Chapter 84: Gaining More Nudism Converts

Arundel Nature Society: mid-August

Tamara, Peter, and Winnie had arrived at the resort on the Wednesday afternoon before their volleyball weekend for their two-week stay. Winnie’s summer courses were mostly over; she could complete the remaining parts on line during the following week. They came a few days early because Tom and Lynette would be making their nudist resort debut and they planned to arrive later that day.

Tom had been “practicing” nudism at the pool at Kevin and Denise’s home on a few July weekends, after he and Lynette had spent two weeks visiting their parents and brother. Tom had decided to go to Peter’s resort early, as Tamara had suggested, as a way to ease into being nude with a larger group. And it would certainly be a larger group—Peter expected that most of his family would be there, plus Kevin, Denise, Amelia, Jeremy, Cindy, Tommy, and now Lynette and Tomas. And most of the varsity volleyball team and their parents and siblings. Tamara had needed to rent five bunkhouse camper-trailers to accommodate everyone; she had to contact three area dealerships to find enough.

Tamara had spent a lot of time organizing everything and not for the first time, had wondered if she should try to find an assistant, like a “gal/guy Friday.”

Emma gets by without one here, but she has her executives at Cambridge to run that operation, Marty runs everything for her at the APL, and the Physics Department secretary helps her at Hopkins, Tamara mused. I don’t have everything in place yet with my companies and all my time is getting soaked up with all of this little stuff. I need advice. I need to talk to Werner.

The only Winsberg family group that wasn’t able to come this week were the Richardsons from Virginia. That meant that the combined Winsberg clan at the resort would consist of the four grandparents, eight aunts and uncles, and nine cousins, including Barbara and Peter.

Rounding out the crowd would be Tamara, Winnie, Terence, Kevin, Denise, Jeremy, Amelia, Cindy, Lynette, and both Toms. Between the house and the three cabins, there were twenty beds available but there were twenty-one Winsberg family members who’d be there. Not having enough beds for the family had also been a problem back before the three cabins had been built, too, so to accommodate everyone on the occasions that they all could be there at the same time, Peter’s great-grandfather had installed a concrete pad and a service hookup which could accommodate a camper trailer on his site. Squeezing an additional unit in was possible, but it would be tight.

This week, counting all the guests, there would be 32 people on the site. That second camper pad was certainly needed this week so all of the extra people would have a place to sleep without having to use tents.

The high-school girls would need seven beds, five for their siblings, and ten beds were needed for their parents. Tamara had rented two large bunkhouse camper-trailers for the girls and their siblings, and she was able to reserve three resort cabins for three of the parent couples. Since the remaining two parent couples were close friends, they had told her that they’d be okay with sharing a two-bedroom, six-bed bunkhouse camper.

When Tom and Lynette arrived that afternoon, Peter met them at the office to help them check in because he figured that their lack of a permanent address would tweak Vicki—they had told him that they lived on campus at Westphalia. Besides, he wanted to tease her. And that’s just what happened.

“But that’s your college address,” Vicki told them when she looked at their licenses. “Peter, why do you keep doing this to me?”

“‘Cause it’s so much fun teasing you, Vicki,” Peter grinned at her.

“Mrs Allerman, for now that’s our only legal address,” Lynette told her. “It’s the married student housing apartment at the uni; before coming to the U.S. we lived in the U.K., in London. We’re in process of moving off campus but we haven’t moved yet.”

“All right, let me finish setting up their records here then,” Vicki sighed. A few minutes later, “Okay, done. Here are your barcode tags. Peter, you’ll tell your guests about using these tags and go over our rules with them?”

“Sure. Say, you remember that Winnie’s high-school volleyball team and parents will be here Friday, right?”

Vicki nodded. “Yes, and that two minors without parents are in the group. Your mom’s already sent me the permissions for them so we’re all set there. At least you didn’t spring that one on me with no warning,” she laughed.

Peter led Tom and Lynette back out to their car.

“Okay, guys, here’s what we’ll do now. You remember that this is a nudist resort,” he emphasized the word, “and not clothing-optional. Nudity is required when conditions allow. But let’s get into your car and we’ll drive to our site; we’ll unload your stuff and you can strip there. Then I’ll need to bring your car back here ‘cause there’s no extra parking room at our site. Okay?”

