A few years ago on a sultry Friday in July, my then-partner and I ventured in our RV up to the Orient Land Trust in Colorado, where we planned to spend a weekend camping and soaking in their hot springs. The OTL website says, “Visitors of all ages and walks of life enjoy free educational programs, clothing-optional naturist open space, geothermal warmth, hydroelectric energy, and Colorado’s largest bat colony.” It’s a beautiful and rustic place, seven miles off the main drag at the end of a ribbon of dirt road that slopes gently uphill and disappears into tall fragrant pines. The bumpy ride we experienced on the way, through acres of bright wildflowers for as far as the eye could see, was so relaxing that you could call it a meditation.
As we drove through the gated entrance and started down the little road toward the registration cabin, we realized that “clothing optional” really meant buck-naked. Most of the people walking along the various paths and in and out of the registration cabin wore nothing except maybe a hat, and when we went inside, we saw a cluster of nude people casually leafing through brochures in the rack by the door. A nude woman in her sixties gave us some paperwork to fill out, and then we hopped back in our truck and hauled our camper to a hookup about a hundred yards above a geothermally heated swimming pool full of naked people being entertained by a naked guy playing a guitar poolside. [He was playing “Pale Moonlight,” which sounded nice the first three or four times he sang it, but it turned out to be the only song he entertained us with for the next two days. I’m guessing he sang it, oh, about 30 to 40 times, and as I write this, the song is now in my head.]
Naked people waved at us as we drove up and jockeyed our camper into place. Later we munched on sandwiches, fully clothed, on a picnic bench outside and watched people swimming in the pool. Neither of us had been to a clothing optional campsite before; but after a few minutes, realizing that we looked kind of ridiculous, we stripped and joined the small crowd in the pool. Over the next couple of days we met a lot of folks. Most of them were professionals — lawyers, engineers, nurses, IT people — who worked and lived in places like Colorado Springs and Denver and had been visiting OTL for years. It took awhile to grow comfortable with the idea of walking around without any clothes on among dozens of strangers, but there was something very freeing about feeling vulnerable and safe at the same time.
While I was there I thought about my good friend Steve, who had gone to one of those therapy groups in California, where everyone sits in a circle and opens up about their personal angst, and then there’s a group hug. In his particular case, everyone in the therapy group was naked, and one of the people in the group was a woman who’d just had a mastectomy and felt deeply wounded. When she opened up and cried about her personal agony, he fell in love with her, and then he opened up about himself and she fell in love with him, and then they married each other. When I heard this story from Steve, I wanted to pack my bags and drive to California, but I came up with a whole host of excuses about why I couldn’t do that right then, and so I didn’t. My experience at OTL gave me a little taste of that, though, and now I’m thinking I’d like to experience that again.
