Chapter 83: Mindspeak

Tamara looked at Winnie with a smile. “Just what brought on that idea, dear?”

“Well, I thought about how much fun I have at the resort and how much all the girls like v-ball,” Winnie said. “I thought that they’d like to have the experience too.”

Barbara laughed. “That’s a sweet thought, Winnie. But think about it for a second—they’d all need to be nude, right? How do you think they’d react to that?”

Winnie didn’t take more than a second to answer. “Well, we wear skin-tight uniforms when we play and they don’t hide much. Everyone strips off for showers afterwards. and no one seems to be modest...”

Tamara laughed. “Would they strip off for showering with boys around? Think of the showers at the resort pool, hello?”

“Well ... um ... maybe not,” Winnie giggled. “I’m so used to nudists now that I can’t believe that everyone doesn’t think like me. Still, maybe they’d want to do it. Knowing those gals, a few have no shame. Maybe they’d think it would be a hoot to give it a try.”

Barbara grinned at her. “Okay, but there are some logistics to consider, assuming you get a few gals to try it out. They’ll all be under eighteen, so the biggie is getting parental permission. I can persuade Ron to extend a special rate to the girls and their parents too if they come. If a gal comes alone, the office needs a notarized document giving parental permission and designating a responsible adult. If they stay overnight, they’ll need a place—or at least a tent—to stay in. Still interested?”

“Oh sure. I think so. I have the cell numbers of the team. Coach too. I’m gonna call everyone and sound them out. Hey, is there a web page that they can look at to see what the resort looks like? I never thought to ask about that.”

Barbara gave her the web address and then mentioned the Superbowl and suggested that Winnie look up that site too and tell the girls about it.

Winnie couldn’t reach everyone immediately; including herself, there were ten girls on the varsity team. She decided to just contact the varsity members, not the JV members. Of the girls she reached, all were dubious but wanted more information; Winnie told them that she’d call them back on Sunday.

On Sunday morning, Winnie called her teammates back to invite them to her home to learn about the resort. It would be a tight fit, but Tamara had told her that anyone who wanted to come, could meet at their apartment. Tamara was surprised that just two of the team members had decided that they weren’t interested. Her coach had declined too, pointing out that if she attended, then the team’s participation could be construed as a high-school sanctioned activity, which could cause all sorts of problems. That meant eight girls were in the apartment, causing Peter to flee the place to maintain his own sanity.

Winnie had prepared well for the gathering—she had set up a video session with Barbara, Dawn Simpson, the Maryland v-ball team coach, and Naomi, one of the two college girls who had gone to the Superbowl with the resort team when Barbara and Tamara couldn’t. Winnie had her virtual guests tell the team members what they thought about nudism in general and what it was like playing the sport while nude. Their enthusiasm was evident and infectious and they answered a lot of the girls’ questions. After the video chat was done, Winnie and Tamara told the girls about their own experiences and Tamara spoke about her two appearances at the Superbowl.

Again there were many questions, but, as several of the girls there pointed out, their volleyball uniforms weren’t overly modest.

One of them laughed, “Yeah, wearing my bun-huggers feels like I have nothing on my bottom unless I twist a certain way. It doesn’t cover much.”

One of the other girls pointed out, “I think that athletes in general have far less modesty than other kids like the gals I see in the locker room at school. They huddle behind towels and rush to get dressed. I’m really intrigued at the idea of playing naked. Look at how they play beach volleyball—those suits cover almost nothing.”

Another girl mentioned the now-defunct ESPN Body Issue. “Remember how the female athletes posed for those pictures? Maybe that was just being exhibitionistic, but I think that they liked doing that.”

After a lot of discussion, and after what Tamara recognized as a lot of self-persuasion and possibly a bit of peer pressure, all of the girls agreed to do it.

Winnie was delighted and gushed about how much fun they’d all have. But, as she pointed out to them, the next step was to convince their parents. Winnie told the girls that, of course, their parents were invited to come too. That caused a bit of consternation for several girls.

“Uggh,” one moaned, “I don’t care if they see me naked, but I think seeing the ‘rents’ privates all hangin’ out there would wig me out.”

