As the train progressed eastward up the Columbia River Gorge, the weather went from broken overcast, to light rain, and then progressively heavier rain the further we went. The scenic views weren't nearly as scenic as I hoped. The rain stopped as we passed through the Cascade Range opposite of The Dalles, Oregon. From there it was mostly cloudy for a while. I stopped looking at the scenery as I was engaged in a conversation with the young woman sitting in the seat next to me in the Observation Lounge.

She was headed back to Chicago where she lived and worked. She was single, a couple of years younger than me, and had been out to the Portland area to visit with family for the previous couple of weeks. She had asked what I was looking at with the telephoto lens and I explained I was looking to see if I could see some of my friends down on the "beach" that was actually a sandbar on the southern side of the Columbia River. I explained that it was Rooster Rock State Park and that the beach that was visible on the sandbar was the nude beach. She said she knew about it since she had grown up in Portland and that was how our conversation started.

As the train continued to the northeast towards Spokane and we were passing through the Washington desert, the outside scenery got progressively less interesting as we moved beyond the Columbia River Gorge. We could see the desert side of the Cascade Range, but there was a fair amount of cloudiness preventing the most notable views. We continued sitting and talking, getting to know each other: what we did, where we lived, where we had been, what we liked to do, recent events in our lives. She thought it fascinating that I "collected states and counties" on a map back home as part of my business and pleasure travels. I told her that I had always kept track of the states I'd been in and that it was a coworker friend of mine who gave me the idea of tracking counties after I saw his map on his office wall.

Eventually the conversation turned more personal to boyfriends/girlfriends or husbands and wives. She had been in a couple of long-term relationships. The first one was pretty boring (her words, not mine). It started while they were in college together and then just fizzled out at the end.

"We just didn't have enough in common and enough to keep us excited about being together after we graduated."

Her last boyfriend she described as a real jerk. Fun, exciting, macho, and different at first. But over time, she realized that he was more interested in controlling her life than she was in being controlled. She realized she had to get out of that relationship to have her own life and her own say in life.

We came to my situation with the divorce currently in progress. I talked about what happened and how my soon to be ex-wife found somebody else to be with. A part of the situation dealt with my travel and another part dealt with how she wanted me to be "The Dad."

"Although I spent most of this summer away, she (my ex-wife) and I worked that out ahead of time because this was one job I probably couldn't get out of because of my expertise. I've dropped nearly all my other travel over the past year to be home. But that interfered with her being with her boyfriend with me being there, so she moved out."

I told her that I had joint custody of our son and that I had certainly missed that time together over the summer. The thing was that with my wife out of the house and our son spending about half his time with me on weeknights and weekends, I could be the dad I wanted to be without her "interference."

She asked when I saw my son last. "He and my mom came out to visit me for 10 days in August. He's back home with his mom waiting for me to come back. We talk on the phone nearly every day while I'm away."

She asked me a rather unexpected and direct question about our sex life in the marriage and whether that played any part in our divorce.

"Our sex life was great, right up until delivery. And pregnant sex was some of the best. But then it all stopped, like someone turned off a spigot. She went into 'mommy mode.' She could only be a mom and not my wife or my lover. In the following four years, we had sex maybe 15 times. Most of the time she wasn't interested. And when she was, she'd jump me. There were a couple of times when she did it just to get it over with...not much fun."

"So, it was a problem?"

"Only in the sense that I felt I was cut off from sex. She's told me that I am the best lover she's ever had. But sex isn't everything in a marriage."

I didn't really mind sharing this with her.

"Have you had any girlfriends since you separated or do you have one now?"

"No. Not even a date."

"Really? Not even with your friends in Portland?"

"When I first found out about the affair, she said she wanted to work it out. Even gave me what turned out to be a "goodbye fuck" when I had to leave for an overnight trip during our vacation with her sisters and their husbands and kids; probably to make sure that I came back and didn't leave her stranded at the beach to explain why I wasn't coming back to get her and our son."

"For the first six months after I found out about the affair and we separated, I didn't really feel like it. I was devastated. By April, I realized I was going to survive. And then this job got going in May and I was out here by the first of June. My female friends here (referring to Portland) are friends because I didn't hit on them."

Since there was no formal dining car (yet), we ate dinner in the Lounge car. Seems like my meals were included in the train ticket purchase, but I bought her dinner. As night fell, we continued to talk in the Scenic View Lounge car. The conversation turned more to things we've done and places we've been.

The lights were dimmed now with a blue hue. But there really wasn't much to see. We eventually went back to the coach car where she had initially put her stuff and we sat continued to talk. She knew I had a room in the sleeper car because we had talked about it earlier and she knew how expensive it was. She told me that her mom and dad wanted to pay for at least a roomette, but being the independent woman she was, she wouldn't let them. I told her it wasn't much more expensive than a standard plane fare.

I told her my company was covering the train cost for me.

Eventually, I summoned up the courage to ask her if she wanted to come back to my room (which was one of the cars behind this coach car). I felt like I was back on the college campus again asking a girl if she "wanted to come up to my room?" In some ways, it felt like I was sneaking a girl into my college dormitory room after hours. She grabbed a couple of items and put them in her bag and we walked back to the last coach car of the train and then passed through two train cars.

We didn't see anyone in the hallway of the first sleeper car as we passed first down the center and then along the left wall of the car. The room doors on the train do not lock from the outside, only from the inside and there were a few roomette doors open. Some, across from each other, had people in them. I was to learn later that sometimes people get two roomettes opposite from each other so that the have more space and the ability to be on either side of the train to see the sights. We went into the second sleeper car.

