What a beautiful dream. Somehow I had come across these two relics. The main one was some sort of solid gold sculture about the size of a fist. The other was larger and was some sort of totem. It was more like a wooden carving that stood about as high as my waist, was gilded with some translucent, multicolored coating, and appeared very, very old. My feeling during the dream was that I had somehow found these objects and they were legitimately mine to do with as I chose.

I approached this old woman in a big mansion to see if she would be interested in buying them. Her family, composed of her children, mostly daughters, pretended she could not afford them even for a few thousand dollars. But the old woman knew what the pieces meant, and to her family's surprise, was not concerned at all about the money. We both knew she was wealthy beyond their knowledge.

Somehow the scene shifted to include other people. Perhaps she had called them to her house to consult with them about the authenticity of the relics. Three people appeared. They walked in side by side. The two people on the outside of this row of people walked almost mechanically like robots. They had a golden glow about them and perhaps were not people at all. I now get the impression that they were the original owners of the objects, and wanted them back.

The middle man of that group seemed to want to argue the position that I had stolen the objects and bring the price down from the terms the old woman and I had discussed earlier. I was unmoved by their shenanigans and was prepared to leave with the objects, although I didn't know who I could approach to offer them up again. Apparently they realized I was going to walk and upped the ante to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I still wasn't satisfied and indicated such.

Then an older man appeared to the left of me wearing a business suit, rotund and bald-headed, he entered the fray by saying, "I will make you a one-time offer of three million." I turned to him and said, "You want both of them?" He said "Yes." I asked him, "Will you make the arrangements for me to have an account at the (Swiss) bank?" He said "Yes."

The three people turned and walked back the way they had come, still glowing and shining, and with great ceremony.

The entire dream took place in a goldenish atmosphere that pervaded everything, and I felt wonderful throughout the entire scenario. I was aware that I was dreaming during the entire affair, and don't think I ever wanted to change anything about it. It was too powerful and I continuously marveled at the wonder of it just as it opened itself to me.

I waved goodbye to that good woman and went on down to the river. My first sight of it impressed me with the strength of it's current. It had been raining upstream when I got there, and it wasn't as clear as what the woman had led me to expect. Still, compared to the water of other rivers it was pretty clear. It had cut it's way through the limestone hills, and the shoal I found myself on was not all that common for the shoreline on the other side of the river. The steep hills around it was covered with forests, and kept the river bound within a more narow stream than the rivers in the flatlands I had come from. It appeared as if the Ozarks pushed the water into a narrow stream in such a way that the water seemed to covort and play with itself as it rushed through the hills.

I had been on the road for several days by the time I got to the river and hadn't had a bath for a while. Since there was no other people around I decided to get naked and wash out my clothes in the river water. Even if it wasn't as clear and clean as it usually was, my clothes would certainly smell better after I rinsed three days of perspiration out. I anchored my clothes with the river stones that permeated the bottom of the river and waded out to about waist deep to clean myself.

The whole river bottom was composed of smooth stones. It was difficult to walk because the stones were large enough that they didn't give at all when I stepped on them. The only sand about was there on the shoal itself. In the river the current was too fast for sand to accumulate. When I got far enough out in the water that I could sit down and wet myself all over I stopped walking, it was too rough on my feet.

The water was cool, but it was mid-summer so it wasn't too cold. On the other hand I was quite hot, and my dip in the river, except for the way the rocks hurt my feet, was very refreshing. I tried swimming a little bit, but found myself carried by the current for about a hundred feet downstream very fast. This meant that I had to walk back upstream on the rocks, and the idea of swimming faded fast. Eventually, I worked my way back over to the shoal so I could walk on the sand. I left my clothes to be washed by the current, and went for a little walk to familiarize myself with the area.

There was quite a few places where people had camped on the shoal. It was easy to see where they had built campfires. There was a lot of driftwood around to use for a fire. I decided to camp on the shoal that first night myself. I was worried about the woman coming back, so I picked a spot well away from the road that led down to the river. I figured she might not look too hard for me if she did come back.

The shoal itself was about two hundred yards long, and seemed responsible for the road that led to it. Other than that shoal the hills rose quickly on both sides of the river. There were a few slues in the shoal so that to traverse it required moving about quite often. The campfire sites seemed to show that the locals who came there had their own favorite spots. There were a lot of boulders exposed by the run of the river along the shore, and I had a little fun jumping from one to the other.

