn’t hurt a soul nor do anything unsafe or sinful, and as long as we are healthy and respected you’ll never see us become petulant or insist on our own way. So I need to say that if you’re looking for some really hot sexy stories about nice girls going bad, this is not the story you’ll want to read. For everyone else, if you stick with it I think you’ll enjoy it.
A word of caution: there are many dangers for any person, clothed or unclothed, prowling about the Pine Barrens, some of which can be much worse than a mild scratch or a case of poison ivy. Also, technically, some of the activities we have pursued in these adventures are against the rules. To allay any formal concerns, we rely on our intentions to not disturb anyone else and on our conscious efforts to defend the pristine natural environment as citizen caretakers. Therefore we, as The Girls of the Dove, do not endorse anything we have done here, do not advise others to follow our examples or surpass such activities on their own, and do not accept responsibility for anyone who does anything following our examples. This advisory is made for legal as well as for ethical reasons. And anyway we’re sure you can find your own unique way of having fun without copying what other people have done.
Jayne Louise
New Jersey, September 2006
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The Girls of The Dove,
in
Close call.
by Jayne Louise.
I
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
It was hot all day, even in school. Someone said the air conditioning wasn’t working right. I had on my little pale-olive green skirt and a navy t-shirt with the soft white cotton shirt over it… and no socks. And no stockings. You’ve got to be kidding me with that stuff in this weather. (I get the no-socks thing from my dad, who never wears socks after Easter, but that’s off the subject.)
Jules got my mom to drive her to a cheer exhibition tonight so Jem and I went for a ride, just the two of us, and we decided to scout out the locations for the Kupala Night festival, which is two weeks from yesterday. I think there was an unspoken plan that we would go skinny-dipping or at least take an evening hike– I know I was hoping for it, because I had changed into a t-shirt that I tied up around my ribs and my dark green board shorts with no underwear, and Jem had on a black tanktop and denim shorts and, as it turned out, no underwear either. And we never even discussed this! Then again, it was too hot to wear much clothing.
We found our way up towards Batsto, which is about half an hour off the island, much quicker than sailing there seven hours in the boat! From the road most of the secret spots we know are almost inaccessible. But I turned in on the Batsto lane and we proceeded down the road into the forest.
I’d been down this road before– it is lovely in the middle of the day, long and straight with the dense woods on all sides and nearly never any other cars or people. I often imagine myself traveling along at about five miles an hour in an old-fashioned horse and carriage like it’s 1750 or something. Batsto was settled here, in the middle of the Pine Barrens, in the 1750s. It must have been amazing for those people back then to have discovered and explored the wilds of what we now call our state park.
For reasons completely passing all understanding, Jem and I turned off the main gravel road, which we knew led to the campground, onto a narrower, spookier road. By this time it was getting dark. ‘Don’t worry,’ I kept saying. ‘If it gets a little too weird we’ll just back up till we can turn around and go out the way we came in.’
Jem shrugged in the front seat, her knee up against the dashboard, her head back, savoring the sight of the dark trees through the open sunroof. She always trusts me with stuff like this. Fortunately I’ve never gotten us into too big of a mess.
Sure enough we found a couple of really terrific spots where we could hold our festival. Several times we got out of the car and wandered around, just to see what they’d be like a few dozen yards off the road. One spot had a beach– well, an open patch of sand and grass where people could lie out and get sun. As it turned out it was not that far from a little creek anyway. Another place was a broad field of grass where four paths intersected. One seemed too sandy for cars, so that made it attractive to us. One turned into a foot path as soon as it went into the trees. But there were piles of beer cans and other trash, so you know we won’t be risking that one.
We proceeded on the way we were going and the road had several eerie turns and twists till we were completely lost and the sun was nearly down. The entire way we passed three cars, all going the other way. They all moved over to let us by. One guy waved and sort of whistled at us. I glanced in the mirror and saw him looking after us. There wasn’t much room for him to turn around and we went around a bend or two and we got pretty confident that he wasn’t going to follow us.
But there wasn’t much room for us to turn around either, so the only thing we could was go on, and on, and on, down this narrow dirt path with trees on all sides. Several times the ground got very sandy and I really had to use the gas pedal to keep us moving through it. Then we came to an iron bridge over a creek. Then we passed a gun club and a little chapel in the middle of nowhere, and then a couple of buildings that were one of the state park offices, and we found ourselves across the highway from the big public lake in Atlantic County. How did that happen? We must have traveled 15 miles on that dirt road leading nowhere… and it led here.
