Naked at Lunch (30 page)

Karla laughed. “Sometimes it made us turn back before we reached the summit.”

Stuart took a sip of tea. “I think we both had thoughts or urges to get into nature and lose the clothes, but the artistic photography side of it almost brought a kind of discipline to it, because we’d get to an interesting place, we’d take our clothes off.”

“You weren’t afraid of being caught?”

“We’d climb mountains and often be back quite late in the day, and so we thought, you know, we’re the last people here, we’ll walk down naked. You kind of got to be careful in Scotland because you get quite a bad reaction.”

Karla joined in. “And then it was: get into the wilds, walk naked where we can, take interesting photographs.”

Stuart agreed. “I just got bored of landscapes. You ideally need some item of foreground interest, which is like a rock. Well, it’s actually best to have a naked body because a lot of what landscape photography is trying to get is the idea of being there. To have someone there, you could actually imagine being there.”

Karla finished his thought. “But if someone’s got clothes on for that picture, it is quite jarring, whereas if you can be nude in it, then it’s sort of making a statement.”

Stuart and Karla are both politically astute, and I wondered if there was a political component to what they were doing or if it was a kind of art-for-art’s-sake endeavor.

Stuart put down his tea. “I think a lot of my personal rant is about how modern-day society really takes us away from our natural environment. We have gyms, we have straight walls and edges and stuff, and people, in different ways, are trying to get back to nature, whether it’s drinking organic beer or sitting in their car watching the sea. Good art always evokes a strong emotional response and this is something that humans are kind of keyed into because it’s where we’ve kind of come from, you know, the natural environment. So that’s the statement from me.”

I looked at him and thought,
He should write a manifesto
.

Karla added, “I believe that you have got so many different aspects to the human brain, that you should actually kind of exercise all the different parts of your artistic, engineering, mathematical, science, literature. And the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Stuart continued. “It was our intentions to do all the Munros as part of this kind of . . .” He hesitated and Karla finished his sentence.

“This kind of artistic nature project”—she glanced at Stuart—“that kind of came to an end when we had the problems with the media.”

Their problems started when one morning Stuart’s brother phoned him and said, “I’m looking at a naked picture of you in
News of the World
.”

Stuart’s response was “Why are you reading
News of the World
?”

News of the World
is a now-defunct English tabloid that was part of Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate portfolio. Like a lot of Murdoch’s papers, it specialized in sex, scandal, and celebrity gossip and was ultimately shuttered when evidence of phone hacking and other illegal activities by its editors and reporters was revealed.

What the editors of
News of the World
did to Karla and Stuart was typical of the publication. Someone spotted their Naked Munros website and the paper pulled photographs off the site and published them without permission. Stuart found himself suffering the ignominy of being in the paper with a clip art lunchbox—“lunchbox” being British slang for the male genitalia—covering his crotch, and the photograph of Karla had been adorned with strategically Photoshopped daisies.

After that, the media descended on them in full force. Even Graham Norton, the Irish comedian who hosts a popular BBC television program, asked them to be guests on his show. As Karla said, “We were overwhelmed.”

Stuart nodded. “Yeah, they picked us apart and, you know, when you get the gutter press saying they want to find out more about you . . . run and hide.” He shifted and took a sip of tea before he continued. “We didn’t speak to the press. We didn’t go on the TV shows. We took our website down.”

Which is pretty much the opposite reaction you’d get from an American couple who suddenly found themselves getting their fifteen minutes of fame.
********
But for Stuart and Karla there were real-world consequences that they didn’t want to deal with. As Stuart pointed out, “She was in education, I was working in social care; we thought it might be a bit dodgy to keep it up.”

When Karla, who is a computer scientist, was offered a job in Munich, they jumped at the chance to get away from the media circus in England.

“Do you feel bad about having to take your website down?”

Stuart shook his head. “We changed the concept a bit. Which is good.” He’s referring to their new website, Free Range Naturism. “The old links now point there.”

“And was there a reaction to the new direction?”

Karla shrugged. “We’ve gotten the same kind of reactions as beforehand. ‘I can’t believe you just stood there naked.’”

“And it’s lost its novelty, which is kind of good,” Stuart added.

As nudist clubs decline in membership, more and more young naturists are adopting Karla and Stuart’s “free-range” ideal. People are starting to get naked in places where they used to not get naked, places where they could potentially be subject to arrest for getting naked. Besides the typical beach spots and “free hiking” in the woods, there are now naked nighttime bike rides through cities, guerrilla nudism in city parks, and what is possibly the mecca for youthful nudists, the “Playa” at Burning Man.
⁸²

In NEWT founder Richard Foley’s book
Active Nudists: Living Naked at Home and in Public
,
he chronicles dozens of naked activities from gymnastics on the beach to canoeing and kayaking, horseback riding, bike riding, gardening, and, of course, hiking. There are naked anglers, naked sailors, nude surfers, naked skydivers, and clothing-free tree climbers. Basically almost any sport you can do with clothes on you can do naked. There’s even a traditional naked rugby game played on the beach in New Zealand.

Although they are not naturist or nudist by definition, Secret Swimming “is a worldwide community of underwater people who are passionate about swimming and discovering secret places.” It operates like a kind of flash mob swim society that organizes dips “in the wildest places, rivers, streams, ponds, iced lakes, wild seas, reservoirs.” Secret Swimming members find the swim locations and times via “secret maps” that are sent a week prior to the swim. If the photographic evidence on the website is any indication, many of these secret swims are actually secret skinny-dips, but that’s not to say nudism is the point of the secret swims—swimming in secret is.

