Naked at Lunch (17 page)

If you look at photos of early German naturists, the acolytes of Richard Ungewitter and his full-throttle
Nacktkultur
, they
aren’t stretched out on chaise lounges by the pool; they’re standing on top of mountain peaks, hiking along forest trails, and swimming in lakes and rivers. They are transforming their bodies by being active while simultaneously connecting to the soulful, spiritual side of the natural world.
Nacktkultur
is about finding virtue and health and joy and Germanness, whatever that is, by being naked and active outside.

To get a taste of what’s now called
Freikörperkultur
(Free Body Culture), I traveled more than two thousand kilometers from the South of France—spending more than twenty-four hours on various trains through Paris to Stuttgart to Salzburg—to make my way to a tiny mountain village in the heart of the Austrian Alps where the Naked European Walking Tour (NEWT), an annual weeklong naturist hike-a-thon, was taking place.

We were hiking up a valley called Vögeialm on a trail with the unpronounceable German name Tauernhöhenweg toward a mountain summit that overlooked a ski resort.

Roberto, a lawyer from Rome, walked next to me. Even in his hiking shorts and Patagonia-style pullover he cut a stylish figure. With his dandyish mustache and goatee, he would probably look better in a tuxedo than most people, but here we were, about to embark on a naked ascent of an Austrian Alp.

We watched the naked hikers start up the trail and exchanged a look.

“It’s too cold for me,” he said.

I nodded. “Me too.”

Although Roberto was an experienced hiker—he’d walked the Silk Road in Asia—this was his first time hiking, as he called it, “in the buff.” I had never hiked in the buff either and the last thing I wanted was to get frostbite on any sensitive areas. We kept our clothes on.

We hiked through a pasture, alongside a stream that looked cold and fresh like a beer commercial, past Austrian cows that chewed on the wildflowers, big brass bells around their necks clanking as they walked. The sun refused to come out. We shivered. Why had I thought hiking in the Alps in July wouldn’t be cold?

The Naked European Walking Tour 2013 edition was a diverse group. There were twenty of us and, except for me, all European. There were NEWT veterans: Paul, a British expat who lived in Switzerland; Vittorio, a librarian and poet from a small town in northern Italy; Harry, a sound recording engineer from Belgium; Pascal, an educator from Strasbourg, and his wife, Clarice; Bruno, a naturist from Marseille; Frederic, a French policeman; and a few other hard-core naturist hikers. When I announced that I had just come from a week at Cap d’Agde, the French naturists in the group scrunched up their faces and looked at me as if I’d just unleashed some sort of sulfuric hell-fart. Bruno shook a finger at me and said, “
Ce n’est pas le naturisme
.”

Most of the hikers were from France or Italy, but there were two Germans, Andreas and Mathius, who didn’t say much, or maybe more accurately, they didn’t speak much English and I don’t speak any German. Karla and Stuart, a UK couple who lived in Munich, also joined us.

Then there were the first-timers, the people who stumbled across the NEWT website while googling keywords like “nudism,” “naturism,” and “hiking”: Maarten, an insurance company executive from Holland; Roberto, the dapper attorney from Rome; Maria-Grazia, a health care worker from a small town in northern Italy; Gus, an actor from England; and Conxita, a documentary filmmaker from Spain. Conxita was making a film about the hike so, between us, we made up the press corps of the expedition.

The trail narrowed and we began zigzagging up a steep incline in a series of rapid switchbacks. It was a serious ascent and the moment when I began to realize that I was exerting myself at altitude—about 1,500 meters (approximately 5,000 feet) above sea level—and it was getting hard to catch my breath, I looked at Maarten, who seemed incredibly fit for an insurance executive, and said something about not being accustomed to the altitude, which explained why I was gasping for air like a beached whale. He just smiled and said, “I’m from the Netherlands. I live below sea level.” And then he bounded up the hill like some kind of mountain goat.

I shut up and kept trudging.

