Chapter 40: Brave Quagga Hunters
The next morning after dawn, I woke with our tent glowing from light reflected off a facing bluff wall. We’d slept the night through without any blankets over us, just a single one under us to soften the synthetic sleeping mat’s surface. Kaitlyn was in my arms; all was perfect.
As the morning muzziness cleared, I realized why I’d awoken: a motorboat was putt-putting closer to us. Deciding that it could just be someone passing by, or perhaps a fisherman choosing our sheltered cove as a good place to drop a line into the water, I held tight, not getting up, hoping our interloper would soon go away.
The motor stopped, shortly followed by a quiet crunch of sand, then a call from a strong female voice. “Ahoy the camp! Kaitlyn? Davie?”
Kaitlyn stirred in my arms as I reached across her to unzip the tent flap about six inches, sticking my finger in the flap to pull it apart so I could see out without exposing us to our interloper. It was Ms. Nemo, the ranger! Kristen, I now remembered.
I let go of the tent flap, squeezed my wife, and whispered urgently into her ear, “Kaitlyn, wake up! She’s here!” Then I called out through the thin tent fabric to our visitor, “Just a sec!”
I don’t know which of these things snapped her eyes open, but we began scrambling around for clothes, not finding any.
Realizing what had happened, I said breathlessly, my voice low, “I left them all in the dry bags outside! I thought we’d have more time to get out and about before she got here.”
“Aghhh!” Kaitlyn grumped. “All right, lookit, I’ll just call out and explain, tell her the situation, send her away…” Then she turned and gave me a decisive look. “No. Dangit, Davie, we were going to show her what we meant by skin-diving eventually, right? How about I just go out there and break it to her now? I’ll call you down if she doesn’t go running.”
“Running from what?” we heard from much nearer to the tent.
Kaitlyn stuck her own finger into the tent flap and parted it again, making the zipper slide down its track a bit further. As close as our new ranger friend was to the tent, I was sure she could see a bit of skin now. “We’re, um, kind of…bare. Is it all right if we come out? Our clothes are out there in the bags.”
I was peeking through my wife’s bed-head, but even from back here I saw the ranger’s face split into a grin. “Both of you?” she asked.
When Kaitlyn didn’t answer immediately, I saw the ranger reach forward, grab the zipper pull, and begin drawing it up through its arc in the side of the tent, slowly and steadily. She was giving us time to object, but Kaitlyn remained silent, as did I. Shortly, we were bared to her gaze, once again putting on the Lovers’ Diorama exhibit.
“You two are such a lovely couple,” she said, pillowing her head on her folded hands, grinning even more broadly now.
We began chuckling, knowing it would be all right.
“I think ‘after breakfast’ means something different to rangers than to regular folk,” Kristen offered once we were out and putting our own morning meal together. “I’ve been up since five, and I held off starting across the lake until well after dawn.”
“Yeah,” I offered, “getting up with the dawn counts as early for me.”
“Me, too,” yawned Kaitlyn.
We’d quickly thrown on our shorts-and-tees outfits from yesterday out of deference to our guest.
While we ate, Kristen said, “I had breakfast down at the restaurant today.” She used the singular, there being only one such, the next being several miles down the road at a small resort near another popular entry point to the lake. “I heard a fun story about two lovers in silhouette on the cliffs up above this part of the lake.” When we didn’t comment, she asked, “I don’t suppose you two know anything about that?”
“Well, I suppose it depends on whether it’s Ranger Nemo or our new friend Kristen doing the asking,” Kaitlyn replied guardedly.
Rather than answer the question, Kristen said, “About time I started getting into my wetsuit.” She got up, hopped down from the small cliff we’d pitched our tent atop, pulled a military surplus duffel bag out of the small aluminum fishing boat she’d arrived in, then began peeling down to her skin on the beach.
We tried not to stare, returning our attention to our breakfast frequently, but we both noticed she was in fairly good shape, having as she did a job that wasn’t sedentary yet which did not call on her to exert herself physically very often. I guessed she probably had to get some exercise in outside of work to maintain what we were seeing. In body style, she was roughly between Kaitlyn and Jess, heavier of breast and less narrow of waist than my wife. I guessed she’d be classed as having a healthy BMI, shy of overweight, but not by much.
Kristen took her time getting the wetsuit on, a shorty type that mainly covered her torso, leaving her limbs free from elbows and knees to her extremities.
Once she’d clambered back up to our camp level and squatted back down by our cooking fire, still barefoot, Kaitlyn said, “Yeah, that was probably us.” Kristen just nodded and grinned knowingly, so Kaitlyn continued, “It’s about time we told you that when we say skin-diving, we mean for-real skin-diving. Nothing but. Is that okay?”
“In principle, it sounds like fun, but as warm as Lake Powell is this time of year, I wouldn’t want to be down there without a wetsuit. Are you two sure?”
“We’ve learned to accommodate the conditions,” I replied confidently, not letting any trace of the evasion creep into my voice, letting her believe we’d learned to accept swimming in water some twenty degrees lower than body temperature at the depths we’d be diving today.
“Well, all right. I wouldn’t like to have to call Ranger Nemo out to deal with two hypothermic turistas.”
“Thanks for the thought, but we’re good,” replied Kaitlyn reassuringly.
