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It started earlier this year. I was staying in France, with friends, a river five minutes’ walk away. I readily joined them in their tradition of swimming naked in the green water that was rushing down from the mountains. The first time? Because I’ll try most things once. But the second, third and beyond? Because I loved it. Yes, the cool river was soothing to my mosquito bites, and the mountain backdrop was nothing short of stunning, but it was more than that.
As we step out of the car at the end of the red dirt road at the top of the mountain, I hear Ethan say, “Oh, my God!” I follow his pointing finger across muddy puddles to a river running fast and thick. Seven local children, four of them naked, one in ragged blue shorts, and two in underwear play at swimming across this flooded menace.
Two U.S. presidents—John Quincy Adams and Theodore Roosevelt—were known to swim naked in the Potomac River. Adams, president 1825-1829, stripped down to his birthday suit for laps in the Potomac at 5:00 am every morning. (A female reporter once sat on his clothes until he answered some questions.) Teddy Roosevelt, president 1901-1909, wrote in his Autobiography that he sometimes went swimming with his “tennis cabinet,” and noted that “If we swam the Potomac, we usually took off our clothes.”
A few years later when I was twenty (1963) and visiting a friend in Virginia during my college days, he invited me to go swimming in the river on a warm summer night, and of course we took off our clothes and swam naked. In a somewhat secluded area there would not be a question about this. It’s what boys did.
Here is my naked wife swimming casually in the river and staying committed to her anonymity.
