Naked at Lunch (20 page)

Gus turned and skulked back into the hut mumbling about house martins.

…

The last day we hiked up from the hut along a wide, easy trail that looped through a valley to a small lake. Richard insists on mountain safety, and on every hike someone had to be the last person, the “tail-end Charlie” or, as the French called it, the “defense.” If you are moderately awake and can count to twenty, it’s a pretty stress-free responsibility. The job is to make sure everyone is accounted for when the group gets to a rest stop or fork in the trail. Because I was still treading gingerly on my leg, I accepted the assignment, or as Pascal so exuberantly shouted, “USA in defense!”

Pascal is another longtime naturist. He’s a tall and ruggedly handsome Frenchman in his early fifties who, like Harry and many of the naturists on the trip, wears a big beaming smile most of the time. He also has a fondness for Americana and wears a baseball cap that says
I HIKED THE GRAND CANYON
and a T-shirt that says
FBI
in giant letters. These were souvenirs from an RV tour of the States he took with his wife and kids a couple of years ago. I asked him if this hike was his summer vacation.

“No. We’re going to go naturist camping next week and then we’re going to Croatia.”

Croatia is famous for having many naturist beaches and nude campgrounds along its coast and is a common destination for European naturists.

“Do you always take naturist vacations?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes. This is what we like to do.”

“When did you start being a naturist?”

Pascal thought about it. “When I was eighteen I went to a naturist camp. I have been doing this ever since.”

“Were your parents naturist?”

He shook his head. “Oh no. Not at all. They are very Christian. Super religious.”

“So you rebelled?”

Pascal stopped on the trail and looked at me like I was the first person to ever suggest this. “Maybe.” He laughed. “Maybe so.”

I know that Pascal and his wife have teenage children and I wondered if they were still naturist or if they’d started wearing clothes like Harry’s kids. Pascal thought about it for a moment and then said, “They are teenagers so they’re not so naturist anymore. They have textile friends and this creates a problem.”

For some reason the trail was busy that day with groups of chubby middle-aged churchgoers out for a day of prayer and communion with nature. I can guarantee that they didn’t expect to commune with our kind of nature. The first Christian group we encountered actually turned away from us, facing the mountain in an act of shunning. I’ve never been shunned before and seeing the group turn away from us baffled me. It made me wonder what they would’ve thought if they’d come across the medieval Turlupins of France, devout Christians who thought that the truly faithful didn’t need to wear clothes. Of course I know the answer. They would’ve done what the medieval Christians did: denounce the nudists as heretics and burn them at the stake. I grumbled something about religion and hypocrites to Richard, who laughed. “Not a God-fearing man, are you, Mark?”

“I only fear His followers, Richard.”

As the hike wore on we passed several other church groups and thankfully their responses weren’t as severe. Mostly they looked at us like we were aliens from another planet. Their jaws would drop and their mouths would hang open like someone had flipped a switch in their heads. Once the initial shock of seeing a dozen or so nudists wore off, they looked down or looked up or looked anywhere they could but at the dangling man bits traipsing past. Not all of them were so horrified. Some cast quick peeks and grinned.

We hiked down a trail until we came to a tranquil little lake. I sat under a tree while a few people went swimming or lay out in the sun. The superhikers decided to continue up the mountain. It was the first time in the week that we’d splintered off into different groups.

Richard joined me under the tree, and we ate our lunch and watched Gus stand by the lake and rehearse his one-man play
This Way Madness Lies
. His promotional material calls it “a raw and humorous tale of going mad.”

I turned to Richard. “How long do you think you can keep doing this?”

“Naked hiking?”

I nodded.

Richard looked off at the lake, where Gus was now waving his arms and bowing to an imaginary ovation. “Until I drop, if I can.”

The warm sun and sheer exhaustion from a week of alpine hiking seemed to settle into our bodies, and soon no one was saying much of anything. It was deeply pleasant, only the sounds of the bubbling stream feeding the lake, the insects buzzing, a few birds chirping in the trees, and a mad actor rehearsing his play.

********
Ideally this salad also includes fresh mint, which the local Austrian grocery stores didn’t have.

********
Yet another portmanteau of “naked” and something, in this case “active.”

Sex and the Single Nudist

M
ost people would think that twenty naked adults living together in a mountain hut for a week would lead to some kind of sexual something or other. A bit of hanky-panky. Maybe an orgy. At least a furtive booty call out by the barn. But if anything happened, aside from some minor flirting, it was incredibly discreet. Maybe that’s because most everyone was married or had a significant other, or perhaps everyone was too exhausted from hiking. Whatever the reason, the only sound I heard at night was in my room, and that was the sound of two very tired men swatting at the long-nosed Austrian mosquitos called
mücken
********
while trying to sleep.

People didn’t even talk about sex. Maybe bringing the subject up might, you know, bring the subject up, so it was best left unspoken. But I can’t really say, because nobody really said. Although on our last evening at the hut, Harry and I were standing outside watching the sunset when Maria-Grazia came out dragging her suitcase. She was driving back to Italy that night, but that’s not why I did a double take. She appeared to be transformed. I almost didn’t recognize her. Harry laughed and said, “You see someone naked for a week and you don’t think anything of it, and then she puts on a cute dress and some makeup and you think, ‘What an attractive girl!’”

And he was right. Here was someone I had eaten dinner with in the nude, whom I had hiked with in the nude, watched doing naked yoga on the grass outside, and I never once thought of her as a sexual being. Which is odd because she is a very nice-looking woman. But something had changed and it wasn’t her. Maria-Grazia was still Maria-Grazia; she’d just put on some clothes. What changed was my perception of her. Naked she was just another naked person among a group of naked people, but in a sundress and sandals, she was suddenly sexy.