Before I checked out the eastern end of the shoal I took my clothes out of the water and hung them on some bushes to dry. Then I worked my way downstream to the other end of the shoal to see what I could see. I was very impressed by the nature of this place. The flatlands where I came from only had an occasional fist-sized stones that had washed down from the piedmont, and here I was surrounded by rocks of every size. The trees on both banks hung out over the river and in some places it looked like the river was going through a tunnel. I felt very priviledged to be alone here.

It was getting late in the day when I realized I needed to return to the other end of the shoal where my stuff was. I needed to get my clothes and then get some firewood together to make my fire while I could still see my way around. I didn't want to be moving around in the dark because of the possibility of running into snakes. I waited to look for the firewood a little longer than I should have, but there was so much of it that it wasn't really a problem.

I didn't really need a fire to cook with. All the food I had was canned meat and the crackers that I had bought earlier. I just wanted a fire to sit and look at. I didn't have a sleeping bag with me, and that was very inconvenient. Especially when the mosquitoes came out and started biting me. The fire I built seemed to keep them off the front of me, but they attacked my back with enthusiasm. By the time I decided to lay down in the sand and try to get some sleep I was covered with mosquito bites everywhere my skin was exposed. The mosquito repellant I had brought with me didn't seem to help much. By the time their feeding frenzy slowed down I was miserable with the itching.

Sleep did not come easy. After all, I was alone in the middle of the Ozarks and I wasn't familiar with the kind of animals that hung out there, especially of the human kind. The mosquitos bites had changed to more pain than simple itching, so I lay there a long time before I fell asleep.

I woke up early. The mosquitos were back. I could see that they were going to make my life miserable. I hadn't planned on them when I sat at home and planned this great adventure, but they were nothing in comparison of what I would experience later on that day.

Just after sunrise I had visitors. A couple of young men came to the shoal to do some fishing. We saw each other and waved. They seemed friendly enough, but it appeared obvious that they were there to fish, and after our brief greeting they went about their business with a great seriousness, occasionally yelling at each other when they caught a fish. About an hour later a family with three young children also came to the river, and when another family showed up I figured it was time for me to start moving down the riverside to look for a cave.

When I got to the end of the shoal, the road along the shore, that was only useful to 4-wheeled vehicles, ran out. That was when I discovered that moving along the edge of the river was going to be much more of a challenge than I had previously reckoned. The river cut straight through the low mountains of the Ozarks, but they were still mountains, and the steepness of the hills running up from the river valley was very sharp. There was somewhat of a trail for a little ways, but that soon ran out because of the steep incline of the hills. Down toward the river itself there was a lot of underbrush that was hard to get through, and there were a lot of briars that were very frustrating to try to maneuver my way through.

I looked uphill to see if it was any better up there. The trees were larger, and it appeared to be less underbrush, but the hillside seemed straight up and it was hard work to keep my footing. There were a lot of loose rocks that caused me to slip and slide. One time I fell about twenty feet before I could save myself from falling head over heel by hanging on to some low limbs. My day pack was kinda heavy, and was not helping me keep my balance. I started sweating profusely as the heat of the day arose, and all the physical work I was exerting just to make slow progress, made it all the more excruciating. I really wanted to turn around and get the hell out of there, but for some reason I keep fighting my way through the woods. By this time I had just about forgotten about finding a cave at all. I was more worried about surviving than finding a cave.

After innumerable times of stopping to rest and forcing myself to get up and get moving I finally got to a inlet where a small stream joined the river. The stream itself was fairly small, but the valley it had cut through the hills was quite wide. It was a spectacularly beautiful place.

I sat down to rest, collect my thoughts, and figure out what I was going to do next. As I had clumsily tramped my way through the thick woods along the river I had heard people on their rented boats moving down the river. Oh, how I wished I was on those boats with them. They were having a wonderful time, while I felt like I was struggling for my life. There at the open area of the stream entrance I begin to actually see them floating along the swift current of the river laughing and having a great time. I didn't want them to see me, so I sat on a big boulder that was hidden by some bushes.

After a while I decided to go swimming again because I was soaked with sweat from all the effort needed to make my way through the woods. I rinsed my clothes out again, and found a spot where the water of the river and the water of the stream met that allowed me to relax without getting taken downstream by the river. A couple of canoes passed. They saw I was naked, but they laughed and waved at me as they continued on their way.