As Tom drove to the site, Peter went over the major rules. Tamara met them when they pulled into the site. They greeted her and then she explained the complicated lodging arrangements to them as she showed them where they’d be staying.

“Peter gave you the quick rules rundown, right?” Tamara asked as they unloaded their car and carried their items into the camper.

“He did. This is an amazing place ... so pretty,” Lynette said.

When they finished stowing their items, Tamara told them that it was time to get undressed.

“Get out the sunscreen and put it on; then grab your towels and come out,” she told them. “Don’t go anywhere without a towel. It’s to sit on, remember from Emma’s?”

Meanwhile Peter had taken their car back to the parking area near the clubhouse. In a few minutes, Tom and Lynette emerged from the camper.

“Say, where’s Winnie?” Lynette asked.

“Winnie’s off somewhere with her friend Theresa. That family lives in Frederick so they don’t get to see each other all that much—but she’s also keeping an eye out for the three bunkhouse units that her v-ball team and their families will be using. They’re delivering them later today. Okay, now I need to give you guys the tour of the resort. You got your sunscreen on?”

“We do,” Tom said, looking around uncertainly. “I guess I’m still not quite used to being starkers like this in public,” he chuckled. “I still have a wee sense of foreboding...”

Lynette looked at him with concern. “But it’s okay, right? No feeling of panic?”

“Oh, no, sweetheart,” he responded. “It’s like a memory of a bad dream and I can ignore it.”

Lynette relaxed and smiled at him. “I notice that you tend to use Britishisms sometimes, sweetie. It’s funny; it took you two years to start doing that in England but now we live here and it sounds odd.”

“I’m just slow, Lynnie, what can I say,” Tom chuckled.

“Hey, don’t stop your British usage on my account,” Tamara laughed. “I like hearing it. Besides, remember how Emma sounds? I think you both sound classy when you talk.”

“You have a cool accent too, Tamara,” Lynette said. “It has a faint resemblance to Québécois—that’s French Canadian—and has a musical lilt too.”

“Yep. That’s the result of my speaking French and Haitian Kreyòl growing up. Here’s how Kreyòl sounds—you’ll hear the lilt. Èske nou tout pare pou toune resort nan kounye a?”

“Whoa—I hear some French usage in there,” Tom said. “Was that ‘Are you all ready for ... what? Oh, must be tour ... the resort something... ‘“

“Very good, Tom. Close. I asked, ‘Are you all ready for the resort tour now?’ The lilt is in a lot of Caribbean versions of English, especially in Jamaica. So let’s go.”

Tamara grabbed her towel from where it was draped on a nearby chair.

“While we walk, I’ll tell you about what I know, but if Peter gets back, he can do a better job.”

As they began leaving the site, Winnie came running up.

“Hi, Tom, Lynette!” she called. “Theresa says hello, Tamara. I was with her and her brother Toby and her cousin Marcia. Anyway, I came to put something on—the campers are being delivered in about fifteen minutes. Ron said I should wear something when I show them where to set them up so the drivers don’t get distracted and crash them somehow.”

Everyone laughed.

“So the drivers don’t have to get naked when they come in here?” Tom asked.

Tamara shook her head. “Contractors and repair people, government people like health department or police, they don’t. And when resort staff are working with them, they wear a cover-up or something so the visitor doesn’t get embarrassed.”

Winnie came out of a cabin wearing a colorful wrap and ran off. “See you guys later!” she called.

Tamara set off with the couple for their tour and saw Peter walking toward them, returning from parking the car. He joined them and they went around the grounds. Passing by the main part of The Meadow, they stopped to watch some pre-teens playing a spirited frisbee game and Lynette noticed Tom’s thoughtful expression.

“Brings back memories?” she asked him gently.

Tom nodded. “This is so frikkin’ different from back then...” and noticing Peter’s and Tamara’s curious expressions, he explained.

“Lynnie and I were thirteen when the family moved to Munich,” Tom continued. “Dad had been reassigned there by his bank. Lynnie and I liked to take bike rides—we still do—and we went to this park a few miles away from where we lived. I didn’t know then about the FKK areas that Germany’s parks had...”

At Peter’s puzzled look, Lynette said, “That’s the German—no, it’s actually the almost universal European term for ‘nudist’—stands for Freikörperkultur or ‘free body culture.’

