Prelude

I will never forget that afternoon. Her name was Lucy. We lived around the corner from each other, went to the same school, and were mostly in the same classes. I was a bit older than she was by a couple of days, but we were both fourteen. It was July, and we had been dating for a bit more than a month. Our formal dates had been dinner and a couple of movies. Our informal dates involved meeting at one of the local playgrounds that had some woods behind it. It was in those words that she said the fateful words. She had kissed me gently. We had not kissed much in the past, so every kiss resonated with my memory. But I remembered this kiss because of what she said next.

“I like you, John, but not that way. I like girls.”

To say I was gobsmacked is an understatement. Lucy was the first girl. You know the one that lets you touch her. She had held my hand, and we had hugged. She even had let me graze her swelling chest. Once. And now she was telling me she was she liked girls. By the time my brain had absorbed that, she was gone.

A week later, I sat on a bus heading north to Sudbury, where I would spend a month on a canoe trip in the Temagami region. I sent Lucy a couple of letters, but given how far from civilization I was, I did not expect any mail while I was out. I came back from camp, only to have a week before I headed to boarding school. And that week was spent clothes shopping.

Before I left, I had endured numerous fittings related to the uniform we were required to wear, including blazers, flannels, dress shirts, etc. You would think, to hear my mother rant about the waste of money, that I had grown to spite her. Forget that I had spent a month hauling myself and food and other gear through lakes that resembled oceans when the wind was up, and we were always paddling in a headwind it seemed. And when we were not paddling, we were walking along unmarked trails carrying all this gear. No matter how light you imagine dehydrated food can be when you have several weeks worth of it in your pack, it weighs something. The same can is true of paddles, lifejackets, and the other minutia required to set up camp every night. So it should not have been a surprise that I would gain some muscles. Growing an inch was not something I could control. So I spent a week being refit and running around finding new shoes and other clothes.

School did not leave me a lot of time to think about Lucy, although occasionally at night, while I lay awake and tried not to listen to the noises from my seven roommates, I would think back to how she felt in my arms and how she had excited me. But boarding school did not lead to many opportunities to meet new girls, and over time I forgot about Lucy.

For the next few years, the cycle was little changed. Camp in the summer, usually as far away from society as could be managed for weeks at a time, and winter’s spent surrounded by three hundred other guys. My Christmas vacations were always somewhere warm, family-oriented, and again, without much opportunity to meet members of the opposite sex. To say I lived like a monk, would be an understatement. The closest I came to meeting girls was highly structured and very formal, with several feet between us.

My sexual education was limited to stories in magazines, and the occasional retelling from my classmates and camp mates. It was hardly inclusive, or accurate. The additional information I found in books in the library was clinical and not particularly helpful for seducing women, much less knowing about how to make love to them. There were some passing acquaintances with girls, more of them fumbles in the dark that anything serious, and never leading to anything substantial.

The summer of my seventeenth birthday saw me escape from my cloistered lifestyle. And it was an escape I was happy to make. The summer of my seventeenth birthday meant I was now old enough to be on staff at the camp where I had been toiling as a laborer for more than a third of my life. At least that is what I felt at the time. One other advantage of my lifetime in the bush was my skill with a map and compass. In those BC days (that’s before the computer), we could not just whip out a cell phone and find our location. We had to look it up. Use a map, and a compass, and a bit of luck, or in my case, skill. I was to teach a group of new staff how to find their way without getting lost in the woods using these rudimentary tools, so I was reporting two weeks early for boot camp.

Chapter 1 »