Eventually we climbed above the mist into brilliant sunshine and a clear sky. The birds were chirping, the air was warm, and the moment of truth was at hand. I joined Roberto and a few other hikers and stripped down to boots and sunhat. I thoroughly blasted my skin—yes, all my skin—with spray-on sunblock and then the hike resumed.

I’d never hiked naked through a forest before. In fact it’s safe to say that I’d never hiked anywhere naked other than to the bathroom or the fridge. But there is something remarkable about hiking naked, or “free hiking” as it’s sometimes called. I quickly realized that skin is an amazing thermostat. I didn’t get cold—as long as I kept moving my body stayed warm—and I didn’t get hot. Normally when I hike up a mountain, I work up a serious sweat, but without clothes to trap the heat, my skin easily regulated the temperature. I walked for hours, up steep inclines, really working hard, and didn’t break much of a sweat at all. Granted, we were hiking in what I consider the ideal temperature for uphill exertions—around 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The other thing about hiking naked is that it feels good. It really does. Once you get past the awkwardness of being out in nature with your genitals exposed—thinking about the flora and fauna judging you as you stroll by, or worrying about thorns, thistles, nettles, bees, spiders, venomous snakes, and other critters with a taste for human flesh—then the raw physical sensation of being in the woods or on a mountainside naked is extremely pleasant. Sort of like skinny-dipping in fresh air, or what the great American poet Walt Whitman called “air baths
.
”

Whitman described his version of outdoor nudism, writing, “An hour or so after breakfast I wended my way down to the recesses of the aforesaid dell, which I and certain thrushes, catbirds, &c., had all to ourselves. A light south-west wind was blowing through the tree-tops. It was just the place and time for my Adamic air-bath and flesh-brushing from head to foot. So hanging clothes on a rail near by, keeping old broadbrim straw on head and easy shoes on feet, havn’t I had a good time the last two hours!”
⁴⁴

And that’s pretty much how we did it. The home base for our daily air baths was a rustic Austrian farmhouse that was called a “hut” for some reason. This was a three-story hut with ten bedrooms, six bathrooms, a large communal kitchen, and a view of a spectacular and verdant valley where I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Heidi tending to her flock of goats and looking for her grandfather. Fresh-baked bread was delivered every morning from the restaurant next door and fresh milk was procured from a farm down the road.

Everyone shared rooms and I bunked with Harry, the sound engineer from Belgium. I realized that—not counting one-night stands—I hadn’t shared a room with a stranger since my college days, but Harry turned out to be an ideal roommate. He’s in his early sixties, yet has the lean build of someone who rides bicycles a lot, which it turned out is what he does for fun. He is also smart, funny, and has an infectious laugh. Like a lot of the people on the hike, Harry is a longtime naturist, someone who used to take his children to nudist camps on their family vacations. Their one family vacation in the States involved a trip to Disney World in Orlando and then a stay at Cypress Cove, a famous nudist resort in Kissimmee, Florida.

I asked him if his children, who are now grown, still practiced nudism. He shook his head sadly. “My son is involved with bike racing, but my daughter sometimes works as a nude model. Maybe that’s her way of being naturist.”

One thing about the NEWT experience is that the nakedness doesn’t end when the hiking does. For many of the participants the fun part is that they don’t wear clothes the entire time. There was always a naked Frenchman or a half-naked Italian woman or a nude Englishman hanging out in the kitchen or drinking beer outside, and Harry was no exception. He’d put on a little sweatshirt in the morning and at night, but otherwise he never wore clothes in the house or on the trail.

Dinners in the hut became a team-building exercise, with various people chipping in to help make them happen. Of course all it took was for a vat of rice to get burned and for me to make a watermelon and feta cheese salad
********
before the French declared a culinary coup d’état and took over the kitchen. In my defense, the people who initially poked the watermelon feta salad with a fork and said, “Mark? What is this?,” eventually devoured it.