How did this happen? Was it the clothes that suddenly made her attractive?

Diana Crane, a sociology professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, writes, “Clothes as artifacts ‘create’ behavior through their capacity to impose social identities and empower people to assert latent social identities.”
⁴⁶

Which is true. We all know that “clothes make the man.” We send a message to the world about who we are, what we desire, and what we aspire to be by what we wear, whether it’s a uniform, a business suit, or a backward baseball cap. But asserting latent social identities is one thing; going from naked and irrelevant to sexually attractive by putting on clothes is another. It seems counterintuitive.

Italian philosopher Mario Perniola, in his essay “The Glorious Garment and the Naked Truth,”
writes, “In the figurative arts, eroticism appears as a relationship between clothing and nudity. Therefore, it is conditional on the possibility of movement—transit—from one state to the other. If either of these poles takes on a primary or essential significance to the exclusion of the other, then the possibility for this transit is sacrificed, and with it the conditions for eroticism.”
⁴⁷

That’s more like it. The act of taking off your clothes is erotic because it is the “transit” between one state of being and another. Which probably explains the enduring popularity of the striptease: it excites the imagination. It’s not what you wear but what we imagine you look like in the act of taking it off and what we’ll be doing once you do take it off that is arousing. In other words: it’s all in our head. Maria-Grazia’s transformation wasn’t something she did; it was Harry and my imaginations being sparked by her wearing clothes.

Dr. Gloria G. Brame, a clinical sexologist, says pretty much the same thing in a
Cosmopolitan
article titled “How Clothes Make Sex Hotter” when she states, “Staying partially clad builds anticipation and makes sex feel spontaneous.”
********

Which could explain why the swingers at Cap d’Agde got dressed up in the evening. When it’s time to swing, you slip into your sluttiest clothes, whereas if you’re standing around with a bunch of naked people, the mystery is gone. If there’s nothing to take off, no erotic “transit” to spark the imagination, well, the whole thing goes limp.

When the week of free hiking was finally over and we’d cleaned up the hut, Pascal and his wife were kind enough to offer me a ride to Salzburg in their Chrysler minivan. There was construction on some of the tracks through the mountains and the railroad had contracted a bus company to link the stations, but the idea of a long bus ride to a short train ride to a taxi to the hotel seemed less appealing than door-to-door delivery in the relative luxury of Pascal’s minivan. Conxita, the Spanish documentarian, was also catching a ride. She had a flight back to Edinburgh that evening, while I had a whole day to hang out in Salzburg before going back to Los Angeles via Berlin.

Conxita and I dumped our luggage at my hotel—the hip and friendly Hotel Auersperg—and then strolled downtown in search of lunch.

I think Walt Disney was thinking of Salzburg when he built Disneyland. The city center straddles the Salzach River and is clean and quiet and beautiful in a way that’s almost a cliché of a picturesque European town. It could be the well-preserved baroque architecture or the narrow cobbled alleyways or the overall greenness of the valley and surrounding mountains, but whatever the reason, I got the sense that I was on a Euro-fantasia movie set: manicured, quaint, and unreal. No wonder it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.

Preternaturally gifted composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived here and they don’t let you forget it. They’ve got a Mozart museum, the house where Mozart lived, the house where Mozart was born, and Mozart’s face on chocolate bonbons, T-shirts, key chains, rubber bathtub duckies, and multiple statues around the city. I’m surprised they don’t pipe Mozart through the streets twenty-four hours a day.

Although I was only spending the night in Salzburg, my visit coincided with the Salzburger Festspiele,
an annual music and theater festival. There was a full slate of concerts, performances, and parties that weekend and it brought the people of Salzburg out into the streets. That these hearty Austrians showed their civic pride by wearing traditional clothing struck me as charming and more than a little goofy—I can’t imagine that a modern Salzburger would normally wear a dirndl or lederhosen when going out on the town. But there they were, imposing latent social identities en masse.

Conxita and I strolled across the river, ending up at an old cinema that had been converted into a restaurant and scenester hangout called Republic Café. We ordered a couple of Aperol Spritzes and leaned back to check out the scene. Coming from the hipster epicenter of Eastside Los Angeles, I have to say that Austrian hipsters are pretty conservative-looking. No tattoos or obvious body modification were evident, but there were a lot of polo shirts tucked into lederhosen and Timberland loafers without socks.

Conxita has an effervescent and distinctly Catalan personality—she’s open, friendly. She sports a pixieish haircut and is undeniably good-looking, and her voluptuous naked body attracted a lot of attention on the trail. Like me, she was not a naturist or nudist—her first day on the trail was her first day being naked in a nonsexual social nude environment—but unlike me, she seemed to take to it with real gusto and surprised herself in the process.

“Are you going to start running around Edinburgh naked?”

She laughed. “You’ve obviously never been there.”

Which is true.

“You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but I was curious if anyone hit on you while we were in the hut.”

She looked at me, slightly perplexed. “Hit on me?”

“You know . . . made sexual advances?”

She burst out laughing and shook her head. “I have a boyfriend.”

“That doesn’t always stop people.”

“No.” She shook her head. “They were all gentlemen.”

Although I knew she was shooting a documentary film, I wondered what made her go on the hike in the first place. Conxita thought about it and said, “It was like an anthropological experiment because I’m fed up of this kind of desk life we are supposed to have, you know, under these little fluorescents, eight hours and go home. And I hate that. So I’m really supportive of people like Richard.”