Naked in Jersey
Welcome to a special installation of Walking the East Coast, stories from that time I got rid of everything I owned except what would fit in a backpack and meandered for seven months along the US East Coast, engaging with all and sundry and finding in these ephemeral connections myself.
The chapters are meant to stand alone. But if Walking the East Coast is new to you and you want to catch up, here’s the preface/TOC, and here’s the previous chapter.
The tales from this trek are one strand in a three-braid memoir in progress. I’m posting chapters from time to time. This one, in honor of a conversation I had on freedom, internal and external, with the curious, open-hearted, and wildly talented
, whose work on Unfixed you will fall in love with if you haven’t already.Naked in Jersey
Outside Hackettstown, New Jersey, summer 2007
Peeking out from the locker room barrier, I took in white plastic chairs at the side of the pool and the handful of people occupying them, blobs of color in a sheet of overexposure. The cotton towel pressed against my nipples.
Here are the times I’d been naked in public up to that point: In high school, a handful of us were drinking late. It was one of those nights where we were all still straddling the fence of innocence and whatever lay on the other side. No one had suggested “spin the bottle.” We’d outgrown that old game. No one was pairing off and making out—well, maybe for a minute or two. The whole night felt like blowing bubbles in a park, like conversations where everyone listens, like maybe all had fallen into place and could be this good forever.
Somebody dared somebody to run around the block naked. Soon, we were all in on it. We somehow landed on a staggered start. One at a time, we dropped our clothes and tore out into crisp moonlight, past well-tended rose beds and minivans filled with soccer balls and crumbs and mailboxes decorated with painted wooden birds. Shivering, eyes shimmering, we muffled our shrieks and felt wild and uncontainable.
Back in the house and our clothes, we laughed and rehashed. “Dude, did you keep your hands in front of your groin like that the whole time?” “You should have seen the look on your face.” “Holy shit, I almost stepped in the snow.” “That’s why I kept my boots on.” In unison, “That’s why yours didn’t count!”
Before that, there’d been the time four of us, two girls, two boys, had removed our suits under the cover of darkness and hot tub bubbles. We’d been maybe 11. We’d sat, awkward and silent, all of us relieved when the family’s retriever propped his paws on the side of the tub and cocked his head inquisitively.
This was different. It felt like a rite of passage, a stepping out into who I wanted to be, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I looked up at the sign on the cement wall next to me. “No clothing allowed in the pool area.”
I undid the towel and refastened it, this time around my waist.
Last night, when I’d told him this nudist resort would be my next stop, Mike D—magic cabbie and pizza tosser, haw-uk whisperer and soul music connoisseur, belly laugher and new friend—had raised his thick eyebrows. “You know it’s mostly a lotta old people,” he’d said.
“Yeah,” I’d replied. “Makes sense.”
“I don’t know why you’d wanna see that.” After a joke about shriveled, wrinkly old man parts, he’d added something meant as bravado but really a sweet sort of shyness about making sure he disrobed in moonlight with a sheet held at just the right angle to show off his manly figure.
“It’s not about seeing.” I didn’t really know how to put it into words. “It’s the opposite really. It’s about being. Or, like, maybe learning to not need to be seen? At least on the outside. You know, not hiding behind the things we wear to signal how much we have or where we fit. Or, like, hiding parts we think are bad. Does that make any sense?”
His round cheeks had risen, squeezing out his eyes, in that way that was already becoming familiar and that said, You’re a strange woman, but I dig it, and shook his head. “Nope.”
〰️
OK, it’s time, I told myself. Looking down, I loosened the towel once more and then draped it around my neck.
Stepping out, I felt the absence of eyes on me as I walked across the cement to claim a chair. I spread the towel across the plastic slats, sat down, half-reclined. The sun kissed parts of me that almost never saw light. They swooned. I swooned.
After a while, skin sun-pink, I walked to the water’s edge and dove. I must have opened my eyes. All these years later, I can still see the aqua tinged with lemon, the wavy splash of red, a reflection of the poolside umbrellas. I can feel the water softening my skin.
I swam as long as I could underwater and then stroked a few slow arm lengths to the far side before idling to the center of the pool to lay on my back and float.
Still, I felt no eyes on me.
I felt their absence like the disappearance of a scar I’d had so long I’d forgotten how I’d gotten it.
A ripple of delight went through my body.
When I was a kid, I overheard a friend’s mom pronounce, like a harbinger of bad tidings, that I was “boy crazy.” Romance did lace my early imaginings—light and lovely visions not yet weighed down by the heavy layers her tone hinted at that would soon bombard me.
Modesty, a prominent feature of my upbringing, would become a massive source of discord in my home. My teen love of Daisy Dukes and bikinis and low-cut tops was fueled by twin longings for freedom and adoration.
By the time I’d made it to this pool, I’d known intimately the sexual violence perpetuated by a culture that equated heterosexual desire with the male gaze and a religion that equated purity with worth. I was only beginning to learn that my yearning was not the problem.
〰️
I swam until it was time to reapply sunscreen. Pulling myself up onto the side of the pool, I felt strong and satiated and unfettered. Back on my white plastic lounge chair, I lay back, taking in just a little more of sun and sky.
On my way back to the locker room, I crossed paths with the closest person to my age I’d seen since arriving at the resort. Still, he had at least a decade on me. He was maybe in his late 40s; I’d have thought of him as an older man. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I said back.
“You traveling?” he wanted to know.
“Just passing through,” I told him.
“It’s a beautiful day,” we each said.
That night, I lay in my tent on a wooden platform that was my home for the night. Bare chest out of the tent, I rested my head on my hands and gazed up. The song of nearby gatherers—a lullaby of laughter and murmurs and clinking glasses—floated up to mingle with the stars.
I smiled, thinking of the lack of layers between them.
Thank you for reading, liking, and commenting! I can’t say enough how grateful I am for our connections here, for the way we’re shedding layers together.
Captioning the photos in the middle of the story seemed a distraction, as none are from the East Coast trek (no photos survived the pre-digital camera, at least for me, era). They’re from (1) a pool in San Diego, California, 2023, (2) a pond in Santa Barbara, California, 2014, and (3) a tobacco field in Viñales, Cuba, 2016.
For the comments, do any stories of disrobing come to mind? What layers of cultural and societal or whatever type of messaging do you think we need to rid ourselves of? How are you holding up?
I’d love to share this unclothed episode far and wide. Pretty please, restack “Naked in Jersey” (press the little recycle button) or share it with a link! Or, if you’re a Substack writer, please consider recommending the Rolling Desk.
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The safety and freedom come through beautifully here. And this, woah — “the sexual violence perpetuated by a culture that equated heterosexual desire with the male gaze and a religion that equated purity with worth. I was only beginning to learn that my yearning was not the problem.”
For our honeymoon, in 1999, we hiked the coast of Brittany. Parts of the trail ran along the beach. At one beach, there was progressively less clothing the further we went until it became apparent that this was a nude beach. When in France... Swimming nude was the best, but we did get a little burned where the sun don't ordinarily shine. And I lived in Jersey 25 years, but was never nude in public there!