A Dip in the Lake
Campfire tales and a borrowed skinny dipping tale
This is an entry in “My Filthy Hobby,” in which I look back over the stories I’ve been publishing and try to unpack how exactly I got here …
This week, I’m looking at “A Dip in the Lake” and my own history with the outdoors. This started off as a sweet little sex-in-the-woods story with a meet-cute scene over a tangled pile of tent material, and quickly morphed into the first part of an epic tale of erotic betrayal, awakening, and reconciliation. As I look back over the stories that have followed “A Dip in the Lake,” I’m a little shocked that something so innocent (well, kind of innocent) spawned the decadence to come. I’m currently working on what might be the final chapter of “Mapping the Boundaries of Love,” exploring Jessie’s past a little more — Phil, I think we can all agree, was largely clueless about who he was getting involved with on that fateful camping trip, and he’s in for some surprises!
As before, the full article is available to paid subscribers, who also get my whole catalog of stories; so if you want to read all of these articles plus the stories they highlight, you know what to do …
Also, if you’re interested in giving a little direction to my future projects, give a vote on these ideas that are bouncing around in my head; there’s no guarantee that the winning project will be my next one, but there is a guarantee that you’ll get a free ebook for checking a box!
AND, completely unrelated to this story: I’ve got a coupon code that you can use if you purchase “A Siren’s Tales: 12 Erotic Confessions” on Smashwords: use 9BKM5 at checkout to get this deal. But it expires December 1, so don’t delay!
As I noted in my piece about the Cassie Snow "Winning With the Wildcats" stories, I was largely an indoor kid through grade school into junior high. I was willing to go outside so long as I could bring a book with me, and I could lie in a shady spot that didn't have too many bugs and read the summer afternoon away.
But camping? Goodness no!
My mother signed me up for the Brownies, thinking that it would be like the Girl Guides of her youth in the Maritimes — she remembered a lot of hiking and camping and sitting around campfires telling stories and making s'mores. The Brownie program I was in was focused almost entirely on selling cookies, with occasional forays into needlework and making cookies; these were largely indoor activities, which I might have enjoyed, but I bristled at the regimented nature of it all. My Brownies career came to an end long before I graduated to the green sash.
We weren't a camping family like my husband's — he grew up taking long fishing trips with his father and uncles, and was accustomed from an early age to sleeping outdoors, reading maps, and making fires. My family, on the other hand, would make sure we had a solid roof over our heads on all of our vacations, even if we sometimes stayed in some dodgy motels on cross-country road trips.
So my mother was surprised when, at fifteen, I petitioned to join the Explorer post my friend Pam belonged to. Explorers (now Venture Scouts) was a Scouting program for older teens that did a lot of outdoor activities — we were promised things like rock climbing, whitewater rafting, and horseback riding — in addition to monthly or so camping trips.
They also had boys. A few cute ones, which is how Pam lured me into her weird little cult for several months
It turned out that even though there were boys at our campsite, having boys in our tents was highly discouraged. The chaperoning was strong. The activities might be co-ed, and there may have been some sneaky hand-holding and maybe even a peck on the cheek or two, but the watchful eyes of adults were always on us (and especially on Pam, who had a reputation for bending and flat out ignoring rules).
But while I didn't come away from my brief Exploring career any wiser in the ways of men, I did actually pick up some outdoor skills, and a real love for the woods and lakes where we camped. And when I did finally meet my husband, at a demonstration of canoes and kayaks put on by a wilderness outfitter at one of our urban lakes, I could show pretty decisively that I wasn't a delicate city girl: I could pull my own weight in the outdoors, and even teach him a thing or two about cooking on coals and hanging a bear bag.
"A Dip in the Lake" is my little love letter to the outdoors. It started with the scene of Phil meeting Jessie while she's struggling with her tent and things just flowed naturally from there. When I heard Jessie swearing at the pile of nylon and fiberglass that refused to become a tent, I knew exactly what kind of gal we were dealing with, and I liked her immediately.
There's a risk in this sort of setup of too much of a power imbalance. Phil clearly knows his way around the woods, and while he's generous and kind, he still puts Jessie in an awkward position of being the damsel in distress. Almost immediately, though, she demonstrates a pretty forceful character — taking a solo camping trip in a secluded forest is a bold move indeed, especially for a first-timer — and a strong competitive streak.
While I'll admit to more than a few lazy afternoons in the tent with a partner, and even some encounters on a secluded beach or off an isolated hiking trail, the skinny dipping scene is definitely not taken from personal experience: I stole that, pretty much verbatim, from a story a friend told me about his own experience. Except that instead of being interrupted in the lake by a talkative hiker, he and his partner had a Boy Scout troop stumble upon them. And they apparently dilly-dallied with their lunch on the shore while my friend and his partner shivered up to their necks in the increasingly chilly water, no doubt very much aware of what they were barging in on.
Taken by itself, I think "A Dip in the Lake" is a sweet little story. It has lots of sex — lots of sex — but also some good rapport between the characters. I enjoyed writing it, and spending a little time imagining wilder behavior in the woods than I usually dare to enjoy myself. But what makes it stand out for me is what comes next in Phil's (and, more importantly, his absent fiancee Petra's) story.
At the time I was writing "A Dip in the Lake," I thought it might be part of the same work as what eventually become "Off the Leash." I was planning to have alternating chapters telling the story of Phil in the woods with Jessie, and Petra at the casino with her friends, both of them straying from their monogamy, but in the end they would be reunited and this "lost weekend" would make their relationship stronger and their love deeper.
That is very much not what happened.
While Phil's chapters in "A Dip in the Lake" remained pretty straightforward, Petra's chapters became increasingly baroque. The characters and situations kept piling up, and it became clear that there was a lot more that I wanted to do with the weekend at the casino than I could possibly achieve with half a novella. The "Mapping the Boundaries of Love" series was born, with "A Dip in the Lake" becoming the unintentional first chapter of a five (or more?) story arc.
As I write this, I'm deep in the process of completing "The Contours of Desire," a story that should wrap up at least some of the threads left dangling at the end of "Casey's Story." Jessie is back, and as spunky as before, and so is Petra, though more than a little frazzled by her experiences at the casino. And Phil — well, he's got some things to reckon with that he thought he might be able to avoid.