On Wednesday I took off for a stream not too distant from home for a combination of stream walking (see my earlier post on this topic), fishing, swimming and tanning. I had finished my lawn repairs the previous day (eight tons of topsoil wheelbarrowed around the yard to be spread and seeded) so I gifted myself with a day off. If you’ve never gone fishing naked you should add it to you list of possibilities. (Helpful hint: watch out for your back cast.)
It was a beautiful day all way around: warm and sunny without being oppressively hot, the relative humidity was quite low and to top it off there was a nice breeze. Once at the stream I worked my way up the current, pausing to fish for awhile at each pool along the way but catching only one unlucky perch. It must have been hungry because I was using a bare hook, and an barbless one at that. After all, the purpose of going fishing is not necessarily to catch fish. Sometimes it is just about getting out into the great outdoors and getting in touch with nature. With this in mind I said “Hi!” to the perch, carefully removed the hook and placed the fish back into the stream, probably none the wiser for its ordeal. Farther on a small sunfish was unhappily marooned in a shrinking puddle cut off from the rest of the creek. With no small difficulty this fish was scooped up in my hat and liberated into the flowing water. (It was Good Samaritan day you see.) Finally I reached the pool I was headed for and lo, there was a big trout in it. I could tell because as I stood in the shallows looking down into the water, it was stationary in the current looking up at me. No, really! Here was this trout, about eight or nine inches long, the ruler of this little stretch of the stream, calmly contemplating the sole angler around for miles. Somehow I sensed that I had lost the element of surprise with this trout. Besides, there seemed to be only one trout and there was no point in bringing home just one fish. It takes a minimum of two of that size to make a decent meal. I told him to relax and put my spinning rod away.
Did I mention the water? Yes, it was at summer low but that has the effect of letting the sun warm it all the faster. It wasn’t even slightly chilly, a fact emphasized by my standing waist deep in the pool without the slightest shiver. So, fishing was cancelled and replaced by swimming, making the day a three-for-one. (The trout didn’t seem to mind sharing the pool.) After the swim I had a bit of a lie-out on the little sand beach beside the pool in order to increase my store of vitamin D. This made the day a four-for-one, plus bonus points for the lack of mosquitoes. All in all, not too shabby a day.
On Thursday, it too being a beautiful day, I headed to the Fundy Footpath for a spot of hiking. I also wanted to check out what has happened to Long Beach, formerly an unofficial but often-used nudist beach. That was the bad news for the day! Long Beach, formerly accessible solely by the footpath or creative bushwhacking, now has parkway access, two parking lots, toilets, two scenic lookoffs and rank upon rank of picnic tables. The Fundy Trail & Parkway folks must think that they’re going to bring in bus tours of beachgoers. As if! Just wait until the first tourist dunks a pinkie toe into the Bay of Fundy and learns how cold the water is – that will put paid to great expectations about the beach. But in the meantime, barring some sort of agreement with the FT&P authorities, Long Beach has been lost for nudist recreation.
Having gotten the skinny on Long Beach I caught the trailhead for the Fundy Footpath there and hiked away eastward to Seely Beach, formerly stop #2 on the Footpath. Seely Beach used to be a popular campsite among the ATV set and was accessible via the old – and I do mean OLD! – road that eventually connected to the Big Salmon River Road. More on this later.
The section of the Fundy Footpath from Long Beach to Seely Beach is just about 4 kms in length, passes through challenging terrain, and is in infinitely better condition than the section from the Big Salmon River to Long Beach. I have hiked both sections this year and the BSR-LB leg can best be described as sad, bad and difficult. The LB-SB leg is, by comparison, mostly quite pleasant, even where it requires some tricky footwork. But make no mistake about it, the Fundy Footpath is not a walk in the park. It is a genuine unimproved wilderness trail and, you know, I like it that way. It is impossible for bicycles, ATVs and horses.
The Fundy Footpath is not to be confused with the Fundy Trail, which more or less follows the course of the Fundy Parkway lying between the gate and the Big Salmon River. The Fundy Trail is a nice walk in the woods, but it is a (relatively) wide, groomed multi-purpose trail through a tamed forest. Baby carriages can be pushed along the Trail; the Footpath beyond Long Beach is definitely PG13 at minimum.
One does not meet kids on the Footpath and maybe that is one of the reasons it is popular with nude hikers. I’ve hiked one or more sections of the Footpath every year for the past nineteen and I’ve usually encountered one or more people along the way. I’ve been keeping a rough tally of the wardrobe choices of the other hikers and, so far at least, the ratio of clothed to naked is about 3:2. Of those who are clothed, none have shown any problem meeting those who are naked. I wonder if these stats would remain consistent if one could account for each and every hiker on every good day. I’d like to think so. I believe that people who go off hiking in the wild are far more broad-minded than the average urbanite.