After I had refreshed myself for a while and recollected my mind, I decided to explore the valley created by the stream. This place was like a dream to me. The water of the stream ran down one side of this cut through the hills, and it was sandy on the leeside of the stream and made walking pretty easy. As I approached the first bend in the stream I heard the motor of a car coming toward me in the distance, and so I hid myself behind some bushes to see what was going on. I knew that it meant that there was a road nearby and I was tickled by that prospect, but I didn't know what kind of people might be coming around the bend.

From behind the bushes I saw a 4-wheeled vehicle come into view. They passed about fifty feet from me, and I got the impression that it was two guys out on a drinking toot, and I was glad that I had hidden myself. They drove down to the river, got out of the truck, and it looked like they were going to hang around for a while. I decided to climb up the hill behind me and look around for a cave while I waited them out.

There was a small spring that seeped water down the hillside, and it had cleared a little open space that I followed up the hill. The climb was very steep, but the water ran over some large boulders that made my climb easier. As I got higher up on the hill and sat down to rest for a while, the view down into the little valley with the stream seemed even more beautiful. I sat there for a long time just looking it over. Again, I forgot about looking for a cave. Climbing in these hills was no walk in the park.

My serenic repast was broken when I heard the truck crank up, and then I watched it as it rounded the bend and I couldn't see or hear it anymore. Then, I made my way down the hill again, filled my water bottle from the spring, and started working my way over to the road the truck had taken. I had decided to get the hell out of here. This was no place for me.

There was a road. One may have needed a 4-wheeled vehicle to go all the way to the river, but once the road moved into the hills it was a decent path to walk. It was all uphill for a long way.

The interesting thing about this walk was coming upon several abandoned homesteads. It was easy to figure that when the government bought the land along the river to make a national park out of it, that the people who had lived there had to move out. One of the homesteads had a stone house that was still intact. It was very small and consisted basically of one room with a fireplace, and from the debris scattered around I could see that the stone room had other wooden rooms attached to it. The fire place looked like it had been used for cooking. Of course, there was no electrical lines or evidence that there had been running water. It looked like a family had lived there. I got the idea that the stone walls of the place was put up by one man, and that accounted for the smallness of it. It probably took a pretty good while for one man to put it together. The fireplace itself had probably taken a couple of months for one man to find the rocks and bring them together in one place, much less to actually erect it piece by piece. The sight of it filled me with admiration for whoever had made this happen.

I had looked at an Arkansa map I had picked up at the state border when I came into Arkansa, and from what I could make out and figure from where the woman had taken me and the way I had walked along the river, it couldn't be more than ten miles to the little town the woman had turned off at. The more I walked, the more I figured I had figured wrong. I hiked for about three hours at a good pace, and I hadn't even gotten to the top of the mountain yet.

When I did get to what looked like the top, the road got a little better, and I saw a cottage that looked like a summer cabin, and electric lines strung out along the road. Then I came to a house that was obviously occupied. I didn't walk up to the house straightaway, but called out to the house to see if anybody answered. After a couple of minutes a middle-aged man walked barefooted and rumpled looking out to the road to talk with me. He seemed a little leery to see me standing there, but he was obliging when I told him how I got there and asked him how I could get back to town. He told me and I asked him if I could fill my water jar, and he pointed to a faucet, and walked back into the house.

He told me to continue along this road until I crossed a railroad track, and then turn left, and eventually this would lead me to the small town. I was very encouraged to have some idea about how I was going to resolve my situation. I had a full jug of water, and I set off at a good pace down the graded road. I didn't expect it to take very long for me to get back to civilization, and besides I was now walking downhill.

That didn't last long. Soon I was going uphill again, and there were no more houses for a long way. Finally I came to a well-kept house with gravel in the driveway and lots of flowerbeds and shrubbery. I kept on going by the house, but down the road I stopped to rest a bit. As I sat there I heard a vehicle approaching from the same direction I had come from. Soon a pickup truck appeared with three men in the front. I waved as they passed by, and for some reason didn't feel at all strange when all three of them gawked at me as they drove past. The truck continued for a while, then turned around and came past me again with the guys staring at me again. Then when they got to the graveled driveway they turned around and came back, and this time they stopped.

The driver was a big man with a red, florid face. The other two guys were skinny looking with dark eyes and dark hair and never spoke a mumbling word. The driver asked me where I was going. I got up and walked over to the truck to talk with them. I wanted a little better look. I was a little nervous because I seemed to know there could be trouble if I didn't mind myself.

