Silence, Stars, and Skinny Dipping

Jim's Musings from Paris August 2022

I went skinny dipping last night at 3 am. We’ve rented a house for a week in Montauroux, a small hilltop village in the south of France, in the Var region, just north of Cannes. And there is a swimming pool in the backyard. I’ve never had the luxury of my very own, secluded, swimming pool. Last night, finally, after six days of record-breaking heat, I couldn’t resist any longer. I woke up from a fitful, sweaty sleep, tiptoed through the snoozing house, flipped the pool lights on, stepped out of my boxers, and entered the cool, chlorinated waters. It was blissful. Silent (except for the hum of the neighbor’s pool filter) as I floated in the water and let the night and the stars envelop me. My 67 year-old self met my 20 year-old self in a moment of tranquility. And I think they liked each other.

I spent spring semester of my sophomore year of college in the south of France. In Avignon. I remember myself back then as being excruciatingly naive—my twenty year old self studying the difference between Romanesque and Gothic architecture, trying to decode Plato, Nietzsche, and Camus in French, taking solitary bus trips to Arles where I spent hours in the old town library researching and sketching illustrations of the region’s traditional costumes for an Art History project. It was an innocent time, writing countless aerogrammes and postcards to my girlfriend, Miriam, back in St. Paul and planning our upcoming summer adventure through the rest of Europe. It was on a spring hitchhiking holiday to Barcelona, to buy my Inter-rail pass for the summer trip, that the innocence ended. I had my first intimate same-sex encounter in a youth hostel in Perpignan and I spent the next day walking back and forth on a gray, sunless, deserted beach north of Barcelona— wondering and reflecting and, finally, rejoicing. It was a long journey getting to that beach, but by the end of all the self-doubt and Catholic guilt, I knew that I was heading in the right direction. This 20 year-old self, who danced alone on the Costa Brava, is who I remet last night during my solitary skinny dip.

Skinny dipping has almost always been a group affair for me. I was part of that weird experiment in 1960s and 70s Chicago-area high schools where the boys swam naked for physical education class. Whenever I bring this up in small talk at a dinner party or cocktail (ouch!) hour, I am met with horrified disbelief. Apparently, it is quite the topic of conversation at class reunions for those schools that engaged in the practice for many years. I don’t know how my particular class has processed this experience because I’ve never yet attended a class reunion, but it seems that there is evidence of some post-traumatic stress stemming from those chilly days gathered with our classmates on the pool deck with our budding manliness on full display. The worst part, I remember, was lining up to practice diving off the board—a belly flop doesn’t only sting one’s belly. I took it all in stride, however. It seemed to me very natural, very Greek even, for young men to do sports in the nude. And, while I may have been teased or even bullied for other things in high school, (I did do theatre, after all) the intimidation never had anything to do with our public school, board-approved, skinny dipping swimming lessons.

Photo from the Life magazine archives.

In fact, if anything, my high school experience made me much less self-conscious and more ready and willing to take off my clothes, if the situation warranted. In my college days, we would sometimes end a summer party with a midnight excursion to one of the Minneapolis lakes and joyfully leave our clothes on the shore as we entered the murky waters of Harriet or Calhoun. One hot and humid night, the police discovered us laughing and cavorting in the tepid lake waters. They turned their spotlights on us, scattered our belongings around the beach, and demanded that we exit the water. Even the threat of arrest couldn’t dampen our skinny dipping spirits, however.

One of my Macalester College theatre comrades lived on a farm near the Twin Cities. His family had built a sauna on the property and we spent several weekends decompressing in the dry heat of the sauna and then rolling our naked bodies in the fresh, clean Minnesota snow. Once, in a moment of inspiration, my dear friend, LM, decided to ski in his natural state down the farm’s small hill. The trip back up the hill in the frosty wind chill almost killed him. I’m sure there were other episodes of naked frivolity during my college years that I might not remember. It was the seventies, after all. Stonewall had happened, Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, and the shadow of AIDS and Reaganism had not yet cut the light from our sexual enlightenment.

Since then, I’ve dipped my skin in the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean (almost). Jairo and I were warned off of a late night tropical swim at the last minute because of the possibility of tiburones (sharks). As a university professor, during the years of more and more sexual repression, I curtailed my skinny dipping activities. However, one night, in a pond in upstate New York, when NWPL was performing at North American Cultural Laboratory’s festival, the company had a lovely late night swim. But last night was the first time in my very own (for one week) swimming pool. I felt a little like Marilyn Monroe during her last photo shoot. Only without the photographer. Confident, yet vulnerable.

There I was. In the last moments of the canicule (heatwave), with the world burning around me, the monarch disappearing, bombs falling in Ukraine, economies straining, and the stars sending us ancient images. And here I am. A speck of dust. A speck of dust that meets in memory the speck of dust I was 47 years ago. I see where I have been and I know where I am. I’m still heading in the right direction. Thank you.