Tamara broke in, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that term before. When they showed my high school the Naked in School orientation film, they had some quick scenes that the film’s narrator claimed showed how public nudity in the U.S. was becoming common. One of the scenes was a nude beach but when the camera panned, a sign that read ‘FKK-Strandbereich’ was visible for an instant. I realized then that the propaganda they were showing us was fake.”

“That sign means ‘nudist beach area,’” Tom said. “The FKK term is used for nudism throughout central and eastern European countries and everyone in Europe knows it means ‘nudist.’ Except we didn’t then. Anyway, we were riding around this lake and saw a sign reading, ‘FKK Bereich’—I knew bereich meant ‘area’...”

He paused and looked at Lynette, who picked up the topic. “Tom still hates to talk about this,” she said. “We had biked into a FKK—a nudist area, and it looked just like this big lawn here filled with naked people lying out and playing sports. And it had a little beach down on the lake too. It was so pretty, just like this lawn, but Tom panicked when he saw all the naked people there. You heard about his reaction to seeing nudity when he was in school.”

“That’s right; I heard,” Tamara remarked. “Tom, so seeing The Meadow here and the kids playing on it, brought back that memory?”

She looked at Tom and he nodded at her.

“Yeah, but just the memory and not the panic I got, thank God. It’s so much better now. I feel a little self-conscious now, but nothing else.”

“How could you have survived in school then with the naked kids?” Peter asked. “For me, seeing the nudity wasn’t the real problem; it was sensing the kids’ emotional turmoil and terror, their humiliation and all that kind of crap. I suffered through that for over three years.”

“Peter, I hear ya,” Tom sighed. “In a way, I was lucky that the head teacher never bothered to look at my medical record and picked me for the Program at the beginning of the school year. I suffered for my first week but missed almost half of it, actually. I left school after I got sick at the Monday assembly and the next day, I only was there an hour. There was a naked kid in my first class. I went back on Wednesday all drugged up. But I had no idea what was taught for that week; it was a loss. Then the next week was when I got picked and, well, trashed the place. Because the head screwed up how I was selected, that let our solicitor essentially blackmail him and made the school exempt me—Lynnie too. He made the school officials forgive me for wrecking the office and forced them to remove our names from any future Program selection list because if they didn’t, he’d bring a negligence suit against the school and get the head and teachers charged with sexual assault and battery for attempting to strip me. And since that happened so early in the term, I didn’t have to suffer in classes with naked kids.”

“Cool,” Peter exclaimed. “Almost the same thing happened with me except that I didn’t wreck anything. Like you, I got out of it because of a legal threat to the principal; in my case, a state police official warned the principal that he and others too would be arrested if they forced me to stay in the Program. But tell me, how did you get out of going to classes?”

“Actually that was part of the blackmail deal. The head had to come up with a way for me to attend classes without me seeing nudity. My dad gave them the idea to set me up in the library and have the teachers send the class work to me, but the head teacher suggested something even better. The school had video cameras that they were planning to put in some classrooms for a pilot project to allow remote learning but they were still working out details. So I became the pilot project. They set up the cameras in my classes and let me try out doing the remote learning. It took a couple days for the cameras to be set up and then I watched my classes by video from the library.”

“So you didn’t have to see anyone naked then.”

“Right. The cameras were aimed at the whiteboards and I could only see the front of the classrooms—so I didn’t see the kids and didn’t see the daily nudity. I stayed in the library all day and ate lunch there too. For P.E. class, I used the weight room with the teams so I could work out with a partner, or I’d run on the track outside—that led to me getting on the cross-country team. My brother suggested it so I asked the coach. He had seen me running and thought I did okay. So for that whole school year, I took all my classes from the library. So that’s how I survived school there. For the next year, we switched schools and we met Amelia and Jeremy there.”

“Did you have any problems when you switched schools to Amelia’s school?” Peter asked.

“They didn’t have the naked program in the new school,” Tom replied. “Actually, they almost had it the year before we switched schools but Amelia and Jeremy and Amelia’s guardians—Kevin and Denise—got it stopped. They brought the Avery Program to the school and it replaced the naked program.”

Lynette laughed. “Sweetie, we did have that encounter with a kind-of naked program during the summer, though. Remember that cultural tour?”

