2005年NPR美国国家公共电台九月-My Summer at a Quaker Nudist Camp

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Good clean competition harry¹ all, otherwise, is a part of summer fun for children attending sleep-away camp. But in the middle of August, camps across the nation are closing their activities. Kids say goodbye to new friends and first loves and their daily dose of capture the flag. Most children are sad to leave but there are some who cannot wait to get back home. And that was the case for writer Mark Oppenheimer .

When I was 8 years old in 1983, my parents sent me off to a nudist camp. Not a camp for adults who voluntarily chose nudism as a lifestyle, but a summer camp for young boys where nudity was encouraged. At Timber Lake, nestled in the woodlands of Vermont, boys swam in the nude², slept in the nude, even played wiffle ball in the nude.

I think my parents sent me to Timber Lake because the camp had been founded by Quakers. I spent a lot of time that year watching / Michael J. Fox played a young right-winger Alex P. Keaton on the TV show "Family Ties". And my parents probably hoped that four weeks in the care of back-to-nature pacifists would cure me of any conservative impulses.

Now, Quakers are not generally nudists, Richard Nixon was a Quaker and he wore clothes in public. James Dean was a Quaker and he wore clothes too. But at this summer camp the free spirit tradition had evolved over the years to include more freedoms than most of us consider normal.

Well, I was a modest boy and I wasn’t having any of this nudist nonsense. At the beginning of the summer, there was one other boy who insisted on remaining clothed even at swim time. But he caved. And by August, I was the only boy willful and stubborn enough to wear clothes all the time. I thought these people were crazy. And if the skinning dipping and nude sports, hadn’t been enough to drive me away, then I surely would have made up my mind after sneaking³ out of my bunk⁴ on the very last night, and finding my counselors⁵, some of them well into their old age, square dancing in their birthday suits.

My parents picked me up the next day, and on the drive home from Vermont to Massachusetts, they filled me in on what I’d missed. David Getty had thrown a no-hitter for the Yankees on the fourth of July. My youngest brother had learnt to kick a soccer ball. But what about me, they wanted to know. Had I been homesick? Happy? Had I made friends? I can’t remember what I told them, but I’m sure that I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. They had such high hopes for my summer with the Quaker nudists. I must have said something like “well, it was an interesting month.”

It turns out that I should have been a little more honest because the next summer after promising⁶ me I’d never have to go back to Timber Lake, they sent me instead to Kinderland, a socialist⁷ sleep-away camp where the cabins were named after dead leftists, like Eugene Depps and Woody Gutherd. I spent all of that summer singing songs about union solidarity⁸ and writing letters to congressmen about the civil war in Nicaragua. But look on the bright side: at least I got to wear clothes.

Mark Oppenheimer is a writer who lives in Connecticut, you can read Mark’s essay about his leftist camp experience in the book "Sleep Away: Writings on Summer Camp".