My Husband Camped Alone Naked in the Woods

​My husband is not a nudist. In fact, he's a bit of a middle-aged prude. With his black-framed glasses, khakis, and button-down shirts, he resembles Walter White before he broke bad.  

But one day Dan announced his plans to camp nude in the woods for 48 hours. Writing a book about the history of camping in America, he had stumbled across the story of Joseph Knowles, a Boston man who stripped down to his jockstrap and marched off into the woods for two months in August of 1913. Knowles became an instant celebrity, though it was later discovered that he might have teamed up with an accomplice who brought him food and beer. No matter. Didn't Thoreau's mother bring him biscuits and jam? My husband decided this was something he had to try.

"I want to see how long I can last out there naked," he said.

"What are you trying to prove?" I asked. "I'm going to need therapy just to deal with the splinter removal."

"I need to go out for at least two days and nights, just to see what it's like," he said. "To see if I can make it."

"At what cost?" I asked. "What's more important: surviving in the woods, or the survival of our marriage?"

I fell in love with Dan after learning that he'd hiked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail. He suffered giardia from drinking unfiltered water, shin splints from cheap boots, and a back injury from carrying too much weight. But he seemed brave and funny — willing to try almost anything if it made a good story.

However, Dan's plan to camp in the nude did not endear him to me. Maybe it's because we'd been together for 15 years and had a 5-year-old daughter, Julianna, who idolized him. Yes, his adventures are still funny. But worrying about him naked and alone in the woods was not fun. It left me wondering about what to do when the thing you love about a person — the thing you're at first drawn to — suddenly becomes intolerable.

While I worked up new arguments against his latest endeavor, Dan spent $20 on materials for a homemade loincloth and deer horn clasp from a shop in our hometown of Santa Cruz. He called rangers at nearby state parks to obtain permission for his nudist adventure. They expressed concern that he would set a bad example and others might try the same stunt. Finally, he found a place with looser regulations — and a forest manager who thought the project sounded "educational."

Dan attended survivalist meetings, where he met like-minded folk. One of these new friends had spent a night lying naked beneath a large pile of acacia pods and assured Dan that he was so toasty beneath that pile of vegetation that steam rose off his body. This did not assuage my concerns for my husband's life.

As the date drew near, I amped up my objections against Dan's trip. I wielded threats.

"If you do it, I'll do it too," I said. "I'll go out in the middle of nowhere naked with no food or cell phone, and we'll see how much you like it."

"Good, I'll support you," Dan said. We both knew that the other one was bluffing; he would never approve of such a thing, and I would never do it. I've never even camped by myself when clothed and loaded up with gear. I've always been cautious and skittish, especially when it comes to testing the limits of survival.

"I promise I'll be careful," Dan said. "I said I'd do it for the book, and now I have to do it."

"But you could fake it. That's what the original guy did."

"You knew what this book was about. You encouraged me to write it. You helped me write the book proposal."

It was true. I had helped him write the book proposal, even laughing at the idea of the naked campout. But that was before the risks seemed like such a reality.

My campaign of threats and negotiations worked, somewhat: I convinced Dan to limit his naked time in the woods to a mere 24 hours.

The morning of his departure, Dan kissed Julianna good-bye. She hugged him, voiced some concerns, and offered advice. "How are you going to sleep in your shelter?" she asked. "Bring pillows. Don't get splinters."

Dan wasn't totally unprepared for his excursion. He had hired a wilderness guru, a man named Robin, who took him to the woods on a couple of dry runs to show him how to search for edible plants and find natural water sources. During a three-hour wilderness tutorial, they built a shelter out of branches and leaves, and munched on redwood sorrel.

Dan was antsy to leave, knowing it would take him several hours to drive to the spot, ditch his clothes, walk five miles into the woods, wearing just the loincloth and a pair of ratty sneakers. (He buried the sneakers and loincloth under a pile of leaves at his campsite, to be retrieved for when he made his excursion back into civilization.)

The moment he left, I wished he'd return.

It was a foggy day on the coast. I was wearing jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, and I still felt a chill. I knew no matter how much he'd crammed during his wilderness survival training, we were both in for a long night.

I took my daughter to the local taqueria for dinner, and we ordered Mexican comfort food. I wondered if Dan had made it to his campsite. I worried about if he was cold, if he'd found the water source, if he'd broken down yet and eaten the peanut butter sandwich I'd persuaded him to bring. He carried it (and his asthma inhaler) in a small cotton sheet the size of a pillowcase that he planned to use to scoop up leaves to build his shelter.

