Chapter 1

Saturday

“Charlie, that was Dave,” Mindy said, as she hung up the phone. “Their mother broke a leg in an auto accident this morning. The doctors say she’ll be okay, but she’s in the hospital. Dave and Carol want to be with her, so they can’t make it tomorrow.”

It was about lunchtime on a Saturday in early August of 1987. My little sister Mindy and I had spent the morning inventorying food and gear. David, Carol, Mindy, and I had planned a week-long backpacking trip into the Wind River Range, with the next day as the date of departure from Fort Collins, Colorado, for the Meadow Lake trailhead near Pinedale, Wyoming. We had planned a meeting that evening, to finish our planning and go over our gear. This could mean canceling the trip.

“I’m glad she’s going to be okay,” I said, and I was. “But I don’t think we should go to the Winds without them.” About that, I wasn’t glad at all.

“Why not?”

“Well, there’d be just the two of us. If one of us should get hurt and need to be taken care of, there’d be nobody to go for help.”

Her lower lip stuck out. She was 18—a bit more than a year younger than I. She’d been looking forward to this trip—her first into real wilderness—for quite a while. “You said that the part of the range where you’d be taking us was pretty well used. So there should be people around to help in any emergency.”

“It’s pretty risky—we couldn’t be sure of help if we needed it.”

The Island Lake area where we had planned on going was heavily used—for the Wind River Range in 1987. But it was possible, then, to spend a week there without seeing anyone but members of your own party.

“Well, nothing’s sure,” she allowed. “I think we’ll be fine, and I want to go.”

I wanted to go, too. I’d been on several long trips into wild country, not least of which was a month-long Mountain Odyssey Learning School course I’d taken two years earlier. I loved being in the backcountry.

And Mindy was determined. So I was doomed. I’d long since learned, the hard way, that when Mindy takes it into her mind that she’s going to do something, she will do it. She had decided that she was going to go for a week-long hike in the Wind River Range—with me, or without me.

“I think you’ve talked me into it, Little Sister. But we’ll have to be extra careful,” I finally said, knowing that however dicey it might be for two people, it would be a lot worse for just one. “And we’ll both have to work on convincing Mom that we’ll be safe, so she won’t change her mind about lending us her car.”

That earned me a big, front-to-front, full-contact oh-big-brother-thank-you-thank-you-thank-you hug. Feeling her trim little female body against me made the risk seem worthwhile.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It was a body I knew well—almost as well as I knew my own. Because we’d lived in a very small home, the two of us had shared a bed until I was ten. Beginning when I was about six or so, we’d taken the opportunity to satisfy our childish curiosity by exploring each other’s bodies. Late at night, we’d use flashlights under the covers for visual exploration. We didn’t need flashlights to explore each other by hand.

By the time I was eight, each of us was very familiar with the anatomy of the opposite sex—at least, as it is found during childhood. I think it was about then that we started calling our mutual examinations “body checks.”

It was all pretty innocent. We knew, somehow, that Mom would disapprove, but we didn’t really know why—so we were very careful to keep our “hobby” a secret. That it was a shared secret made it even better.

In spite of the way we checked each other’s bodies out, we never slept without our pajamas on. Mom had impressed upon the two of us that it was “uncultured” (one of her most disapproving words) for a person to sleep with nothing on. To this day, I’m not sure whether she intended to keep us from sleeping naked with each other—or if she simply intended to keep us from sleeping naked. At any rate, she certainly got a message through: I now sleep naked, though never without remarking to myself how uncultured I’ve become.

In that shared bed, we often slept in each other’s arms, or “spoon” fashion. Mom probably thought the way we snuggled together in our jammies was “cute.” I am sure she was right because, at our ages, it was, could have been, nothing more than an expression of our childish affection for each other. Moreover, the family finances being marginal at best in those days, she unwittingly encouraged us by turning the thermostat down to 55° during those cold Colorado winter nights.

It was during those years of childish love and intimacy that we invented a secret ritual—our private, sacred litany. It was how we expressed our love for each other, how we cheered each other when one or both were sad. One of us would say to the other “Big Brother and Little Sister,” to which the other replied, “Best friends.” And then, in unison: “Now and always.”

And during those years, too, we made a solemn pact with each other, our own Code of Honor: We could lie for, but never to, each other. We simply called our agreement The Code. If either of us invoked it, each of us was bound to tell the truth and, maybe more importantly, to believe that the other was telling the truth.

For reasons Mindy and I did not understand, our father was not a part of our family picture—and hadn’t been at any time either of us could remember. When I was ten, Mom found a man who loved her. He was a successful attorney, and, when she married him, our standard of living improved immensely. We moved into our new stepfather’s large home, and Mindy and I each got our own bedroom and bed.

Initially, Mindy and I didn’t think that was an improvement. For a few weeks, Mom frequently found one of us in the other’s bed late at night, both of us fast asleep, snuggling with each other. There was nothing sexual about it. Nor was body checking the issue; we were just lonely trying to sleep apart from each other. After all, we’d spent most of our lives sharing a bed.

Slowly we adjusted, and after several weeks we were able to spend the whole night alone in our own beds.

Nighttime body checks were then pretty much out of the question, as was sleeping in each other’s arms. But we still could avail ourselves of daylight opportunities. Our new stepfather had gotten our mother a secretarial position in another attorney’s office, so both of them were usually gone during the days. They thought us mature enough to handle being without adult supervision when school was out.

You must understand: We regarded our bodies as mutual property, but we weren’t obsessed about our body checking. It had much the same place in our lives as any other childish hobby might have had, being something we might choose to do when we weren’t otherwise occupied. It was driven almost entirely by innocent curiosity, with, maybe, just a little of the spice of the forbidden thrown in.

Before the man we soon came to call “Dad” joined our family, the three of us had never been very private about our bodies. I think that made it easier for Mindy and me to share our bodies with each other. In our little home, Mom had almost never closed the door when she used the bathroom, and in consequence neither did we. If Mom happened to be naked when she wanted something, she had no reservations about going and getting it without first covering up. So we had none, either.

As our new family integrated, Dad, too, stopped concealing his body around the house. So we were used to seeing the naked bodies of all four members of our family. Mindy and I just carried it a little further.

We did know what people do to make babies. We knew what it was called—a word we knew to be very uncultured (and which we used between ourselves for that reason). We didn’t know, though, that there was any reason to do that unless you wanted a baby. And back then, we thought that a baby would always be the result of that activity when grown-ups engaged in it.

We tried it several times, to see how it worked. At least, we thought we had. As far as we knew how to be clinical or scientific, those trials had been clinically scientific experiments, which we’d carried out in dispassionate quest for knowledge. This is supposed to fit into that. We’ve got one of each here; let’s see how it works. In retrospect, I see that all of those efforts were pretty lame—or, more precisely, such was our knowledge of sexual matters that most of our efforts were pretty limp.

There was one exception; the last of those experiments was different. As we approached puberty together, we each took a deeper interest in our bodies—and our sibling’s. We knew that soon those bodies would change; determined little scientists that we were, we wanted to follow those changes. And each of us wanted to follow them in both bodies. Our growing determination extended, as well, to trying to pierce the mysteries of adult sex.

We performed our last experiment on a snowy day in February of 1980. Mom and Dad had to work, but our school was off. Late that morning, after the children’s television had turned into boring game shows, we engaged in a daylight body check and in another experiment. Unlike our previous experiments, this effort was not limp, and we achieved partial success. It was only partial because it hurt her, and we didn’t carry the experiment past her pain. But it is worth noting that...