But having the French in charge of the cooking seemed like a natural solution and the quality of the food improved immediately. Harry and I, who are both predominantly vegetarian, were lucky as Vittorio, the soft-spoken librarian from northern Italy, took over cooking vegetarian dinners. He had packed his Fiat Panda with supplies, including three or four large jugs of red wine and enough olive oil to last a month. When I suggested we go into town and buy some pasta, he looked at me and said, “I have twelve kilos of pasta in the car.”

Watching a brigade of naked people cooking dinner—with big pots of water boiling and pans of hot oil spattering—is a completely unique experience and I found myself chewing my nails with anxiety when Vittorio decided to make vegetable tempura one night. I guess it wasn’t the first time he’d faced a skillet of hot oil in the nude, because if he got burned, I didn’t hear any screams or cursing.

Of course if someone had been screaming, I’m not sure I would’ve understood them. Communication wasn’t always easy or clear in the hut. Several of the French speakers only spoke French, the Germans German, and the British English, and although most of the Italians spoke a little English, even they had trouble communicating. One time Maria-Grazia was talking to Roberto and me, and when I asked for a translation, Roberto shrugged and said, “She speaks an Italian I don’t really understand.” But there were a number of people who were multilingual. Pascal spoke good English and German, and Conxita was fluent in four languages. Official announcements, like the planned hour of departure for the next day’s hike, were announced in English, and then various people would take turns translating. The overall effect was chaotic but fun, like we were part of some naked United Nations task force.

…

The organizer of NEWT and the driving force behind the Naktiv
********
movement is Richard Foley, a British expat living in Munich and author of the books
The World Naked Bike Ride
and
Active Nudists: Living Naked at Home and in Public
. Richard has a compact and powerful build, with strong legs that propel him up and down the mountains with relentless energy. Imagine the Energizer Bunny as a naked hiker and you’ll get an idea of what he’s like. He has a broad, friendly smile and a good sense of humor, which is an important quality to have when you’ve invited a bunch of naked strangers to live together in a hut for a week.

Richard isn’t a naturist or a nudist; he’s a “Naktivist.” Which isn’t about posing nude for PETA or taking off your shirt to protest the patriarchy—that’s a different kind of naked activism. Naktivism is about getting naked and going out and doing things. It’s the opposite of lying on the beach and sunning your buns. Would it surprise you to know that Richard has written a manifesto?

The Naktavist manifesto is built on three main themes. The first one is pretty basic: to support and encourage naked activities everywhere. It’s the belief that “being naked is okay in all contexts.” Although Richard clarifies that not everyone has to be naked all the time if they don’t want to be. Which I think is generous of him.

The second part of the manifesto is a call “to educate society that the naked human body is acceptable in all contexts.” This is an appeal for basic human freedoms. If you want to be naked, you should be able to be naked, and Naktivists are urged to demonstrate “how healthy and non-shameful the naked human body is.” Richard wants to show that nakedness is a “positive action with beneficial mental and physical aspects for the whole of human society.” Of course this requires an “attempt to disassociate society’s automatic linking of sex and violence and the media with nudity.” To his credit, Richard understands that’s a big task.

The third part hits at the political agenda. Simply put, the Naktiv manifesto is a call “to decriminalize the naked human body. . . . there should be no law of any land which may be misused by the loud and righteous minority to dictate how anyone else chooses to dress.”

As far as manifestos go, it’s a pretty good one.

I sat down with Richard in the hut kitchen to talk about the Naktiv movement. He was naked, as he generally was the entire week, and sat at the table with a mug of tea. Conxita set up her camera and I suddenly felt like we were having a proper press conference. I’m fascinated by how people get into nudism, so I asked Richard how he first discovered he liked being naked. He thought about it for a moment and then said, “I guess my first experience of nudity would have been my mother taking me to a nudist club when I was very young.”

“So you’re a second-generation nudist?”

“Well, kind of. It wasn’t particularly active. I went several times with my mother to a club. She was going with this big scriptwriter and got to have a bungalow in a London nudist club. So we went there for a few weekends and they packed me off to the swimming pool. And basically, that was that for a long time.”