Plein Air Erotics

Stephen J. Lyons

The shifting sand dunes reflected in the lake at Bruneau, in southern Idaho, are soft and curvaceous. The morning air is dry and frosty on this October morning. And best of all, becoming one with the view of the dunes beyond the open tent flap is the woman I love, moving tenderly above and upon me — like the soft breeze blowing through the olive trees.

This is my honeymoon. Neither of us is young or new to the institution of marriage, but right now, in this setting, we feel enthusiastic and ageless, part of an ancient river current of lovers. We've been sparking in the open, blessed by big skies and birdsong, since we met and fell in love in eastern Washington eight months ago.

Together in the most sexy sense of the word, we've already traced the ancient Missoula Flood's lasting imprint in the spectacular Scablands of eastern Washington. Holding hands, we've wandered dreamlike through cemeteries in antique towns like Southwick, Idaho. We packed picnics featuring huckleberry muffins and raspberry ginger ale to sustain us as we followed the feeder roads from the Palouse prairie down into the Snake River Canyon. During a fierce windstorm we foolishly slept unprotected on a ridge under swaying, creaking ponderosa pines at Mary Minerva McCroskey State Park in northern Idaho. The next morning, happy to still be among the living, we drove down into the lentil town of Farmington, WA, religiously grateful to drink coffee and eat our breakfast at the (what else?) Frying Pan Café, where more than eggs and bacon were sizzling.

Once we had the marriage ceremony, we'd packed up the ancient Honda (another road trip!) and headed south down Idaho’s infamous goat trail — aka Highway 95 — through a landscape that further fueled our passions: McCall and its forest-nested lake, Lowman Hot Springs, the aftermath of a lava climax in Craters of the Moon National Monument, and the curvy Bruneau Dunes State Park. 

All of our camping, hiking, and nosing round the back roads of the Northwest, coupled with the passion and hunger of new love, made us uninhibited in a way that placed us closer to the landscape than ever before. Beside Idaho's Lochsa River, we steamed up another tent in a scene I wrote about later in a poem titled "Loving Among Western Rivers," published in the Passionate Hearts anthology:

Pull the car off over here
in the tall rushes 
of mock orange and wild rose.
Deep along these riverbanks of late spring
runoff there is one spot of blue sky,
one chance between storms to touch.
We’re hungry for skin. 

Set up the hot tent near the steep shore 
so the water moves beneath us 
as you move beneath me . . . 

Open mouth tasting salt. Sweat and saliva. 
Raising of hips, belly to belly, there’s
no turning back, we want 
each other and nothing
will stop us, loving, 
along Western rivers.

Logging trucks carrying the green world away rumbled by so close on Highway 12 that day, that we could feel their vibrations. Or perhaps those drivers could feel ours.

My lover and I are not the only ones engaging the outdoors and each other like this. In the out-of-print, but still relevant and racy Field Guide to Outdoor Erotica (Solstice Press, 1988), which has contributions from many Western writers including Robert Wrigley, Joy Passanante, and Michael Frome, editor Rob Moore explains "what constitutes erotica" in the outdoors. "Some stories moved open-eyed through a world of wonder . . . that leads to sexual awakening (like) heat lightning on the horizon. With other stories you were drenched immediately, soaked to the skin, lightning striking all around you . . . After twenty pages of lust on the rocks, a poem or a quick humorous scene comes as a welcome relief."

In the Field Guide's stories and poems, you can discover many of the various, ahem, positions where nature and sensuality intertwine. The gender differences are deliciously celebrated, as in the opening lines of the first story, Terry Lawhead's "Green Flash": “I had her naked and laughing on a bed of ferns.” And 125 pages later, Charlotte Mendez begins "Sky Come": “The desire she felt for the sky was the same as that she had felt for the dearest men in her life, neither more nor less powerful, neither more nor less sexual. The men had all left, of course, but the sky never did.” 

What is it about the Western landscape that makes us feel especially amorous? Why do we feel sexier outdoors among the rounded shapes of stone, the soft sand beaches of lake and ocean or stretched out on the welcoming grasp of sandstone? What makes us rip our clothes off, plunge our toes in hot sand and make love to the music of rhythmic rivers and pounding surf? 

Probably it's because the West abounds in erotic landscapes, from the Southwest's slot canyons and gravity-defying spires to the foamy waves crashing on Oregon's rocky coast and the post-coital volcano of Mount St. Helens, whose fertile ash is strewn everywhere across the Northwest. Our region's landscapes are usually not crowded, so lovers who desire privacy in the open can find it. And there's a feeling of danger in the wilderness, an instinctive urge to connect with a fellow human being as a statement of survival.

Strip away all the Gortex, Lycra and SmartWool, and at our evolutionary core we are still hungry primates on the prowl for warmth, tenderness and some consensual carnal cavorting. We crave the taste of each other’s bodies. The scent of our desire — undiluted by the artificial aromas of civilization — is an aphrodisiac. No, thankfully there is still no app for that.

Many nature writers are too genteel to describe love-making, but they go on and on about how all of our senses are hyper engaged when we are in nature. Should it not follow that the three essential senses of sex — taste, touch and smell — should also be accentuated?

The opposite of merging in the boondocks is loneliness in the boondocks (not to be confused with welcome solitude). I know that kind of loneliness as the sound of love-making in the next room of a flea-bitten motel in Umatilla, Oregon, as you lie there alone, the bed frame almost coming through the thin sheetrock. 

Loneliness is also hitchhiking from San Francisco to Durango, Colorado, and being dropped off in front of Gina’s Ranch for Men, a legal brothel in the middle of nowhere Nevada, imagining what went on behind that faux Western fort while thinking that no one, absolutely no one, is going to give you a ride while standing in front of that place. 

I was 19 years old on that trip, inexperienced with only a few kisses to my credit, and I fell in love about every 20 minutes. Several rides after Gina’s, around Grand Junction, Colorado, a woman with a striking resemblance to Joan Baez picked me up. She asked if I was hungry. You know what I said. Then she took me home and made me the best cheeseburger I have ever eaten. I was smitten, but when I finished the last bite she herded me to her car and drove me to the edge of town. Despite my sending her numerous letters across the San Juan Mountains, quoting Hesse, Steinbeck, and Ed Abbey, she never wrote back. Sometimes an act of kindness is simply an act of kindness.

On another expedition when I was even younger, I would wake up alone in my torn sleeping bag in the Utah desert, thinking I was having some of the happiest moments of my life. So I imagined back then, when I didn't know any better.

At Bruneau, when morning arrives like a cheerleader, the tent is lit by the sun, my wife’s eyes are closed and I can no longer tell whose body is whose. We are moving ever so slowly through this sensual landscape, discovering our own wild territory and headed toward the sweetest destination of all.

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Stephen J. Lyons is the author of six books of reportage and essays: Landscape of the Heart (Washington State University Press); A View from the Inland Northwest (Globe Pequot); The 1000-Year Flood (Globe Pequot); West of East (Finishing Line), Going Driftless (Globe Pequot) and Searching for Home (Finishing Line).

Stephen is a two-time recipient of a prose writing fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. He has published articles, reviews, essays, and poems in numerous publications, including Wall Street Journal, The Independent; The Washington Post, Salon, Manoa, Newsweek, The Sun, Chicago Tribune, Funny Times, South China Morning Press, Witness, and High Country News.

His work has been featured in more than a dozen anthologies alongside such noted writers as Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Edward Abbey, Barbara Kingsolver, Anna Quindlen, Dave Barry, and Louise Erdrich.

He is also the author of the Substack newsletter “The Revolution Starts Here.”

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