I told the man who was driving my little story of getting lost and was trying to work my way back to town. He stared at me for a moment, and told me he was going to town, did I want a ride. I was so tired I didn't really give a damn about their intentions any more, and told him I would appreciate a ride. The driver told the guy on the passenger's side to "Git out, and git in the back, and let this gentleman ride in the front, I wanna talk to him."

Without the slightest hesitation, the guy got out and scrambled his way into the back of the pickup, I got in, and away we went down the road, hopefully toward town.

Turned out the driver was a preacher of the most fundamental kind, and the two guys with him were members of his church. From the way he had been obeyed by the guy in the back of the truck I sensed that they would do anything he told them, and that if he told them to knock me in the head, they would do so with no less hesitation, so I tried to present myself with as much politeness as possible.

It turned out that the little town was about ten more miles down the road. The only reason the preacher had picked me up was to save me for Jesus. We came to the railroad, he did turn left, and when the edge of the little town became apparent I was very relieved. The preacher let me out at the laundermat I had asked him about, and I expressed my gratitude and went inside and washed my clothes. By the time I finished washing and drying my clothes and sponge washing my body in the bathroom of the laundermat and making myself presentable, I had made up my mind that I would wait for a better time and circumstance to find myself a cave to meditate in. Arkansa and the Ozark mountains had whipped my ass.

I have experimented a bit with sensory deprivation. I built my own float tank and used it for about two years. What i really wanted to experience was to spend some time in a cave. Finding a cave to use to experience nature's own sensory deprivation chamber has not proved to be an easy thing for me. I haven't found it easy to find a cave to sit in. I haven't experienced it yet.

I began to research about how to find a cave on the internet. There isn't much information there that would do me much good. I did read about the conditions that allow caves to happen, and found out that certain areas of the country have more caves than others. Kentucky has a lot of caves such as are in the Mammoth Cave area, but I've had some bad experiments in Kentucky, so I didn't want to go there, My next best choice appeared to be in Missouri and Arkansa. Well, I'm a wanted man in Missouri for driving with an expired license a few years ago, so I decided to hitch-hike out to Arkansa to see if I could find a cave there that would suit my purposes.

I didn't know exactly where I should go in Arkansa to find a cave for meditating in, just the general area where they should show up, and so when I made my plans to go there I found that I could travel I-40 to Little Rock and turn right, and the area between Little Rock and on into Missouri should serve my purposes.

I decided to use my day pack to make the trip. It isn't a very large bag, but I didn't figure I would need a lot of stuff to sit in a cave. The problem with my day pack is that it doesn't facilitate carrying a sleeping bag. It's too small to put a sleeping bag inside it, and doesn't have the tie-downs to attach a sleeping bag to the outside, so I went without one. This proved to be a mistake as I got out on the road.

I caught a ride with my brother over to Fayetteville where he works to start out on my trip. By going that way I figured there would be at least some local traffic, and it would take me through some old hills that used to be mountains called the Uwharries. These old hills aren't what they used to be hundreds of millions of years ago, but they are interesting to me because of the stuff that hasn't rotted away yet. I have found some perfectly white granite rocks that have flecks of gold in them in those hills, and thought I might find some other interesting things like those rocks as I passed through there. The flat swampy coastal plains where I grew up don't have many rocks, and so I have a natural interest in them. I knew I wasn't going to pick up any rocks and haul them around in my backpack on my way to Arkansa, but I might find an interesting location I could return to later in my car.

As it turned out I didn't have much of a chance to look around in the Uwharries, the rides I got didn't allow it. I got stuck in this small town where there was not much traffic, and spent most of the first day standing by the road. When I did get a ride it was with a young man who had just gotten off work and was going to Winston Salem. I remember this guy mostly because of the truck he was driving. The thing about the truck that was so memorable was that it didn't have any brakes, and when he came to a place where he was required to stop, he would have to down-shift as fast as he could and pump frantically on the brake pedal. It was a little scary because we were in the edge of the Uwharries and there were some pretty good hills in that area where having good brakes is a good thing.

This young man had a story he liked to tell. He was an acoholic and had just got out of clinic where he dried out, and this job he was working putting up sheetrock was real important to him. He had to drive fifty miles one way every day to get to the job, but he had messed up so many jobs because of his drinking that he said he was lucky to have it.

He had a hobby he liked to talk about. He was a woodcarver, and his favorite thing to carve was wooden indians like the ones that used to be in cigar stores. He told me that he carved some really nice ones, and there was a tourist trap called JR's we were going to stop at just so he could show me the ones they had on display there. The cigar store indians at JR's were vastly inferior to his, of course, and the thing that made him mad was that JR's didn't seem at all interested in having better quality carvings in their place.