Most of the other girls were either amused or horrified at the thought of seeing their parents naked. Then the girls started discussing how to break the news to their parents. That’s when Tamara spoke up.

“Hey guys, I’ve met most of them at your games; they’ve been dedicated fans at your games all season and they know that you all have the potential of getting a college sports scholarship. So I think that they’d support you in any kind of off-season practice.

“Winnie, you’ll have to convince the parents that the resort is safe, you know,” Tamara told her.

“Ah, Tamara, since you’ve met most of our folks—could you talk to them?” one of the girls asked.

Tamara had each girl phone their parents and each explained about going to the resort. Then they turned the phone over to Tamara who spoke. It took about an hour, but finally the parents of five of the girls were satisfied with Tamara’s assurances of the resort’s safety—in fact, those five sets of parents actually said that they would go to the resort with their daughters. Five of the families had a younger child, three were boys and two were girls, ranging in age between 9 and 13. They were all going to come. Several girls had older siblings, but they chose not to come.

Two of the girls had parents who were more hesitant. Actually one was a single mom whose work as an LPN didn’t allow her to get to many games, so Tamara didn’t know her very well, and she didn’t know the other girl’s parents that well either. Tamara spoke to all three of those parents but they still seemed hesitant; they said that they needed time to decide. The meeting over, Winnie’s teammates left, and the final two teammates said that they’d work on their parents to get permission.

Several days later, Claire learned about Winnie’s volleyball plans and that there were a couple of holdout parents. Claire thought Winnie having her team come to the resort was a stellar idea, so she decided to call the three reluctant parents herself. She identified herself as the mom of one of Winnie’s guardians and told the parents that she was a part owner of the resort and a Navy officer, a professor at the Naval Academy, and could vouch for the safety of their daughters. She mentioned that four of the resort members were on the county police force too and that the resort was perhaps one of the safest places in the entire state.

The reluctant parents were persuaded by Claire’s comments and asked her if she could be the responsible adult for their daughters and she agreed. Winnie was in heaven; her idea was taking shape.

The first volleyball clinic would be on the second weekend of August and that was when the high-school team would be there. Tamara let the resort’s volleyball team members know that they were going to have a big crowd. She needed to find accommodations for the team members, siblings, and parents so that everyone could stay for the full weekend and enjoy all of the resort’s facilities.

The resort had three cabins available so Tamara reserved them. She decided that the rest of the beds would be in bunkhouse campers—using tents would be unwieldy and require too much additional camping equipment. The resort had a number of full-service camping sites available and Tamara reserved enough for the campers she’d need to rent. Since the Winsbergs were expecting a big family crowd and all of Tamara’s friends would be there as well, the lodge and cabins couldn’t accommodate everyone. However, the Winsbergs’ site had a space for camper-trailers and two camper units could fit there.

Beginning of July

About a week later, Nadine called Tamara with news she had received from her Haitian contacts. The mystery person who was behind the organized gang violence had been identified and located. He was now in custody and the additional policing support from the Benin and Togo “advisors” was bearing fruit; the urban gangs were slowly being rooted out. Those in the rural areas were still causing problems, though, so the national police had begun to turn their attention to those problems. Haiti’s police force was slowly getting rebuilt.

The construction of Tamara’s permanent manufacturing facility was well underway with a projected completion date in the following summer; the headquarters building would take an additional six months because of the specialized laboratories that Tamara had specified to be included in its design. And the school site preparation work had begun; the rough grading of the landscape into gentle rises and dells had begun and topsoil was being trucked in to cover the exposed rubble fill. The site design would use a gentle hilly topography and a tree barrier to isolate the school building site from the research park. For the social planning part of the project, Jay had his law-firm colleagues contact the agencies that they worked for and they circulated the information about the proposed school project. A meeting of all of the interested parties was scheduled for mid-September.

All during the past year, Tamara had been working with Winnie to help her to develop her emotion-projection abilities. Now that the summer was here, Tamara had decided to use the weekends in July to try to see if Winnie could connect with the world-energy entity that Tamara had found during her kouche. Since that experience, she had used her pwen skill in meditation to commune with the lwa, generally with Ayizan, but at times Papa Legba seemed to be the focus. But it seemed to her that after her kouche experience, her sensing the differences between the lwa had become blurred. It was as if she had developed an affinity for all of the lwa.