“Yeah, right,” Tom sighed. “In the summer before we started at our new school, we went on a cultural tour that kids at our new school who were finishing year ten could do. Mom saw the summer course description in the school’s materials and knew that Lynnie and I would want to do it. It was one of the summer programs that a lot of Brit schools offered for credit and a private company ran those programs. So we went. Our tour group traveled by train and bus and we visited ten European cities on the continent; we toured museums and art galleries; went to art fairs and concerts; and did a bunch of other cultural stuff. We then had to write essays about the attractions we visited, answering the topics that the leaders, who were our teachers for the course, set for us to write. That’s how we got school credit for it, it was an elective class.”

“Jeez, that sounds totally amazing,” Tamara said. “I’m so jealous. You enjoyed the tour?”

Lynette nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, for sure. It was blindin’ brilliant, Tamara. That is, until we got back to France toward the tour’s end.”

She looked at Tom and nodded to him.

He chuckled. “Lynnie wants me to tell it. Yeah, we were on a train from Italy to southern France. Part of our tour was to be a hike in a national park area in the French Alps near Grenoble. It was scheduled to be for two full days and three overnights and the tour company provided the tents, food, and all the other hiking supplies. Lynnie and I were kinda wondering how we would like it. We both love biking; hiking not so much. But just before we arrived at the Grenoble Eurostar station, Lynnie and I learned that the kids in our tour group, back in the early spring when they had organized the tour schedule, those kids had all voted to do that hike naked.”

Peter shot a look at him. “You’re shittin’ me ... they could do that?”

Tom shrugged. “Could and did. Seems naked hiking is a popular thing in Europe; who knew? And the area in France where the hike was organized happened to be a popular naked hiking site. The kids going on the tour had heard from some of their mates about the fantastic time that they had while doing naked hiking with their families in Germany and Austria; they had seen the photos that their mates had taken during their naked hikes and they all got convinced that it was brilliant—so almost all of the kids voted to do the cultural tour hike naked too, and their parents were all okay with it as well. You know, public nudity in Europe is no big deal; there are naked areas on most beaches and in a lot of parks too. There even are hiking areas where it’s actually expected that hikers will be naked. It even has a name: Nacktwanderung, and it’s very popular throughout central Europe. Guess what that German word means. Oh, Tamara, I see that you know.”

“Yep. Wow. Sure, it’s naked hiking.”

“Yeah. As I said, Lynnie and I later found out that the park area in France where the cultural tour hike was scheduled is one of the most popular naturist hiking locations in France. Anyway, two of our tour group members weren’t very enthused about the nudity, but they were told that they could keep their kits on if they needed to. But just before our trip, they had apparently told the teachers that they would join the others and the whole group did the hike naked. Except Lynnie and me. By the way, our friends on the tour told us afterwards that they had a smashing good time. I was just, ‘Good for them.’

“So when I heard about the nudity, I freaked out. Lynnie and I only found out that they were doing the hike naked when the teacher passed out the essay assignments. That was only an hour before we arrived at the train station and I saw that all the topics were about experiencing nature while naked ... yeah, Peter?”

“But didn’t you know it was gonna be a naked hike?”

“Oh, right, I need to back up. Yeah, we didn’t know about the naked hiking part. We weren’t in the school when the tour sign-ups were done in January. We were accepted to the school in February and would start in the fall. Mom had asked about the tour but it was filled, so she got us on a waiting list. Lynnie and I were added in April, two months after the deadline, because two slots had opened up. So we didn’t know anything about the kids’ voting to do the hike naked—we weren’t going to that school then—and the teacher who was leading it didn’t think to tell us that it would be a naked hike. Hell, they didn’t even have our folks’ permission for us to do it. So when I freaked when I heard about it, the teachers told me that I could keep my kit on if I needed to, but of course, with all that nudity of the other kids ... well, you know how that was.”

“This is like a soap opera,” Tamara chuckled. “Or a reality show—hey, ‘Naked and Afraid.’ Tossed out naked on a wilderness hike.”

The others laughed.

“So what happened?” Tamara asked.

“Lynnie came to the rescue with a perfect excuse for me to skive off doing that part of the tour without embarrassing me in front of the other kids. She went off to the side with the teachers and told them that both of us were very sensitive to the sun, so us being naked was not possible. And doing the hike clothed made little sense because the teachers had framed the entire experience around being naked in nature and all of the essay topics they had set for the class had to do with that, so if we were clothed, we couldn’t write about it, of course. So even clothed, it wouldn’t make sense to go with them. And that’s what the teachers told the others.”