Chapter 9: A Suffusion of Yellow
Fall color came to the area about a week after this, so we planned a day trip out to the Wasatch Mountains east of Ogden for the four of us. Jess hadn’t owned a bike since she was small, and Vin hadn’t brought his up from Moab, so we planned it more as a ride-sharing deal with us as two couples rather than a foursome together.
Besides, I think Kaitlyn was a little wary of spending time with Vin in this delicate early stage of his relationship with Jess.
We left Salt Lake on I–15 North in Kaitlyn’s happy-blue Subaru, our two bikes on its rack, us in the front, Vin and Jess in the back, we taking turns appending songs to the queue for the Bluetooth head unit I’d installed for her, they doing a whole lot of heavy petting. By the time we took the 12th Street exit for the Ogden Canyon road, they were fully involved, horizontal. Owing to the evaporating thimbleful of restraint still available to them, they managed to remain clothed. For now.
When Kaitlyn parked us at the foot of Pineview Dam, silencing the soundtrack to their makeout session, Jess groused, “What’re we stopping for?”
My wife answered, “We’re getting out here. The road to the left takes you up along the lake. Go find a picnic spot; then you can go off into the forest and do…whatever. Us, we’re taking our bikes up the right fork to the Wheeler Creek Trailhead. We expect to be gone about four hours, so if you’ll have lunch ready…?” She dangled the car keys past the headrests, and Vin snatched them eagerly.
After dismounting our bikes from the car, but before the young lovers left to seek their own piece of solitude, Vin produced a matched pair of walkie-talkie style radios from a duffel bag he’d brought.
“Here,” he said, handing me one. I took it, and he continued, “These are cheap Chinese radios I bought online. The thing about the big Chinese factories is that they like to do stuff in volume, so they don’t make 492 different radios — one each for all of the radio licensing authorities world-wide — they put out just one design that covers a wide swath of standards, then tune it to something widely used for each shipment based on the destination port. When they shipped these ones to the US reseller I bought them from, they tuned them for FRS, which is legal for amateur use across most of North and South America, but because these radios are adjustable in firmware, you can make them do more powerful stuff that isn’t strictly legal here in the US without an FCC transmitter’s license.”
I raised my eyebrow at this, but Vin hurried on, “As long as we’re not stomping on licensed communications, no one’s going to bother us about it. Out here in the forest, we’ll be fine.”
Jess said, “Here, gimme that,” gesturing at Vin’s radio. He handed it over, and she began fiddling with it, intuiting its interface and features with fluid facility. It spoke her language, and she its. We watched her work, and after a few minutes of bleeps, bloops, and static hisses, she pronounced, “I used the radio’s listen-only mode, and all the bands are clear at the moment; you heard. So, I picked UHF channel 8.” Then in a tone that said this should explain her choice, she added, “Power of two, in the middle of the band.”
I understood, but I doubted the other two did. Wordlessly therefore, I set our radio for channel 8 and asked, “All set, then?”
Jess said, “If you hear anyone else on our channel, go to 4, 2, and 1.”
Once again, she didn’t need to explain her reasoning to me, so I just nodded and clipped our radio to the top of my bike’s trunk bag, then replied, “Good plan; see you around noon. Give us a call on the radio when you find your picnic spot so we can more easily find you.”
“Have fun, you two!” said Kaitlyn with a smirk as they got back into the car, this time in the front.
Through the cloud of roadside dust they kicked up as they took off up the road over the dam, I asked, “Wanna lay odds on how long it takes them to find a quiet spot in the forest and get their clothes off?”
She replied, “I’m more concerned with how long it will take us to do the same.”
And with that motivating thought, we got ourselves on down the other road.
Autumn was glorious up here!
We’d left Salt Lake with most of the trees still green, with a bit of color peeking out here and there, but up here in the mountains, the hills were almost the opposite: yellow-leafed quaking aspens everywhere, shot through with streaks of evergreen pine. I was looking up so much that more than once I nearly spilled the bike from missing a chuckhole or similar in the gravel and dirt mountain biking trail.
