T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

All. Right. And they were quiet now, E. E! Ers, newspaper hacks, birdwatchers and Winnebago pilots alike. This was a spectacle. This was nudity. And Andrea — andrea Knowles Cotton Tierwater, the Earth Forever! Firebrand and environmental fugitive-was next. Again the bowed arms, as she worked at the catch of the brassiere, again the hundred pairs of eyes deserting Tierwater to embrace. His wife. (Come on, Ty, she'd said, it the human body, that's all, nothing to be ashamed of You're beautiful. I'm beautiful. This is the way we were born.) Then her breasts fell free and she stepped out of her panties — and handed them, silken and still warm, to Teo, Teo who'd seen all this before, up close and personal. And the rest of them? They saw that she was a natural blonde, for what it was worth.

There was a spatter of applause, and then Tierwater had her by the arm-grabbed hold of her before she could take a bow, because he was sure it was coming, and Why not, she'd insist, why not? — and they turned their backs and hobbled awkwardly over a spew of distressed granite on feet that weren't nearly hardened enough. He couldn't see the picture this made, because he was at the center of it, but Tierwater was reminded of nothing so much as Raphael's depiction of the expulsion from paradise. But that wasn't right. It was paradise they were entering, wasn't it?

For the next three hours, Tierwater focused his attention on his wife's buttocks, though the glutei were only the most prominent of the muscles in operation here. He studied her thighs, calves and ankles too, and the dimple at the base of her spine. Her shoulders dipped and arms swung free with the easy rhythm of her stride, and her hair-newly washed, brushed and conditioned-lifted and fell with a golden shimmering life of its own. He admired the sweet triangulation of her scapulae, the exquisite grip and release of the muscles of her upper back, and her heels, he loved her heels. This was all new to him, a revelation, bone and muscle working beneath the silk of the skin in a way that was nothing less than a miracle. He'd seen plenty of women with bare shoulders in his time, women playing tennis and wearing evening gowns, women in swimsuits and tank tops, women in the raw, active women, ballerinas and gymnasts, porn queens on the receiving end of a zoom lens and Jane giving birth to his daughter in the flesh, but he'd never followed a naked woman through the woods before. It was something. It really was. And it moved him somehow, the grace and good sense of it, even more than it excited him — and it did excite him, so much so that he was hard-pressed to keep from planting her in the ferns at the side of the trail and expressing his wonder in the most immediate and natural way.

Of course, he couldn't do that. Not with Chris Mattingly moving along lightly behind him. And "lightly" was the word — the man kept a discreet distance, the only indication of his presence the occasional scrape of boot on rock or the rustle of cooking equipment packed loosely in the outer flaps of his backpack. This-Chris Mattingly, that is, and picture an Eagle Scout all grown up and rejected by the Marines, twenty-eight years old, regular haircut clipped to fishbelly-white arcs around the ears-was another of Andrea's inspirations. We've got to bring a journalist along, she insisted. Somebody impartial — or at least impartial enough to see that we don't cheat. How else would anybody know we don't have a cache of jerky or candy bars or even filet mignon out there in the woods — or a cabin with a satellite dish? Or how would they know we didn't just slip away to Maui for a couple of weeks? We need to record this, Ty, if it's going to do any good.

So Chris Mattingly was going to shadow them for a month (thirty days, yes, because there was no sense in challenging Great-grandfather Knowles' record, and, besides which, by September first it could get pretty frigid in these mountains). He would be sleeping in a tent, on an inflatable mat, and feasting on freeze-dried lobster thermidor, scallop enchiladas and power bars, while they made do with bark and pine boughs for bedding, and scraped watercress out of the muck and toasted grasshoppers and freshwater mussels on a stick — if they could manage to start a fire, that is. Think of it as an adventure, Andrea said, and it was an adventure, Tierwater saw that immediately, the sort of thing that would make the two of them more notorious than all the Foxes and Phantoms combined. Of course, when Andrea first mentioned it, he bitched and moaned, argued, pleaded, employed all the specious reasoning of the Sophist and the third-year law student, but it was for form's sake only-secretly, he was pleased. To go out into the wilderness with nothing, to hunt and gather and survive like the first hominids scouring the African plains, that was something, a fantasy that burned in the atavistic heart of every environmentalist worthy of the name. And he was one of them, as far now from the shopping center and the life of the living dead he'd been enduring all these years as it was possible to be. And though his feet hurt and he ached with lust for his wife and he was already feeling the first stirrings of hunger despite the staggering mounds of ham, bacon, flapjacks and eggs he'd forced down for breakfast, he was feeling at peace with himself, feeling fulfilled, feeling lucky even.

They hiked all that afternoon, following a trail that led them out of the national forest proper and into a remote wilderness area (entry by permit only, no hunting, no logging, no motorized vehicles, no traps, snares, seines or gigs, all fishing on a strict catch — and — release basis, beer cans, chain saws and boom boxes strenuously discouraged). This was old-growth forest, the redwoods gathered in groves along steep stream courses, the pines rising up out of the hills like bristles on a brush, the silence absolute but for the screech of a jay or the breeze that would announce itself with a long echoing sigh in the treetops. It was dry. And warm. Very warm. Tierwater had begun to feel the sting of the sun on the back of his upper thighs and his own lean buttocks, and he watched his wife's shoulders and backside turn first pink and then a freshly spanked red as the day wore on (and this despite the fact that they'd put in at least an hour of nude sunbathing each day over the course of the past two weeks as a precautionary measure). But you couldn't guard against the sun, not if you were going to live in nature, or any of the other vicissitudes of natural life either-insects, snakebite, the elements — and both of them were prepared to make the sacrifice. Still, what he wouldn't give for a tube of sunscreen or even a palm-full of Hawaiian Dream tanning butter.

But they didn't have sunscreen. They didn't have toothpaste or dental floss, aspirin, Desenex, matches, knives, crockery or silverware, they didn't have down pillows or blankets or cell phones or even so much as a ring or bracelet to decorate their bodies with. All those things he'd accumulated in his life, all that detritus from his parents and his house and office and even the little he could call his own at Ratchiss'-it was gone now, irrelevant, and he was like one of the roving Bushmen of the Kalahari, blackened and bearded little men who accounted themselves prosperous if they had an empty ostrich shell to haul water in. Sure. And what else were he and Andrea going to have to do without? Coffee, English muffins, canned tuna, chocolate, vodka. Books, music, TV. Band — Aids. Mercurochrome. A snakebite kit.

And this last was important. Vitally important. Indispensable, even. Because their destination was a stretch of the upper Kern River, deep in the gorge it had carved out over the eons, and there were whole tribes of snakes there — or so Tierwater had been informed by three-quarters of the residents of Big Timber, none of whom had ever actually set foot in the place. And it wasn't as if they had hiking boots and sweatsocks and stiff thick denim jeans to protect against the savage thrust of the naked fangs. Or scorpions-what about scorpions? Ticks? Mites? Cougars, bears, rabid skunks? What about them?