But why do we do it? I mean, of course, why do we hike naked? Someone on a naked hiking forum – a new guy of course – recently stated that he did it because he is sexually excited by it. Really?!?!? How pathetic is that! Others on the forum did not agree with him and he skulked away.
Why do I do it? Well, truthfully, I do it for a variety of reasons and the number of reasons has expanded over the years. The top two reasons have always been “to be closer to nature” and “freedom,” or so I used to state as my default explanation. But there has always been the need to prove to myself that I was comfortable within my own skin. Oh sure, there are a lot of other valid reasons related to health and fitness but bigots among the clothen usually have counter arguments at hand for those. On further examination “comfort” is an issue, as is “stress relief.” I figured out the first one all on my own but the thought about stress relief was pointed out to me by a woman at Kellys a few weeks ago. “This is great,” she said, “no stress at all.” The more I thought about that statement, the more I realized it was true. Great! One cannot have too many good reasons for doing a good thing.
In the past few years I have been able to say quite honestly that I do it for religious reasons as well, for I have concluded that unless one can fully accept one’s natural self as it is – one’s full humanity – once can never reasonably contemplate either God or another human being. (If you’re not inclined to believe in God substitute “nature.”) So you might say that I do it, in part at least, to follow the dictum “Know thyself.” I can think of no better reason.
And oh yes, the Seely Beach Road – see, I told you I’d get back to it. As previously noted, in former times it connected Seely Beach to the Big Salmon River Road – it doesn’t do this anymore. It has now been cut off by the extension of the Fundy Parkway and the days of ATV outings to Seely Beach are a thing of the past. Yay!
The road itself is just the right width to accommodate ATVs and Jeeps – real Jeeps like M-38s, CJ5s, CJ7s and YJs, not the bloated luxomobiles Jeep now sells – but only for one-way traffic. Unless I miss my guess this little road predates the internal combustion engine and was built for use by horses, a relic of the times when men were men and sheep were nervous. The road is to my mind a little marvel of human endeavour, built by the sweat of men and horse gouging out and backfilling a 700 metre long diagonal course along the slope, rising 144 metres from the beach to where is now meets the parkway. (That is a 20% grade, by the way – pity the poor horses.) Parts of the road are now severely washed out and there is no bridge over the small brook at the bottom. (Bridge? Horses don’t need no steenking bridges for so small a brook.)
From the looks of things up at the parkway there is no immediate plan to rehab the Seely Beach Road as anything. I really hope this is true because it means that Seely Beach will be left out “in the wild” and will remain a nudist-friendly beach and campsite on the Footpath. On the other hand, since the Fundy Trail & Parkway has (in my opinion) so far ruined every other beach along their shore maybe the days of Seely Beach in the wild are also numbered. That would be a real pity. Use it while you still can. So ended day number two.
Friday was another beautiful day for nude recreation, this time on bicycle as I continue to “train” for the Halifax Naked Bike Ride. Anyway, that is what I told myself. Having now seen the planned route for the ride I’m growing iffy about participating. But in the meantime I loaded my bike onto the car and headed back to the Fundy Parkway, not to ride there but because it provides easy access to the Big Salmon River Road, the backbone of a more or less empty network of well-graded woods roads.
I had the place to myself – didn’t see another person once I left the parking lot. But I did see plenty of wildlife, which is usually nice, sometimes a bit surprising. Besides the smaller folk – red squirrels, hares and a groundhog – I also saw a pair beavers busily working on their dam. Then there were two separate deer sightings, something that is no big deal because I see them in my front yard every morning. More of a surprise was Mama Bear with twin cubs, seen at a non-threatening distance and therefore of no particular concern. No, the concern came about when I was rocketing full tilt downhill on a dirt road when I found myself headed for a very tall bull moose standing beside the road staring at my approach. All I could do was veer to the opposite side of the very narrow road and hope for the best. Luckily, he blinked first and sloped off with a clatter to vanish into the nearby wood line. All the same, it did get the old heart pumping doubletime for a few seconds. All of the aforementioned animals looked sleek and well fed, and as the road is comfortably distant from any urban areas that means the forest is producing plenty of food.
The other animal life that was present in abundance out there were frogs, hundreds, more probably thousands of bullfrogs and leopard frogs staking out the best corners of several ponds and calling for prospective mates. Every pond I stopped at was well populated by the not-so-little guys and I take that as a very good sign because they had seemed to be in rather short supply for a few years. Ecologists consider them a bellwether species for determining the health of an ecosystem so it was nice to see them in abundance.
I pedaled eastward for a couple of hours, then turned about and retraced my route back to my car, keeping careful watch for bears and moose. Seeing none this time. All in all, another great day to be naked outdoors.