The higher we climbed, the better it got. One especially memorable stretch had orange and red streaks through the predominance of aspens. I identified scrub oaks, Douglas hawthorn, and canyon maples.
At the top of one rise, I had a compact interchangeable lens camera out and was composing shots, Kaitlyn just taking it in through her built-in lenses when I heard her breathe out in wonder, “Gaia in a party dress!”
I let the camera fall to my side, gathered her in a hug, and said, “Think she’d mind if we showed up to the party in formal skin?”
“No,” she opined, “so long as we dance beautifully.”
And so we danced horizontally for a good hour upon a bed of autumn leaves, sixty meters up the hill from the trail, the occasional bright leaf falling down around us.
Momentarily satisfied, we re-dressed and got back onto the trail, eventually finding its eponymous creek. Sweaty from our prior endeavors, we got down off the trail and found a tree-screened section, propped our bikes up against a nearby aspen, peeled our biking clothes back off, and waded out into the creek.
I have written of the Colorado River’s cold water, but this was F-R-I-G-I-D!
That didn’t stop us from splashing around like little kids for a while, though.
What did stop us was an alerting sensation from our magical tendrils laced out through the tree-covered landscape. An incoming human! Not a subtle presence either: it was a powerful life glow easily seen with our magical senses, so we quickly called up a drying wind and had finished dressing by the creek when we saw the other nature-lover.
For she was a nature-girl, all right, bare as we’d been just a minute before! That explained how “bright” she had seemed to our senses: there wasn’t a stitch of concealing technology upon her person.
She saw us and halted, her all-natural body tense on the hillside leading down to the creek from its other side. She began coloring to match the deep red of the scrub brush leaves that partially concealed her nubile nudity. She said not a word, just froze and watched us, looking ready to bolt back into the trees at the smallest misstep from us.
We smiled kindly at her.
Kaitlyn, re-clad in autumn shades herself — though of an entirely synthetic nature — called out to our interloper, “Careful, it’s cold!”
The nature girl simply nodded, making her long medium brown hair sway around her healthily padded waist, just above her wide hips, partially concealing one all-natural D-cup breast in her wary, crouching stance.
My wife added, “There’s a trail just above here on this side of the crick. Best stick to this tree-lined section if you don’t want to be seen, okay?”
The young woman nodded again.
And so we turned away to leave her in peace with Gaia, communing in her own way.
We got to the picnicking area by the lake around noon as we’d estimated, but there was no sign of Vin and Jess. Fortunately, they’d placed the picnic basket under the shade of the table before they’d locked the car, so we were able to get lunch prepared while they returned from the patch of forest they’d claimed.
When they finally reappeared, they didn’t say much about what they’d been up to, but there was plenty of physical evidence to go on: assorted scratches on their skin, some straight and in four-and-five line groupings from fingernails, others apparently naturally caused from rolling off of their blanket or pushing past bushes while scantily-clad or less. Plus a fair bit of leaf matter in their hair!
As we were sitting down, a familiar-looking girl walked past our spot on the road, evidently heading for her own picnic spot.
Kaitlyn stood and called out to her, “Hey!” waving to catch her attention.
Just as before, the young woman froze and stared.
But this time she relaxed, apparently having recognized our biking outfits, colorful as they were.
Kaitlyn called, “Join us?”
The woman hesitated some more, then walked cautiously toward us. At the table, she asked, “Are you going to tell on me?”
My wife asked rhetorically, “For doing exactly what we were a minute before you arrived? No, we just want to invite you to lunch. Let’s talk. My name’s Kate, and this is my husband Davie, whom you’ve met. This is my little brother Vin and his girlfriend Jess.”
The young woman said, “Okay, sounds fun. I’m Annie. My, um, friends call me Naughty Annie. You can maybe guess why.”
“Nothing naughty about it,” my wife opined, “just natural and beautiful.”
And it was exceedingly beautiful, our fall color picnic in the mountains, the five of us surrounded by a suffusion of yellow.