We did stop at JR's so he could show me their wooden indians, and finally we got to Winston Salem without having a wreck because of the bad brakes on his truck. He put me out at an intersection of I-40, and I was glad to be there in one piece. Driving through the side streets of Winston Salem in an old truck with no brakes was quite an adventure. When I asked him why we were taking the side streets he told me he didn't have a driver's license.

The intersection of I-40 he put me out at didn't appear to be a very good place to catch a ride, but I got lucky. Within fifteen minutes I got a ride with a young man going to Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis was a good five hundred miles away, and he was driving a fairly new car with air-conditioning, so I was fairly pleased he had stopped to pick me up.

The driver had a fairly interesting story. Presently, he was a good Christian and had a good job in the computer industry, but during his college days he had been a speed freak and a drunk. He told me that Christ had saved him from a horrible life. He was a fairly bright person and had figured out how to make his own methamphetamine, so he had gotten in deep trouble with his self because of the constant availability of his drug of choice. I pretended to be interested in how Christ has saved him from his own weakness, but I was more interested in how he made his own crank. Surprisingly, he seemed very interested in telling me. So, for the next ten hours or so he explained to me exactly how easy it is to make it happen. I guess I should have written it down, because I have forgotten everything he told me except that it somehow involved ether, which he said was easily available over the counter in spray cans sold for starter fluid. Somehow I think I deliberately forgot what he told me about how to make my own crank because I figured I'd get into the same trouble of using it just like he did.

He let me out east of Memphis in a suburb called Germantown. Germantown is about ten miles outside of Memphis. The intersection he let me out at was a terrible place to catch a ride, but I had been sitting so long that after about an hour I decided to walk to Memphis just to get some exercise.

A woman at a nearby convenience store told me that there were sidewalks all the way to Memphis. What she didn't tell me was that I had to walk through the roughest part of Memphis to get to the Mississipi River. The roughest part of Memphis is pretty rough indeed. Lots of drunks and crackheads. Probably a good thing I didn't know. I believe I was there on a Sunday. There wasn't much going on in Memphis. I did find myself walking past the Sun Studio where Elvis recorded his first records. I knew that because there were signs all over the place saying as much. It's located in a rundown section of town fairly close to the Salvation Army store.

I finally worked my way back over to I-40 in downtown Memphis where there wasn't much room for cars to stop if they were interested in giving me a ride. I squashed the fleeting fancy of walking across the Mississipi River Bridge. Eventually I did get a ride, and in a few hours I had reached Little Rock, Arkansa. I had to go about ten miles west of Little Rock to get to the road leading north through the Ozarks. I had passed through this area several times in the past, and was surprised at how it had developed since my last memory of it. There had been a lot of road-building going on and it seemed a little unusual to see how many new industrial parks there were around. I finally caught a ride out to where the road I was looking for was, and soon found that the new look of Little Rock quickly faded away as soon as I got a few miles down that road. I soon remembered why the Ozarks are referred to as Dogpatch.

I got a ride with this guy who was going to do some work on his summer cabin. He was a retired military guy. He certainly didn't look like most retired military guys I've run across. He started telling me horror stories of how "outsiders" can run into real problems up in the Ozarks. I had heard them before. He stopped at a feedstore to pick up some fertilizer he planned to use up at his cabin. My suspicions of this guy developed a little when one of the employees at that store expressed surprise that I would be hanging around with this guy. The impression I got from his comment was this guy I was riding with was one of those people who preyed on "outsiders", so when he offered me a job helping him work on his cabin I decided it was not a good thing for me to do. He turned off the main road to go back into the hills where his cabin was, and seemed real disappointed that I refused to go with him.

The place he turned off at was sparsely populated, and I had to walk a while before I got to a country store that was about five miles down the road. There wasn't much traffic on the road, and what there was didn't even slow down in curiosity. I began to feel a little nervous about where I was. There was no good place to hide in case I ran into trouble, and I felt trouble brewing.

The country store was used mostly as a gas station from what I saw. It seemed to be the only one around for the local people. It had a hokey touristy look about it. As though the owners were attempting to pull in some of the people going to the National Park further down the road. Inside there was not much stuff that went beyond milk and bread for the locals, and snacks such as tourists might be interested in. The prices were very high. I was getting into the area where I might find a cave, so I bought some cans of tuna and a box of crackers so I would have something to eat if I found one. The people who worked there were not too friendly, but they weren't openly hostile either.

