Murders at the Nudist Ranch
One of my half-dozen childhood abodes was a ramshackle, three-story farmhouse. To get to the third-floor bedroom I shared with my brother, I had to pass my parents’ second floor suite, although “suite” may be too grand a word to describe a room with faded wallpaper, worn Linoleum floor, and furniture amply scarred by age and use. The only bathroom in the house was opposite that bedroom and adjacent to my sister’s room, a space from which my brother and I had been evicted when she was old enough to leave the crib and claim a room of her own.
One night when I was eight or nine I got out of bed and descended the narrow third-floor stairs to the bathroom. My parents’ bedroom door was open and when I cast an innocent glance in that direction I saw a sight I had surely seen as an infant but didn’t remember, my mother’s bare breasts. I must have stared, because my father quickly stepped to the door and pushed it shut. Nothing was said to me, either then or later. Like an image from a particularly vivid dream it took up a space in my head, where it would gradually, though not entirely, fade.
I was revisited by that ghost of the past a few weeks ago when I saw a newspaper headline about a couple being murdered at a Southern California nudist ranch. In an area with almost thirteen million people, murder is neither rare nor noteworthy, per se, but the setting was enough to pique my interest and no doubt the curiosity of other readers. A man, the article said, had been charged with murdering a 73-year-old woman and her 79-year-old husband and hiding their bodies beneath his house at the resort and RV Park called Olive Dell Ranch. Local police haven’t publicly speculated on the 62-year-old suspect’s motive, but the lurid details will ostensibly be forthcoming. For fans of tabloids and true-crime reality shows, it’s probably safe to assume that the case will soon find its way to their TV screens and supermarket checkout racks.
I also assume that most people have never set foot in a nudist ranch, or colony, or whatever moniker happens to have been hung on such a place. Depending upon one’s views, nudism as practiced in these group settings is a wholesome family activity or a sinful abomination. No doubt my highly religious parents held something more akin to the latter view, with its roots in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, whose punishment for committing the original sin was feeling ashamed of their nakedness and having to cover themselves. When I first saw renderings of the couple with fig leaves hiding private parts, I was puzzled by the minimal nature of these concealments, only later learning that they were inventions of artists who might otherwise run afoul of prevailing religious prudery.
By the mid-1970s I had permanently moved to California, which was reputed to be a bastion of tolerance for so-called “alternative” life styles, including those with casual attitudes toward the wearing of clothes. I had a girlfriend who embraced what she called “body positivity” and described herself as a nudist, the way someone else might describe themselves a socialist or a skydiver. She had a membership at a “clothing-optional” facility called Elysium Fields, a bucolic place in the mountains on the western edge of Los Angeles, and she took me there one Sunday afternoon. I didn’t know what to expect. I had never been naked before a larger group than the boys in the high school locker room, and never in mixed company numbering more than one. She assured me that I had nothing to fear, or to be embarrassed about. There would be people of all ages, but nobody younger than eighteen. Overt sexual acts were prohibited, although couples could avail themselves of private “meditation” rooms. She’d packed a basket with food and drinks, and advised me to just think of the coming experience as a picnic in a park.
Okay, but you don’t spread out your blanket in a public park and then proceed to remove your clothes. Which is what we did that day at Elysium Fields, and again on a second visit. (Shortly thereafter the hastily-woven threads of the relationship unraveled and my dabbling in the nudist lifestyle came to an end) At first, it felt like every eye—I guessed there were fifty or sixty people scattered about--was on me although in reality I didn’t detect anything more than a few glances from the immediate vicinity. Within minutes, the scene—people sitting or lying on blankets, swimming in a pool or soaking in a spa, playing on a badminton court—felt perfectly normal despite the absence of any clothing other than caps or hats.
My father, who was a lay minister and preached on Sundays about sin and damnation, must have believed that his nine or ten-year-old son would be in some way harmed by the sight of his mother’s unclothed body. In fact, the harm of that incident wasn’t the sight of my mother but the abrupt closing of the bedroom door. I had seen something forbidden, and even though I hadn’t sneaked up to the open door or peeped through a keyhole it felt that I had committed a sin. If I passed my parents’ bedroom while they were in it, I averted my eyes, although there was always a perverse urge to look. After all, I was at an age where curiosity about bodily matters relating to reproduction begins to percolate toward the surface, and cause all manner of feelings—fear, excitement, queasiness, confusion. An age where the imagery that embellished stories told by boys in the locker room about girls and women would soon turn from abstractions to things entirely possible to imagine.
When Elysium’s founder died in 1995, his heirs decided to sell the property. Some members were eager to maintain it as a nudist facility, but weren’t able to raise the money needed to buy it, and that was the end. By then I was married to the woman who has shared my life ever since. She hadn’t besotted herself with the new age elixirs so beloved of the nudist girlfriend, but she was far from being a prude, and we kept a toe in the naturist lifestyle with forays to several “clothing optional” hot springs in southern California, most memorably one in a remote part of the Mojave Desert called Saline Valley, where people shed their clothes and soaked in a pair of pools filled by steaming water piped from deep underground. It was perfectly natural (in all senses), although the torturous drive over miles of primitive rock-strewn roads to get there deterred us from further visits.
All this might just be nostalgia, if not for the moment at Elysium when the sun descended beyond the live oak and sycamore trees and people started getting ready to leave. It’s a commonplace fact that we make assumptions about strangers based on the way they are dressed, but what happens when they are wearing nothing? Who is wealthy enough to wear clearly expensive clothes? Who isn’t? Who is style-conscious and who is okay wearing a mismatched outfit? Eric Stefanut, communications director for Fédération Française de Naturisme, one of the largest naturist organizations in the world, is quoted as saying, “When someone is naked, you don’t know whether he’s a sales director or a mason. Nudity makes social difference invisible—it puts everyone on the same level.” And indeed, the sense of social hierarchy was muffled by the appearances of people wearing nothing, although certain subtler elements, like grooming, were still there to provide material for assumptions.
While the phenomenon of nudity as a leveling force cast an aura of equality over the scene, it also starkly illustrated how much is hidden by clothing. The obese person with thick folds of flesh. The excessively thin person. The amputee. The woman with a mastectomy and the man with a colostomy bag. Flat-chested women and men with breasts. A variety of scars and discolorations and blemishes, all rendered invisible or at least less visible by shirts and pants and dresses. Yes, you don’t know whether a particular person is a sales director or a mason (at the risk of straying off the point, I’d look at the hands), but we also don’t know how such persons present themselves to the larger, clothed world. In that sense, nakedness works to conceal, not expose.
On my second and last visit to Elysium Fields, I struck up a conversation with a man my girlfriend knew whose upper body was a field of long, prominent scars. Maybe he noticed me staring, because he told me in some detail about the surgeries that followed a high-speed motorcycle accident on a nearby canyon road. At the time, I was into bicycling, taking rides of seventy or eighty miles almost every weekend, and I told him about a couple of my own accidents, obviously not nearly as severe as his but enough to leave permanent road rash on an elbow and knee. Pleasant moments with a stranger on a sunny afternoon, unremarkable except for the fact we weren’t wearing anything, which in itself was unremarkable for a handful of hours there on the grassy slope.
The idea of murder being committed in such a mild, unthreatening environment seems inconceivable. Alcohol, that great contributor to aggressiveness and reckless behavior, was prohibited. I never noticed any expressions of anger or hostility. And if I had been bent upon killing someone, how would I have concealed a gun or knife?