Now Tamara wanted to see if Winnie could also sense what she herself could, but it wasn’t feasible to find a sufficiently remote place where they could tune out all of the emotional background noise of a highly populated area, so the best alternate to use would be the natural area adjoining the nudist resort. So every weekend in July, Tamara and Winnie spent the two days at the resort with Peter. On the second Saturday in July, for their morning run, Tamara and Winnie decided to take a trail that was rarely used because it was dead-ended. Part of the trail paralleled the river for a distance before it ended at a marsh. On the river bank close to the trail’s end, the two runners came upon an open clearing with a large flat rock partially in the water. The area reminded Tamara of the waterfall near the cabin in the mountains. When they finished their run and were back at the cabin, Tamara told Winnie her idea.

“That big rock on the river bank?” Tamara asked. “Remember? That place reminded me of my retreat and a little waterfall and pool I found there. I told you how I connected with that world-energy being there. Want to try doing one of our meditation sessions out there?”

“Sure ... I felt something there as we passed by, Tamara. Something very old. Also, when I’m walking through the woods in the natural area, I sense ancestral spirits. So I looked up this area on the internet a ways back and learned that it was occupied for many hundreds of years before the white men came. For most of that time, the Patuxent tribe lived in this whole region and the nearby larger tribes included the Piscataway; they’re all part of the Algonquian peoples. That spot we passed must have been used for sacred rites. It had a special feeling to me.”

They showered and returned to the site. After they settled themselves on the flat rock there, Tamara asked Winnie if she sensed anything.

“Just a feeling of peace ... And maybe welcoming too. I can sense the forest spirits when I’m in the deep woods; this is a feeling like that.”

“Let’s lay back and meditate now,” Tamara suggested. “Hold my hand; look at the clouds, and try to see the patterns in the air between you and the clouds. The patterns seem to start where the breezes move the leaves on the trees.”

They spent a while doing that and then Tamara felt Winnie stiffen as suddenly she felt an unusual voice in her mind, a voice that sounded like Winnie’s.

“What is happening?” it seemed to say.

Jeez, Tamara thought. Is that Winnie?

“Tamara?” Winnie asked aloud.

“Shhh, go back to where you were,” Tamara whispered.

A minute later, there was a definite question sense in Tamara’s mind so Tamara “poked” at that thought and responded, “This is Tamara. Is it possible that you can sense this thought?”

Winnie’s hand tightened again and a thought formed in Tamara’s mind, “Papa told me legends of some medicine men and women doing this but the art was long lost. Have you really found it?”

Amazing, Tamara thought and Winnie’s thought returned, “It is amazing!”

Tamara could even feel-sense Winnie’s emphasis. And suddenly, the energy not-voice she had heard during her kouche was in her head too.

“Greetings, daughters,” came the thought and Winnie jerked but didn’t let go of Tamara’s hand.

“Yes, Awinita, I am real but not what the Algonquians regarded as the Great Spirit. The Patuxent, whose holy site you currently occupy, were closely related to the Algonquians. God, the Great Spirit, or the Bondye—that entity is as real as the entity now communicating with you and is a metaphysical construct which is made real by personal beliefs, so therefore exists. We are pleased, Awinita, that you have achieved the needed sensitivity to connect with our energies.”

A thought appeared in Tamara’s mind: “Is this a dream?”

She thought back, “No: just listen—oops, wrong word. Attend.”

Winnie “attended” and Tamara followed along while Winnie learned a few things about her ancestral forebears’ capabilities and Winnie even got a faint sense of a loving embrace that felt like her grandfather’s used to feel.

Soon, “Now, daughters, it is time to return to your lives. Rapport will come easier in future need. Farewell.” And the “voice” was gone.

“Is it over?” came the thought in Tamara’s mind; Winnie had risen up to a seated position and was staring at her.

“It is,” Tamara said aloud, but in her thoughts, said, “Can we now speak in our minds?”

Winnie winced and then a big smile broke out on her face.

“Papa said this was something that only a few wise men and women could do but was lost many generations ago. The voice told me that it was a secret tradition that came when they understood how to talk to the spirits. That must have been what we were doing, right?”