I stayed near that store for four or five hours. It was a hard place to catch ride. Traffic was not only slow, but it was going the speed limit right pass me without any need to slow down, and there wasn't much of a shoulder on the road for them to pull over if they did. I figured my best hope was to catch one of the people who stopped at the store. And eventually, that's exactly what happened. A thickset woman in her late thirties pulled out of the store's gas pumps. She went past me at first, and then stopped and backed up to get me.


It always surprises me when women pick me up when I'm hitch-hiking. It just doesn't happen very often. As we drove down the road this woman explained to me that the only reason she had stopped was that she was originally from California, and she knew none of the locals would give me a ride. She planned to drop me off in the next little town where I would have a better chance of getting a ride because the traffic had to slow down to go through the little town.

She liked to talk. She was going home from work, and said she had to stop by the dairy where her husband worked to talk with him for a little bit, and because he would be pissed off at her for picking up a hitch-hiker, that she was going to let me off beside the road while she drove in to talk with him. She would pick me up again on her way out. The buildings of the dairy were just visible from the road, so when she stopped to let me out she told me she would be back in about twenty minutes, but if I got a ride to go ahead and take it. We both knew I wasn't going to get a ride.

She was good for her word. When she came back she stopped and picked me up again. She told me that she had ended up in Arkansa because back in the Hippie days she and her second husband were looking for some cheap land to buy where they could "return to nature". The land in the Ozarks was very inexpensive compared to California. She told me that she was now disenchanted and was trying to sell her land. She didn't really like the cliques of the locals, and they didn't particular like her and her "hippie ways". I didn't know what to talk to her about, so I asked her what astrology sign was and about her children. She had five children, three of them had already left to go out on their own. She intended to divorce her husband. She told me she was an unhappy Aries.

I told her why I was in the Ozarks, that I was looking for a cave to meditate in. She assured me that I was in the right area, there were a lot of caves around, but that when I looked for them I would have to be careful of the marijuana farmers who were constantly on guard against people looking to steal their crop and some of them booby-trapped their pot fields to discourage people from stealing their pot. She told me my best chance was to look on the National Park land that stretched out along the river. She said the Park was a big tourist attraction because the water in the river accumulated from all the limestone springs that fed it, and that the water was clean and pure enough to drink because it had been filtered through the limestone. The tourists would rent boats that would take them down the river to see the land along the river.

As a matter of fact, she said, her house was very near the river, and that she would take me down to the river before she went home if I wanted her to. I agreed that being off the main road portion of the river might work out good for me, and agreed to go where she was going to take me because it was isolated, and if I found a cave, I didn't want anyone to see me going into it.

She turned down this street in the little town that eventually turned into a dirt road, and the further we went down that dirt road the rougher it got. We came to a fork in road, and she told me she lived down the road that split off, but that she would take me down the side road because it led to the river spot she had told me about. This road was hardly a road at all, but more of a one-lane path through the woods. By the time we got near the river I had figured out her real reason for taking me down to the river was to have sex with me.

I wasn't very comfortable with this idea. I don't like the idea of messing around with married women for one thing. And the next thing was that I didn't feel any excitement with this woman. Over the years I have found out through experience that the old saying about a woman scorned is pretty much the truth, so I was in a quandry about how I was going to deal with this.

If I had been a young man and still in my prime, and could have gotten aroused by just about any woman, this wouldn't have been a problem, but I was sixty years old and had lost a lot of interest in sexual activities, and it would have to have been an woman that really interested me to get it up to get started. I felt totally dispassionate around this woman. She had told me she was an Aries, and I knew she would not only be available, but would initiate whatever needed to be done to make what she wanted to happen. So, I knew I would have to refuse her advances rather than just leave it alone and feign ignorance.

Sure enough, when we got down toward the river far enough and she couldn't risk taking her car any further because the dirt on the road was getting mucky, she stopped, got out of the car and made her play. She did it by pretending to pick something up and letting her skirt ride up her considerable butt. She was not an unattractive woman, and the way she did things could be fairly alluring at an earlier time in my life. What I did was pretend not to notice and walked toward the river which was just around a bend in the road. She called out to me to stop, but I kept going toward the river. She yelled out to me that she had to go, but that she might come back before dark. I told her that would be okay, but I kept moving. I never saw her again.