ActiveNaturists.net
is a website started by three guys, one in Berlin and two living in New York City. Not surprisingly, they are all European. Kirill and Joe are German and Juan is from Spain. On the site they chronicle their adventures hiking in Upstate New York, performing capoeira on the beach at Sandy Hook, running trails in Pennsylvania, and taking a trip to the Burning Man festival. The website lists places to vacation nude and promotes a variety of activities from naked mud wrestling to nude waterfall climbing in Hawaii.

But
ActiveNaturists.net
isn’t unusual; there are dozens of websites devoted to people who like to hike, bike, or otherwise frolic in the nude in the countryside. But what about nudists who don’t want to leave the city? While it’s not unusual to see people sunbathing in the nude on sunny days in parks in Germany, it’s less common in cities like New York.

In New York City, the Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society
⁸³
puts a literary spin on urban nudism. Taking advantage of an enlightened New York City law that explicitly gives equal protection to men and women who desire to go top-free, they gather in public places like Central Park, take off their shirts, and read books, specifically pulp fiction. I can’t tell if this is a liberation movement, a kind of hipster book club, or the greatest book marketing idea ever, but the accounts of their exploits are fun to read and the photos of lithe young women in the city are compelling.

Naktivist Richard Foley finds all this activity encouraging. “I think, generally, there are more and more people involved in naked activities all around the world and they get encouragement from sites like Free Range Naturism. And there’re more and more sites just popping up all the time, you know, describing just how much fun such a simple activity is, you know, it’s economically viable, it’s environmentally friendly, it’s fun, it’s harmless. It’s all this good stuff, really.”

One of the more unusual things that Stuart has done is write a naturist-themed novel titled
Naturist, Red in Tooth and Claw
under the name Stuart Pitsligo. If it sounds like a horror novel, well, it kind of is.

I wonder if the Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society would put it on its reading list.

“Naturist fiction is one of these things which you think, ‘Oh, I wonder if there’s any fiction about naturism,’ and you have a look and it usually falls into three categories: a sort of comedy romp where someone experiences naturism for the first time, a murder-mystery set in a naturist environment, or some romance which is completely joyless. And so I thought, ‘Let’s do something different,’ and I came up with this bit of zombie horror.”

“Are the zombies naked?” I asked.

“It’s the characters who are naturists, but they had to be naturists for them to get to the situation. It’s set in the Scottish Highlands; there’s a lot of our own experiences there. So I think I’ve promoted free-range naturism in the novel, but at the same time, I’ve done something completely new with the naturist fiction genre.”

As one reviewer wrote on Amazon, where the book is available on Kindle, “If you love Nudists and Zombies this is the book for you!”

While the writing in
Naturist, Red in Tooth and Claw
isn’t up to Stephen King’s level, the book is a lot of fun and does have a clever and redemptive ending. And who knew there was such a thing as a zombie horror-naturist genre? As Stuart says, “It was an experiment.”

…

What’s happening is inspiring. As the old nudist clubs begin their slow fade into obscurity, young nudists are finding ways to be active and enjoy themselves without the need to be tucked away safe from public view. It’s the opposite of the closeted nudist resort mentality.

And there’s no telling where this free-range naturism will end. Stuart explained, “We did some paragliding in Scotland, but next year we’re going to do some refresher courses for the Alps. We’re going to learn to fly here and then . . . naked paragliding.”

I can’t imagine flying around on a paraglider without any clothes on. But then I can’t imagine flying around on a paraglider with clothes on. Karla laughed. “We could be soaring above you the whole day going ‘Ha-ha.’”

********
They’ve asked me to omit their surnames from this book.

********
See: Kardashian, Kim; Hilton, Paris; Plumber, Joe the.

Funwreckers

T
he Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge is set on a long spit of land off the coast of Virginia called Assateague Island. It’s a kind of barrier island, part of the half-isthmus that separates the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic. It is famous for a herd of wild ponies and a lighthouse listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, and is reportedly a good place to dig for clams. There are miles of beautiful beaches, which, as you can imagine, might attract the occasional skinny-dipper or nude sunbather. Apparently nudity was semitolerated on the north end of the beach until 1985 when
NO NUDITY
signs were posted and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service park rangers began enforcing the new regulations.
⁸⁴

On a warm June day in 1989, a young woman named Jeanine Biocic was strolling along Chincoteague beach with a male companion. I’m not sure what prompted her decision—maybe it was the beautiful day, the beach, or her friend—but whatever the reason, she decided to remove her bikini top and “get some extra sun.”
⁸⁵
Her breasts came to the attention of a park ranger and Jeanine was given a summons for “indecency and disorderly conduct” as defined in the Code of Federal Regulations 50, Section 27.83. It’s a weird regulation, as it basically throws the jurisdiction back to the local authorities by saying, “Any act of indecency or disorderly conduct as defined by State or local laws is prohibited on any national wildlife refuge.”

At her trial—to her credit Jeanine didn’t deny that she was topless on the beach—she was found to have violated Accomack County’s anti-nudity ordinance, which defines female toplessness as indecent “in order to secure and promote the health, safety and general welfare of the inhabitants.” How the health, safety, and general welfare of the county’s residents would be jeopardized by Jeanine Biocic’s exposed breasts is, I guess, open to speculation. I haven’t found any pictures of her breasts and can only imagine that they look like, you know, a young woman’s breasts and not dangerous sea monsters.