So it was another 20 miles back the long way to Batsto. By this time it was fully dark. Jem rang Daddy and told him we were stopping to get something to eat and we’d be home. But by the time we got back to Rt. 9 there wasn’t anything open. So we bought a couple of sandwiches at Wawa and turned around to go back towards Batsto, just to find a picnic table to eat on.
By the time we got there it was totally dark, so we got a clever idea and decided to have a dip at the bathing beach and boat ramp. No one was in the campsite across the road, so we backed the car pretty deep into the woods and shut off all the lights. It was just about perfectly dark then. The two of us sat and stared up at the blackness for a few minutes, getting up our nerve. Then we made sure the inside lights would stay off and opened the doors to get out.
A car went by
on the road, about 150 yards away from us through the trees. Quickly we got out of our clothes. I laced the key into my sneaker so I wouldn’t have to carry it and Jem transferred the Wawa snacks into a darker plastic bag from the car. Then, we stealthily hiked out through the empty campsite towards the road.
Another car went by. It was still only 9-something and there was traffic, but on a week night before the real season begins the campsite was empty. That meant the rangers would probably not be making regular rounds. We darted like deer across the sandy entrance path and broke out onto the still, silent county highway. We had not heard anyone go down the driveway to the boat ramp. But that didn’t mean a state trooper or ranger couldn’t come up on us from behind. On the deep wooded driveway there aren’t many easy places to dive into the foliage and hide.
I found a broken stick and used it to wave in front of me, letting the very tip of it scrape the path to ensure we weren’t walking into anything nasty in the pitch darkness. Another car went by, the headlights glowing gray in the dull light behind us. It didn’t turn in. But halfway there we could see dim starlight at the end of the drive. Jem actually broke into a run then, scampering away in her baby-blue-and-white Vans with her hands fluttering in the air like an uncoordinated child.
The lavatories were open as usual and we used that, washing our hands with no soap and blotting them dry on the mass of napkins we’d got at Wawa. Then we strolled across the empty parking area to the fence and the picnic tables. As we’ve done before we crossed the footbridge over the drainage creek with the bulkhead along it, and took a table near the water. There was no moon but the river glowed in the starlight and we could see very well by now. Jem served us each half the sandwich and we ate that and drank Dasani. It was a totally throwaway supper, you know.
Cars continued to go by on the road, maybe one every two or three minutes. Their headlights came around the bend upriver from us, momentarily filling the woods where we sat with light, but at such a distance they’d never see us. Then the road led farther away from the water and by the time they actually passed us they’d be about 100 yards behind the trees. So while it was eerie being illuminated like that there was absolutely no danger from any of them.
We parked the shoes on the bench beside our Dasani bottles, with the key still tied securely to my laces, and sat dangling our feet in the river for about twenty minutes. The water was only a foot or so below the bulkhead. Finally Jem decided she would be brave enough to go in. ‘It’ll be the first dip of the season,’ she said simply, and started lowering herself in.
‘Jules should be here,’ I said, staring at the water.
‘Yes, but, she’s not. She should have known if it was me and you coming here that we’d be doing something like this.’
I shrugged. ‘Okay, maybe so.’ So I stated lowering myself in too.
The water was not warm. It never really is in June. So there was all the drama of easing our bodies into the water, getting wet stage by stage until it’s enough that we can let go of the bulkhead and wade.
Jem let go first. For a few long moments she stood on tiptoe with the water just up to the bottom of her rear end, so that the whole curve of it emerged out of the water and exaggerated the small of her back because of how she was standing. Only Jem can make an awkward moment like that look cute!
I found a slightly warmer spot just up from the drainage creek and was able to go in to my ribs well before she did. The tide was strong and coming in, although from how high it was on the bulkhead it didn’t have much more to go. We made our way out into the dark river, eager to enjoy the sensation of being naked in a wide-open space. Jem bobbed down and got her head wet. I just got my feet free of the bottom and started a lifeguard breaststroke with my head above water. Both of us were moving with no noise, like secret agents on a covert operation. Silence is good for something like this!