We arrived at my room and I rolled the door open to let us in. There was a light on and we could see that the lower bed had been extended and made up for the night. Even with lower bunk extended, there was still a place to sit on a seat in addition to being able to sit on the bed. It can seem a tight fit, but I had been camping throughout the summer at various times and this felt spacious compared to my tent.

Once inside, I pulled the curtains closed over the door to have some privacy and locked the door. Fortunately, I had a bedroom on the car at the back of the train over top of the wheel-trucks. But in the darkness, there wouldn't be much to see and not any reason to walk through the car unless you were heading to one of the other rooms or roomettes on that last car.

We were approaching Spokane and I was uncertain whether there would be a ticket check when we arrived. My destination was marked by a note posted outside my room and I was a through-traveler. Similarly, the overhead bin above the seat she had selected had been marked with her destination. But I was still uncertain whether there would be a ticket check for the coach car, as well. It was getting late in the evening and so I suspected not, but we were prepared just in case....

My daypack had my reading materials, some of my camera equipment, my Sony Walkman cassette player and a collection of cassette tapes that I brought with me. She looked at my collection of music; an eclectic combination of the earliest New Age music, some soundtracks and, yes, there were some rock groups in my collection. It was sort of a disjointed collection of music that I liked to listen to and I thought I'd have lots of time to listen to my music while on the train. Little did I know that wasn't really going to be true.

Sometime before we arrived in Spokane, I pulled my blue Samsonite suitcase out from where it was stowed away. I hadn't yet opened it to get my travel kit out when I first arrived in my room. You know, toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, deodorant, electric shaver, condoms....And that's when she saw it. There, atop my neatly folded shirts and next to my travel kit, was my red combination hot water bottle with enema/douche bag attachments that had travelled around with me for the last several years. The hose was coiled and had the douche nozzle installed on one end of the hose and the screw in connector plug at the other end.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed beside my open suitcase and her eyes were fixed on the bag, if only for a moment. I reached down and grabbed my travel kit out of the suitcase and turned to place it near the sink.

"Do you like enemas?" I asked.

There was a long pause and then she answered "Sometimes."

"Ever had anyone give you an enema?"

"My mom gave them to me a long time ago"

"Anyone recently?"

"No."

"Have you given yourself enemas?"

"Yeah, when I feel like I need one."

I took the bag and hose out of my suitcase and hung them up on a hook by the bathroom door, closed and latched the suitcase closed and stowed the suitcase under the bed.

This was no accidental display on my part. In fact, this was the boldest I had been about enemas in a long time. I knew the bag was there and I did nothing to hide it. And unlike the time when my fondness for enemas was accidentally discovered by a female friend of mine, this was intentional and could alter the way this train trip could be spent. I didn't know I was going to meet someone on the train, but if seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. She could decide this was too strange for her and to choose to leave me all alone.

I sat down across from her in the chair and told her that I really liked the full warm feeling of the enema inside me and that it was an erotic turn-on for me. I told her that I'd been giving myself enemas since before I was a teenager. I even told her about my nursing student friend who had dropped by the house unannounced, when I had a full bag ready to be taken, and what that experience was like. That opened to a number of questions about that experience and any others I had. I told her that two of my friends decided an enema sex party was a proper way to celebrate my 21st birthday with me. Well, at least she was inquisitive and wasn't running back to the coach car.

As the conversation wound down and her questions answered, I finally said "Part of the reason for having this room was if I got bored, I could come back here, take and release a few bags as the train rolled down the tracks. 'Enemas Across America!' I could call it."

She laughed at the thought. Now came the big questions.

"Would you like to join me in my Enemas Across America tour? Would you like to give me some of my enemas?"

"Maybe."

"Would you like me to give you some enemas?"

"Maybe."

"Well think about it. You don't have to if you don't want to. Just know if I'm back here by myself during some of the trip, that's what I'll be doing if you want to join me."

The conversation was a bit more subdued as we approached Spokane. We gradually passed through the suburbs to the train station in the city center.

We arrived in Spokane on-time, but the other section of the train coming from Seattle had been delayed on the way. A few people disembarked in Spokane and there were a small number that came onboard, too. But it didn't really change the number of people who were on this part of the train. We sat in the station for more than an hour waiting for the other section to arrive and be connected. Our conversation turned away from enemas to other topics related to her work and Chicago. I had worked around Chicago six years earlier, but I hadn't been there recently.

The Seattle section finally arrived and connected to the front of the Portland section of the Empire Builder. We could feel the jostling of the cars with the disconnection and reconnection of the various parts of the train. We finally started rolling forward and we were on our way towards northern Idaho. Clack-clack. Clack-clack went the wheel trucks underneath of us as we were rolling once again.

"Do you want to stay the night? We don't have to have sex." I had started to say "we don't have to fuck," but refrained from being that coarse.

I knew right away that didn't land right.

She looked hurt by the comment. "You don't want me?"

"Of course, I want you. I want to spend the night exploring every inch of you, inside and out. I just don't want you to feel obligated because you are staying with me."

"I WANT YOU, TOO!"

Never make sex a requirement and always give your prospective lover a way to opt out even if you've already agreed to and started into sexual activity. That was something my mom taught me and my close female friends echoed.

The pace of the wheels was getting faster: Clack-clack. Clack-clack. Clack-clack.

(to be continued)