My anxiety whirled and I thought about Dan's feet, which always were painfully cold. He'd suffered frostbite on all his toes during an ill-fated college campout in New Hampshire.

As the minutes ticked by into late evening and early morning, two scenarios swirled in my brain. The first was that Dan would call from a pay phone at the county jail to tell me he'd been arrested for indecent exposure and beg me to bail him out. I imagined he'd apologize and claim it was good fodder for the book. The second was that I'd get a call from the hospital informing me that he'd been admitted for hypothermia.

The silence allowed my mind to hover on the worst outdoor misadventure that Dan and I shared. Before we were married, we'd hiked Killington Peak in Vermont. We were unprepared for the deep snow on the mountain. We were hiking in jeans, T-shirts, and cotton socks, which chill you to the bone when they get wet. On our way down the mountain, Dan lost a boot in a deep snow hole. He hiked the rest of the way with a garbage bag tied around his foot. The story made everyone at our small wedding laugh—but I could never tell the tale without the remembering that feeling of fright that we were going to die up there.

At about 10 a.m., the phone finally rang. Dan's voice was weak. "How'd it go?" I asked.

"Oh, my god, I can't even talk about it," he said. "Maybe in a month or two I'll be able to tell you everything that happened."

"Did you sleep? Did you find food?" I asked.

I heard him choking back tears. "It was worse than you can imagine. Let's meet at the bakery."

Julianna and I walked over to the restaurant. I saw a stubbly, filthy, bleary-eyed version of my husband waiting for us there. His eyes were wider than I'd ever seen, as if he'd spent the night too afraid to close them. He had bits of ground cover stuck on his face. I kissed him on the cheek as he devoured a fried egg sandwich. He smelled musty, like he'd been inside something rotten.

After he'd shoved the last remaining bits of sandwich in his mouth, he said, "I was stung by seven yellow jackets." He shows me his arms, which had red raised welts.

"You're lucky they didn't get you where it would have really hurt," I said, laughing a little. He did look awful, but it was hard to feel sorry for him. "How was the shelter?"

"Fine, until I had to get out in the middle of the night and the cold air came in," he said. "I couldn't sleep because I kept thinking I was hearing voices. My heart was pounding from the venom from the yellow jackets. I think I hallucinated grapevines."

"Did you eat at least?" I asked.

Dan shook his head. "I dropped the sandwich in deer scat."

As I sipped my coffee and Julianna ate her banana bread, Dan told the story of his horrible night in the wilderness. It was already becoming a tale to be retold, a yarn he was spinning to amuse and amaze. The narrative was a chance for him to process his mistakes, explain his foibles, justify his stubbornness and his decisions, no matter how absurd or twisted they might seem. He would tell the story to an audience and the humor of it would erase the terror he felt in the woods.

"I'll never do it again," he said. But this was a mantra I've heard before, and no longer believe, no matter how much I might want to.

After brunch, we headed home and Dan showered. The water removed the deer scat, ground cover, and twigs from his body. But he discovered dozens of redwood bits embedded in his hands and legs. I held him down half-naked on a kitchen chair wielding tweezers, digging deep to get the splinters out. When it became too painful, Dan stood up, claiming I'd gotten all of the forest out of him. 

Even though he may not camp nude again, Dan can't promise that his adventures won't push the limits of what his mind, body, and our marriage can handle. As soon as one perilous undertaking is over, another looms. A few months after the naked campout, Dan ventured on a solo trek up Mt. Whitney. When he arrived home a half-day late with blackened, frostbitten fingers, I sent him straight to the ER. 

In times like this, when I ask myself where my common sense has gone, another thought comes to mind — a feeling that there is some compensation for all this drama.

"I am never bored with you," is something Dan and I say to each other more than anything else. There is almost a comfort in this. We have sidestepped the stifling sameness that can kill a relationship, choosing doses of danger (both real and imagined).

I know that there will more sleepless, worried nights for me. Dan's single-minded determination is his best and worst quality. If he gets an idea in his head to do something, he does it, no matter the cost. While this can be intolerable, and even infuriating, it may just be the thing that keeps us together.

And that daredevil spirit is infectious. In recent years, I've learned to be a bit more of a risk-taker myself. I've boxed my possessions, said good-bye to friends and family, and moved across the country (twice). I've walked away from cushy full-time jobs so I'd have more time to travel and write.

After years of living with Dan, perhaps the tables will turn and I will finally be the partner who keeps him lying awake alone in our bed worrying.

Maybe I'll even make good on my threat to camp alone naked.

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