I’d gotten up and was cleaning the utensils and aluminum plates the old fashioned way, scrubbing them with sand when Kristen commented, “Quite the eco-freaks, aren’t you two? Most campers bring along dish soap and wash tubs, then toss the dirty dishwater out into the lake. The more conscientious sort use a soap that quickly biodegrades, but it’s still not great for the wildlife. You’re doing it the old fashioned way.”
“It’s no exaggeration to say that we’re in tune with Gaia,” I told her from my squat there in the sand.
Kristen just raised an eyebrow, then when no further comment came from either of us, she nodded in satisfaction. “I’m happy to hear it.”
Once I’d hoist our food bag back up into a nearby tree, using a limb that projected out over the beach, I said, “Shall we get to quagga hunting, Ranger Kristen?”
As Kristen got her heavy gear on — tank backpack, buoyancy compensator, weight belt, mask, even a diving knife — Kristen whispered to me, “We’re doing this without the magical scuba trick?”
“Yeah, while she’s here at least. Can you cope?”
“You showed me how to magically warm the surrounding water up on the Colorado. It’ll be easier here in the lake, since the water isn’t moving as fast. As for holding my breath, you’re right, the biking’s got my lung capacity and stamina up higher than it’s ever been. It’ll be a fun challenge.”
That settled, Kaitlyn and I stripped off, ready to dive well before Kristen, even with her two big head starts. Kaitlyn put her hands on her hips and began tapping her bare foot.
“All right, all right, I’m movin’,” replied our guide with a small smile.
“Go get a bag. And a knife,” Kaitlyn told me sotto voce.
“Oh, right,” I agreed, then hopped back up to the tent level and dug my fanny pack out of one of the bags, emptying its contents into the larger bag, dropping a multi-tool inside. Realizing that the larger bag now contained all of our valuables, I zipped it up, took it around behind the tent and caused the sand to part beneath it, sinking it down to the hard sandstone below, out of sight of our guest and any sneak thieves that might come along.
By the time I hopped back down to the small beach, our guide was ready to go.
“Lead on,” I bade her, and she turned, walking down into the lake wearing probably fifty pounds of gear, while I wore maybe a quarter pound between the bag and knife, and Kaitlyn wore none a’tall.
Our guide showed us everything we’d wanted to know the previous day: what the mussel colonies looked like in situ rather than in close-cropped pictures, how to recognize likely spots to find them, and so on.
We were able to milk our guide’s tank time to a couple of hours, since we spent most of our time either at or near the surface. Although the quagga mussels can thrive almost to the deepest parts of the lake, the natural light didn’t go down very far. The practical limits on our unassisted diving depth also limited our guide, she being unwilling to dive deeper than we could handle. Another factor was that we were diving without a flag, having left both boats back at the camp, so we didn’t want to get out where the motorboats were running fast.
On our way back to camp, our guide bobbing along the surface with her BC acting like a life vest, and we doing easy backstrokes, I took a few more dives to harvest some mussels, using my mage senses to interrogate their health before taking them. They were all quite healthy, which I supposed was part of the problem: we wouldn’t be talking about an infestation if they weren’t thriving.
Kristen looked curiously after my first return, so I explained my theory of mussel health as a function of distance from the marina, leaving out my direct test of their health. “Ultimately,” I told her, “the proof will be in the eating.”
She didn’t object to that scientific test, so I continued gathering more mussels as we went along back to camp.
As we walked up the beach below our campsite, our guide asked, “So, you two, you’re some kind of nudists, I guess?”
“Some kind,” I agreed with a small secret smile.
“Um… Can I…like…join you?” she stammered.
Kaitlyn took that one. “We’d have asked eventually. I’m glad you asked first, though.”
“You’ve got to be starving,” I probed. “Kaitlyn, how about you go get our guest warmed up and maybe show her some meditation or something while I get lunch prepped?” I gave her a meaningful look at ‘meditation,’ implicitly suggesting that she test our guide for magical talent. I knew Kaitlyn had only the vaguest of notions of how to see this in another person, having only me as a model and never finding the talent in another herself. I wasn’t a great subject, being fully self-aware in this regard, but I didn’t think it would work the other way around, Kaitlyn on lunch and me, a strange naked guy trying to get a nervous new acquaintance to relax enough to show her talent, if any.
Kristen dumped her heavy scuba gear into the fishing boat, then peeled out of her wetsuit, hanging it up on the same tree limb I was using for our food bag. Then the two bared lovelies climbed halfway up the path to the bluff top, settling in for a beginner’s meditation session while I got to work.
About half an hour later, I had everything simmering to my satisfaction, waiting only to be served, so I called them down. As Kaitlyn passed, I raised an eyebrow, and she nodded slightly. Did that mean what I thought it did? I began bouncing slightly on my butt there by the fire, anticipation thrilling through me.
I served everyone silently, but that didn’t last.
“Damn, Davie, this is surprisingly good!” Kaitlyn said.
“I had no idea,” added Kristen, clearly regretful that she’d lived with this nearby for years with the solution so easy: eat the problem!
I ran off my recipe as well as I could reconstruct it, having been brought up on the “dash of this and pinch of that” school of cookery.
I’d supplemented the bivalves with a side of pasta Alfredo, the “just add water” variety from our camping supplies. A delegation from the Michelin Guide would not be beaching nearby to sample the offerings of la cuisine de Davie, but I thought it was pretty good for campground lunch literally scraped up from the bottom of a lake by a long-time bachelor.