One afternoon last summer, somewhere high in the Beartooth Mountains of Wyoming and Montana, I was wet, I was naked, and I was not alone. Skinny-dipping alongside me in the lake was my companion on this four-day hike: Mary Ellen, a cute, half-Korean lesbian with pierced nipples, twelve years my junior. And on shore behind us was my video camera, capturing all the action for my New York Times travel blog, a decision that incurred the wrath of my editors, but not, mysteriously, my wife.
The next day, when Mary Ellen and I again went swimming (this time in proper attire), I emerged unable to stop shivering — a case of mild hypothermia from the glacial water. I rushed back to our tent, dried off, put on as much clothing as I could and crawled into my sleeping bag. When I couldn't stop shaking, I asked Mary Ellen to join me (body contact is the fastest remedy for hypothermia — check your Boy Scout manual). We spooned, and soon I had a massive hard-on. Ridiculous. I was debilitated from exposure, yet some ancient, cretinous part of my brain was circulating hot blood down to the one place it wasn't needed.
Cut me some slack. I hadn't had sex in two months. As a travel columnist for the Times who also happens to be married, my job is an exercise in sexual frustration. I spend months at a stretch traversing the globe while my beautiful, smart, sexy wife, Jean, remains at home in Brooklyn, working the stationary job that pays our bills, and being patient and trusting during my long absences. This is my life: Propelled by a more-than-adequate expense account, I leapfrog from one exotic locale to the next, where as a reporter I am essentially required to flirt with beautiful women — women who sometimes flirt back, offer to have sex with me, and even end up sharing a bed with me (more on that in a moment). I, in turn, must remain unfailingly chaste. Stanley Milgram couldn't have devised a more sadistic psychological experiment.
Travel is about embracing new experiences: foods you've never eaten, languages you've never spoken, religious rituals you've never even heard of. To decline any offer at all — a spontaneous wedding invitation in Pondicherry, a swig of rice wine from an unmarked flask in a Saigonese goat restaurant — is to deny the very spirit of voyaging, and so I decline nothing. Except for it. The fact that I can't take part in it, that most hallowed ritual of travel — sex with strangers — frustrates me on a philosophical level as well as a primal one.
