Staying warm in the winter wilderness

For several years, around this time of year and with fair regularity, a I've gone snowshoeing with a group of buddies in the Uintas. This year, a top-brass meeting at my company's headquarters kept me a couple of hours behind the guys, so I drove up on my own. I bought my permit at the Kamas ranger station from a woman in her early 30s -- tallish, average or even below-average looks, but a big smile and, I noticed when she turned from the front desk to return to her office, outstanding lines along the back, apparent even through her tightish, U.S Forest Service-issue ranger pants. I've commented previously that I imagine (and it may well be strictly my imagination, with no footing in reality) myself to be more interesting to women when I'm in my full, professional peacock regalia and, given that I was still dressed for the big meeting I'd had that morning, I thought I noticed a little twinkle in her eye, her little wedding ring notwithstanding. I needed to change out of the work duds and into my snow gear, and she said I could do so in the restroom there. As I changed, I wondered? hoped? imagined? her coming in while I was changing, and something (as I've said before) quick and anonymous happening against the counter.

I spent that night in the Ritz Carlton of snow caves. I'd built a few front-yard, Webelo Scout-variety snow caves in my time, but this one was in a class by itself, structurally solid and large enough for four or five people but just two of us used it while the others used other, more permanent accommodations. It took about 15 minutes to reach a comfortable temperature, and as I quickly dozed off, I thought (as any still-hormonal male probably would) of how amazing it would be to showshoe up there with my wife, and spend a fully-nuptial night with her there, in pitch darkness at over 8,000 feet, and miles from anyone. And then I laughed at myself for having wasted seven neuron firings on the notion that my wife would ever consider such a thing.

Last night I dreamed that my wife turned over to me in my sleep and, with neither warning nor warmup, proceeded to hastily deploy (how shall I put it?) the primary, powerful pleasuring technique available to a woman who has just given birth -- a technique she'd banished (this is fact, not dream) from her already-limited sexual repertoire several years ago. (As a side note: For some inconsistent reason, she has not placed the same prohibition on the reciprocal, claiming to be uncomfortable with both idea and act but almost invariably allowing the act to be acted out, when I pursue it.) It was so sudden, and so shocking, that the whole thing lasted about five seconds from start to finish -- not a speed record a man will generally brag about, but I share it simply to emphasize the bizarreness of it. It was just the second time (the first time was in the snow cave a few nights before) in close to probably two months that I've even had a sexual thought about her, and, on a positive note, the first explicitly sexual dream that I've had about her in literally as long as I can remember.

At times like this, when I consider this lackluster-at-best/dysfunctional-at-worst element of my marriage--an element that prior to marriage I'd looked forward to as being a central unifier, but now it's a source of alternatively meh or ugh--it seems almost unbelievable to me (miraculous, if you will) that I've neither had an affair nor reverted to porn. I honestly don't know what to attribute either of these feats. It's not fealty to the Covenant or a longing for eternal rewards. It's certainly not an emotional commitment to my wife that I manifest the best way (physically, or in this case through the avoidance of the "wrong" kind of physicality) a caveman knows how. Maybe it's the kids, plain and simple -- that I don't want them to have that kind of dad. I don't know.