Tracks
Just finished reading Tracks by Robyn Davidson. She hiked many miles across the outback naked almost out of necessity. What an epic trek and a really enjoyable book. Although I am having a bit of a hard time relating at the moment - it was -19F this morning.
Heat and clothes get a little nasty hiking that many days without water to spare for rinsing them out. She writes about hurriedly covering up when walking up on her destination sooner than expected. I've had that happen. Only about five sentences in the book are about walk naked in the Outback. I suspect she could have written more on the subject. The condensed story is in the May 1978 issue of National Geographic, but book is far better. It was made into a movie also, but....
I am about half way through another book where a long distance hiker in the desert concluded that naked is the way to go. In 1963 Colin Fletcher hiked the Grand Canyon the long way - lengthwise, downstream to upstream. Below is a quote from his book. What he expresses is one of the main reason I hike naked.
"At lunchtime on the day beyond my five-gallon overhang, the breeze suddenly died. The heat clamped. All at once it occurred to me that in the privacy of the Canyon I could carry my thermostatic clothing system to its logical conclusion. And I promptly stripped to hat, socks, and boots.
Now, nakedness is a delightful condition. And it keeps you very pleasantly cool especially, I suppose, if you happen to be a man. But as I walked on eastward that afternoon through my private, segregated, Tonto world (exercising due care at first for previously protected sectors of my anatomy) I found I had gained more than coolness. I felt a quite unexpected sense of freedom from restraint. And after a while I found that I had moved on to a new kind of simplicity. A simplicity that had a fitting, Adam-like, in-the-beginning earliness about it.
The new simplicity was there, working, all that afternoon, and all through the days that followed.
Freed from the pressures of haste, the tyranny of film, and now the restraint of clothes, I found myself looking more closely at what went on around me. Not only at a network of white dikes that reached up and out into the black walls of the Inner Gorge, "
Colin Fletcher The Man Who Walked Through Time (1967)
I am about half way through another book where a long distance hiker in the desert concluded that naked is the way to go. In 1963 Colin Fletcher hiked the Grand Canyon the long way - lengthwise, downstream to upstream. Below is a quote from his book. What he expresses is one of the main reason I hike naked."At lunchtime on the day beyond my five-gallon overhang, the breeze suddenly died. The heat clamped. All at once it occurred to me that in the privacy of the Canyon I could carry my thermostatic clothing system to its logical conclusion. And I promptly stripped to hat, socks, and boots.Now, nakedness is a delightful condition. And it keeps you very pleasantly cool especially, I suppose, if you happen to be a man. But as I walked on eastward that afternoon through my private, segregated, Tonto world (exercising due care at first for previously protected sectors of my anatomy) I found I had gained more than coolness. I felt a quite unexpected sense of freedom from restraint. And after a while I found that I had moved on to a new kind of simplicity. A simplicity that had a fitting, Adam-like, in-the-beginning earliness about it.The new simplicity was there, working, all that afternoon, and all through the days that followed.Freed from the pressures of haste, the tyranny of film, and now the restraint of clothes, I found myself looking more closely at what went on around me. Not only at a network of white dikes that reached up and out into the black walls of the Inner Gorge, "Colin Fletcher The Man Who Walked Through Time (1967)
I read this over the holidays. One of the more enjoyable stories Ive read in a long while. If only it were mandatory reading in schools it would open peoples eyes to how natural and wonderful it is to be nude in the wild.
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