The water gets really deep as you go past the boat-launch ramp, something over six feet. We both paddled our way across and came up on the bathing beach, rising up till the water was at our waists and peering over the edge of the bulkhead at the parking area. ‘Okay, trooper,’ I whispered, ‘if you’re coming, come now.’
Jem giggled a little. ‘You just want it to be a close call.’
I shrugged at that. ‘No. But I want to know that I can hide from them if I have to.’
She nodded. ‘Well, if he came now, what would we do?’
‘Stay right here,’ I said. ‘He won’t be here all night, and we’re patient.’
‘When we have to be,’ she said. Really patient is about the last thing Jem is!
‘Hey,’ came a young boy’s voice, clear as though it were right next to us, and we both spun round in surprise. ‘Where are you going?’
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II
A small, dim light was coming up the river on the other side. ‘Shhh,’ I said to Jem.
She nodded. From the voices we could make out two boys and a girl, barely audible over a small outboard motor. The light was making almost no progress even with the tide. We figured they were just puttering around, maybe night fishing. They were not, in any way, interested in us or even aware that we were here.
I pressed myself up out of the water and stood up above the bulkhead, stretching a little like I’d just run a marathon. My sister stood in the water staring up at me with nothing to say. She might have been admiring me– I know she sometimes does, you know. But when we’d been looking at each other a few moments she said, ‘Sorry, just having a pee.’
I giggled. ‘I thought so.’
It sounds weird but when we’re naked, like we’re ‘natural’ I guess, we all tend to pee a lot. Maybe it has something to do with being so totally relaxed. I have found there are two ways to pee outside, and one of them is not to stand and spread your feet really far apart. It always seems to run down one leg. (If that worked we would all be straddling the potty with it between our legs.) The first way is to put your feet really close together, right up next to a tree, and then hold onto the tree with both hands and lean your bottom way out, like you’re squatting down over an invisible potty. The other way which is even better is to lean back against something, like a tree or a fence, like sitting down on a potty but holding yourself up with your back. Then again, there is always doing it in the water!
Being me, I am such a priss that I actually walked across the parking area to the ladies’ room! But it’s always pleasant to have a little stroll like that.
When I came back we went back out into the water and started drifting up river towards the picnic table again. The kids in the boat were still out there, talking like no one else was around. Daddy always taught us to be pretty quiet on the boat. Sound carries much farther across the water than most people think it does. Fortunately those people were making so much noise themselves that they never did notice the very slight splashing we did in swimming breaststroke just enough to keep our heads up. But just past the launching ramp we noticed they had started coming our way. In fact we could hear their little engine pushing them up river, more into the middle of the channel, towards us.
‘Psst!’ Jem whispered to me.
‘Yes,’ I whispered back, having noticed it myself. ‘This way.’
We made our way over towards the bulkhead where I put my feet down once and actually stood up in the water to get a better look at them. Jem paddled on, eerily silent in the water. They actually were heading closer, though in the dim starlight there was no way they’d see me. There is a launching ramp directly across the river from where we’d had our supper and that’s where they were headed. I followed Jem a little till we both saw the kids in the boat coming about even with us. Abruptly their engine cut. Then the little boat was turned towards the other shore.
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said aloud to Jem, even as the kids in the boat were calling to someone on the shore over there.
We pulled ourselves out of the water and sat on the b
ulkhead again, rinsing off our feet and tying our sneakers on. The car key was still safe on my lace and I tucked it behind the other laces as I tied up the shoe. Then we collected our trash and started out towards the little bridge over the drainage canal.
One car went by– we watched it through the trees as we were heading for the lavatories because if it were a ranger we’d be caught in his lights by the time we stepped out into the parking area. The car slowed, as though it would turn, and then the sound seemed to disappear. We both froze.
‘He’s coming in,’ Jem said.
That didn’t bother us. We could just stay where we were. If he stayed too long we would just go through the trees to the roadway, hop over the fence, and run up the road to the campsite where the car was. But as we stood there waiting we realized the car was not coming into the bathing beach and boat launch ramp. The ranger had either gone by, and we’d lost the sound of him, or he’d gone in to check on the campsite first.
That’s when I began to worry that he’d discover the car.
‘The car is dark,’ Jem said. ‘And it’s not in a campsite but way back beyond that. He probably won’t ever see it.’