Naked at Lunch (18 page)

“So where did this desire to return to nudism come from when you were an adult?”

“When I was about forty, I suppose, a special time of life, I was realizing that my activities in the mountains, because I had been quite active scrambling and walking and a little bit of climbing, were quite curtailed through work and family life. I was sort of looking for a way to get back into the mountains a little bit and I came across Stephen Gough’s rather epic trip from Land’s End in Cornwall, in England, all the way through the length of England and Scotland going right out to the top.”

Stephen Gough is a former Royal Marine who has served more than six years in prison, off and on, for public nakedness. Known as the Naked Rambler, he has appeared in court naked, walked out of prison naked, and stripped midflight on an airplane. And “Naked Rambler” is no misnomer. Depending on whom you talk to, he is an inspiration, a martyr, or an annoying nutjob.

Richard continued. “It was an extremely impressive achievement, although he had a lot of trouble on the way. I was thinking about nudism a little bit at that time as well, so I thought I’d try some naked hiking myself. I started on my own. Started walking completely naked in the forest barefoot, no rucksack, almost pure naturist if you like, classic naturist.”

“How’d that work out?”

Richard laughed. “I very quickly found, with all the thorns in my feet, and the stinging nettles and the bees and the thirst and the hunger and the ‘I wonder where I am now,’ that this is pretty stupid. And so it seemed to make much more sense to combine my previous knowledge of mountaineering—again, take a rucksack, you put your food in it and your map and your compass, and you put your boots on. You wear a sunhat and you’re prepared for eventualities and it made an awful lot more sense. You could get a good day’s tour in.”

“And so then, how did you make the leap from that to starting the NEWT?”

“I was looking for some kind of a trip, perhaps a little bit like Steve Gough, which wasn’t quite so epic because I didn’t have that much time. You know, I had commitments to my family and work and all sorts. So I had to think of something that was smaller scale. And I decided to walk across the Alps naked. I started in Germany, walked across the thinnest bit of Austria I could find, and down the other side into Italy. This took me a week. I did it on my own, taking my tent with me. And it was fun, you know, it was fine. Anyway, I wrote it up, put it on my website as an adventure that I had done, and I got a little bit of feedback from it.”

“And that was that?”

He shakes his head. “During the following year, I had various people write to me and say they’d love to do this trip with me if I did it again. I was thinking, ‘Well, I’ve done it once, it was quite fun. Maybe it would be interesting to do it with other people.’ I wasn’t sure; I hadn’t really been out hiking with anyone naked before. It was a little bit new to me as an idea, because I wasn’t actively part of any club at that point. So we went on the second trip with seven of us and that was also quite fun, and it was interesting to see the reaction of other people when you’re in a group rather than when you’re on your own as a single male. Now it seems to have become a bit of an annual tradition. Every year there’s more and more people who join, particularly now that we use a hut as a base rather than a tent. And I encourage women to join because a mixed group is much better when you’re outside.”

A mixed group is essential to Richard’s mission of educating the public about nudity.

Richard sipped his tea and continued. “I think a single male, like a single male in a nudist club, is always regarded as a bit of a predator. A single male who is out naked hiking is regarded with some suspicion. But if you have a male and female couple, or a group of fifteen people, three or four who are female, perhaps, and a couple of dogs, the impression that everyone else gets is completely different, it’s far more relaxed and you can get into much more natural conversation with people. It’s almost like diplomacy, you know.”

“And you’re proving your point to the public.”

Richard nodded. “Yeah. I think most naked hikers will tend to steer towards places where there are fewer people, or no people, which you can’t guarantee. But at the same time, the more people you do see, the more people actually realize they’ve seen or met a naked hiker and survived to tell the tale. And it’s actually perfectly okay and it’s mildly amusing, perhaps. There’s no big deal about it.”

I had seen a variety of responses to our naked hiking group on the trail; some people were delighted, laughing and smiling, totally amused by the parade of nudists. Of course they could’ve been making fun of us—I don’t speak German. And then I noticed a father turn his children away so they wouldn’t look at us, which I thought was a strange thing to do. I recounted this incident to Richard.

He nodded. “There’s one in a hundred that is actively against it. This is the vociferous minority I’m talking about, the ones that you hear about because he might be prepared to make a complaint of some kind. Everyone else is all . . . ‘That looks a bit strange or unusual, but perfectly harmless. Why bother making a fuss about it?’”

I realized that this kind of diplomacy—a sort of “lead by example”—was exactly why Richard organizes the NEWT hikes and makes it clear to participants that there will be media attention and photography. So I asked, “Is there a political aspect to what you’re doing?”

Richard pondered that for a moment before speaking. “The NEWT, for instance, is not a protest march, right? We’re just a walk in a nice environment. That’s what we’re doing. Naktiv as such, it might be a little bit more active in terms of like publishing a manifesto and generally having a few points to make about nudity being acceptable in different environments, or anywhere, at any time.”

I asked Richard what inspired him to form the Naktiv movement. Richard leaned back in his chair and scratched his head.

“Anita and Wolfgang Gramer did a lot of writing on naked activities in German, which is where ‘
nackt
’ and ‘active’ comes together. And I was inspired by their writings and their examples of their naked hiking and their naked cycling and naked poetry reading in Berlin, and all sorts of things like this. And they wrote this book called
1, 2, Frei!
[
1, 2, Free!
],
⁴⁵
which is a classic, I think, for this new kind of paradigm of naked and active. And I thought, well, I could anglicize the word and slightly adopt it and hopefully not plagiarize it so much as . . . what’s the word I’m looking for?” He looked out the window for a second, then said, “Pay homage to. To prove this idea that they’ve essentially focused. And so that was when
naktiv.net
was born, if you like.”

