Chapter 4: The Hike

Hiking up the switchback climbing from Fourth of July Lake, I watched Jean in front of me. More correctly, I watched Jean's legs and the movement of her buttocks. She was a few feet in front and above me on the steep, dusty trail.

We'd broken camp a few hours ago after having spent a couple of lazy days in a remote part of the Sierras. It was our family's custom to pack into remote areas at least once or twice a season and this was the first time Jean and I had gone alone. With no agenda save a couple of day trips and some reading, we'd had time to further our connection. I suppose it's not unusual for siblings to know each other very well on some levels while being almost strangers on other levels. It was that way with Jean and me.

For as long as I can remember, she'd been my older sister... aloof, superior and occasionally condescending. As with most of us, the position of apparent superiority was assumed to cover the usual teenaged feelings of insecurity, of being "less than."

I'd taken on a completely different persona in the family. I was the joker, the hero and, deep in my own mind, the lecher... the closet rake. A few months before, in an attempt to expand my licentious sphere and engage Jean in some "dirty talk," I'd turned up the intimacy current. Unexpectedly, we'd literally fallen into some near-explosive sexuality. While our "fooling around" had had sudden intensity, we'd not really "done the deed" and since then our connection was clearly more tender, yet guarded.

In my loving moments, I'd welcomed the chance to continue our process of a deepening relationship. In my horny moments, I'd looked forward to escalating our previously ill-defined sexual connection. In short, I was hot for my sister and hoped she was too. What an opportune time, I thought, to explore our sexual side.

Jean, however, had reservations. Oh, she'd shown that she was capable of intense sexual response once before when we'd been fooling around on the couch and it'd progressed into a short-lived voyeuristic masturbation. But since that time, as if frightened by the unplanned and seemingly uncontrollable force of the experience, she'd drawn back.

Her response to my plaintive entreaties of, "Oh, come ON, Jean... why won't you let me... " (fill in the blanks) were met with a smile and her reasonable position of wanting to go very slow.

"Billy, you know I love you. You're my kid brother and the sweetest boy in the world. You're sexy and, most of the time, you're kind to me. But... (damn, there's always a "but" that follows such a good start)... but, this is scary stuff. I don't know what's right and what's wrong. I know how I feel, but that doesn't make it right. Won't you give me some space, please?"

When she said "please" to me with that certain sincere, loving tone of voice, I was a goner. "Okay, okay. But don't blame me if I'm limping around all the time." (As if there were blame or that I'd really be limping. The major organ limping in me was not my dick... it was my brain!)

We'd gone skinny dipping each day in the freezing high-Sierra, snow-fed lake. It was so cold that my pecker had attempted to crawl back into my abdomen. My cremasteric muscles - that thin sheet of muscle that envelopes the spermatic cord and testes - had gone into such intense spasm from the cold that each day, on dashing back out of the water, I was doubled over with pain. It didn't help my sense of dignity or my macho image when Jean'd point and laugh at me. (I've since come to see the wisdom that warns: "It's OK to laugh in the bed room, but not to laugh and point.")

Anyway, my unflagging desire to see Jean nude was answered, but I was so blue and shivering that I could think only of jumping back into my sleeping blanket. (My suggestion that Jean and I zip our mirror-image sleeping bag together elicited no more than a twinkle and a smile coupled with a mute shake of her head.) So the wish that I carried with me on the backpacking trip that I see Jean naked had been filled each morning... when my dick was a negative impression. The rest of the time, she'd managed to change clothes out of my presence. While we'd talked into the night, she wouldn't let me even cuddle her. Rats! I was frustrated. Still, I was having a wonderful time. What a collage of feelings.

Too, I thought I'd get a chance to spy on her peeing. Remember me? I'm the horny little kid who presses his ear to the bathroom door to listen to his sister take a leak? Yep. That's me. I'd almost come in my pants from smelling her panties and once, when finding some of her pale yellow urine and a used tissue in the toilet, I'd jacked off right into the bowl... taking all of ten or fifteen seconds.

Out here in the great outdoors with no bathrooms, not even an outhouse, I'd surely get to peek at her... I thought. So far, no dice. Either she's got a holding tank for a bladder, or she was adept at slipping away. I, on the other hand, believed that the only bad publicity was no publicity. I used every chance to casually take a whiz when I was around her. Oh, I didn't come up and piss on her shoe, but I did things like continue a conversation, turning just a little aside as I took out my pecker and peed on a tree or a rock. She didn't comment on my little exhibitionistic streak and I couldn't really tell if she was watching or not.

No cuddle, no peeks, no peeing. Shit! I just wasn't getting what I wanted and was feeling sorry for myself and not a little petulant. So I employed the short form of the Serenity Prayer and said, "Fuck it." It was, after all, all right. Here I was, in God's indescribably beautiful mountains on a primo day with my dearest friend and best buddy, and I was petulant. Boy, talk about an ungrateful wretch!

Knowing it was going to get very hot by midday, and that we had a twelve-hundred-feet climb out of that basin, we'd packed and started early after a good breakfast and tanking up on mountain water, both in our bellies as well as our canteens.