Girl To Mom

Navigating the Changing Tides of Sexuality

When I first met my husband, years before we were married, we were both river guides and my sexual appetite was insatiable. We were strong, tan, and powerfully communing with rivers, navigating raging whitewater, big drops, and getting splashed awake with cold waves. We felt completely alive and unfettered. When we weren’t working I wanted to make sweet love and fuck all the time, outside under the stars, in boats, buses, anywhere. We spent days in bed, like sex was our food and water.

Somewhere around my 10th summer as a river guide we spent a season in California on the American River and had this amazing experience going over a huge waterfall called Ruck-a-Chuckee. It was about 25 feet high and considered a class VI, meaning unrunnable with guests commercially. The company I worked for walked all the guests around while one-by-one the guides got in our rafts and took them over the falls alone. When I first saw this waterfall I said I wasn’t going to do it. Then a friend of …