“This was what? Ten years ago?”

He nodded.

“Are you doing anything on the political front?”

Richard shook his head. “I’m not really politically motivated. People like APNEL, which is a French organization, are very active in trying to change the law in France, for instance, where they can make being naked in public explicitly not a crime. Whereas at the moment, I think, I believe it is explicitly a crime in France. And in England, it’s specifically not a crime to be naked in public. Whereas in the past, there used to be a law in England called indecent exposure. If you were naked, you would just be collared on that one and that was the end to it.”

“But that’s pretty enlightened compared with the States.”

“That could still happen in the UK, but if you get a decent enough lawyer, that actually knows the law rather than knows what he’s told in the pub, then he’ll be able to quash that instantly.”

Which made me wonder why the Naked Rambler keeps getting put in jail.

“I mean, I think that’s one of the things that Stephen Gough has got slightly wrong in that he goes head-to-head with people. I don’t know how familiar you are with what he does. But he tends to walk through the middle of the village naked, and maybe two or three villages are okay and the fourth one, you know, someone objects and he gets arrested and he’s put in prison, and then he goes to the court hearing and he refuses to get dressed for court. So the judge gets upset from lack of respect, blah blah, and it goes on and on and on.” Richard shrugged and continued. “But it’s not my life, he’s doing what he has to do. And, as I said, I can respect his strength of character to stick with it, but not the implementation.”

I agree with everything he’s saying. Gough could be viewed as some sort of politically motivated flasher, and yet he’s a folk hero for a younger generation of naturists. I wondered if Gough will have a lasting influence on when and where to be naked.

Richard considered that. “Well, in the naked and active part of that, yes, definitely, because you’re doing something and young people want to do something. They don’t want to sit around on deck chairs for the entire afternoon reading the paper, which is what the old-school nudist clubs do, right? They cater to the retiree population largely . . .” Richard leaned back in his chair for a moment and then said, “That’s obviously an unfair generalization. But as a general broad-brush statement, it probably holds true. I think the naked movement, if you like, can learn a lot from the gay movement and how extremely successful it was. Because it’s not only—you have to remember—it’s not only that being gay is now acceptable, right? It’s enshrined in law. You can’t discriminate against someone for being gay in a job environment, in the army, you know, anywhere. It’s illegal to do that and that’s how is should be with nudity as well. You shouldn’t be able to turn around and say you can’t have this job because you go naked hiking or because you go naked swimming or something like that.”

This statement reminded me of the previous night’s dinner when there was an informal poll asking each of us if we could tell our friends or coworkers or employers that we’d been on a naked hike. I was surprised by how many people felt that they would lose their jobs, or get in some kind of trouble, if they told the truth.

Richard finished his tea and looked at Conxita and me. “Shall we get back to hiking?”

Richard has the unenviable job of trying to please a group of hikers with varying levels of fitness and diverse reasons for coming to NEWT. Some, like Bernard, the seventy-two-year-old Parisian, are superhikers who can motor up and down the mountains with apparent ease; others just want to get some fresh air and sunshine and be naked. I was just enjoying the incredible mountain air, which, for an Angeleno, was so clean and smelled so good it seemed unreal, like it was the kind of air that they only served in Michelin-starred restaurants.

The first day we went about ten miles at a fairly decent pace. I struggled to adapt to the altitude, but mostly it was an excellent hike. I wished that my wife had come along, not because she would enjoy being around a bunch of naked people, but because she is an avid hiker—she hiked the John Muir Trail years before Cheryl Strayed made it popular—and the scenery, the super-alpine Alp-iness of it all, would’ve blown her mind. Or maybe, after visiting three countries over the past month, and being naked around everyone but my wife, I was just getting homesick. One thing was certain, I no longer felt strange or awkward about being around naked people. At least, not when the naked people were as friendly as this group of hikers.

Despite my complete enjoyment of the ten-mile hike up and down large Austrian mountains, some of the superhikers complained that the route wasn’t sufficiently grueling, so the following day Richard took us on what many of us came to call the Ursprungalm Death March.

We left early in the morning and drove in a caravan of six cars for more than forty minutes, winding through rich green valleys, around small towns like Mandling and Radstadt, past shuttered ski resorts dotting the sides of mountains, up through mountain passes, back down into another valley and then up another mountain. There wasn’t a lot of traffic on the roads, although we did pass several cyclists who were getting a serious low-gear workout.

Eventually we arrived at the trailhead, a large gravel lot that was packed with cars like a mall at Christmastime. There were clusters of hikers standing around, families, little kids, grandmas and grandpas, teenagers, college students. They were all fully dressed and didn’t look like they’d be stripping down and joining us anytime soon.

The scene called for tact, so we set off on the trail with our clothes on. We ascended rapidly, toiling up a steep incline. After we put about a quarter mile between ourselves and the parking lot, it was time to strip. This happened quickly and without a lot of discussion. Once Richard’s shirt and pants are off, that’s the signal that it’s time to get naked.

As I slipped out of my shorts, I received a text message from my wife. She was in Los Angeles and getting ready for bed. Her text read: Have a great hike! I replied: Sweet dreams!

It turned out that this part of the trail was a fairly popular hiking destination for Austrian families. Just as we disrobed we began to encounter large numbers of hikers. It’s one thing to be naked with a bunch of naked people in an area like a nudist resort or nude beach where you’re expected to be naked, but it’s totally different to be naked around people who are fully dressed and aren’t expecting to encounter a troop of nudists. Interestingly, I didn’t find myself getting as embarrassed as I thought I would be. There were a lot of friendly smiles and good-natured laughter as we passed and—perhaps because there was a number of attractive women in our group—a lot of people reaching for their cameras.