The Thing About Nudity

Know your starting point

As I listen to my sister prepare for her wedding in South Africa, I am thinking about my country of birth more…anyway, if you prefer to listen to me telling you this story? Listen to my podcast Thou Shalt Know Your Starting Point

In my very young mother’s belly I was already traveling. Moseying around Southern Africa with Rod Stewart as a soundtrack to our life together. Is this why today, 35 plus years later, I have such a bush of hair on my head? Perhaps, but more importantly this is certainly why travel feels so much a part of who I am. Not in the obvious, let’s ask Daniel for travel advice on where to eat in - insert city here, but in a much deeper way. Mae West was speaking to me when she said, and I paraphrase here as I like: “Good boys go to heaven, bad boys go everywhere” 

I always say my birth mother is Norma Jean, not quite Marilyn Monroe. But what she did do, is travel with wild abandon - topless with the wind through her...ummm...breasts. She was in Africa, and so it all felt so free to her. Oh, let’s just establish this right now: Africa is like that. It helps you lose those strange inhibitions you tend to hoard over time. Remember when you were just a wee lass or lad, you just tried everything twice, and again if you wanted to, and you did it all without thinking about it too much? And here you are today and you’re questioning whether to go to age-old incredible Mexico, because the media sparks fear in you with some border situation. 

There is something about that scarlet, bloody soil of Africa that stays in your very being. I leave again and again, but somehow being born in Africa means I am always tugged home. The umbilical cord is taut. I know it when I get off the plane and smell that air - it alters you, no matter where you’ve come from. It smells like the bushveld everywhere - animal sweat, fecund. The clouds are extra enormous and when the afternoon rolls in just as I’m thinking about lovely tea time, they do a dance of storms for me. It’s louder than what my ears think they can handle, and it’s wetter than any rain I’ve ever felt. Big drops are tasked to clean my soul. And they come down with a riotous frenzy. And all my shit is washed away. 

The drill is always the same, I kick off my shoes and find my feet bare in the sand, or soil, or dust somewhere. And it immediately roots right there, my feet become the very beginning of life as we know it. It taps into the centuries of humanity in all its cruelty and beauty...only Africa can make you cry and laugh all at once. I’m not supposing that Africa doesn’t have its problems, and I am not suggesting that just because I was born on the continent that I somehow miraculously understand it better than the Khoi-san (and others) who have spent centuries reveling in it, and protecting it. On the contrary, I, as white boy from Africa, can only partially see the sword and the shield. 

I read this beautiful line in “Wild”, Cheryl Strayed’s book: “The wilderness has a clarity that includes me.” Ok granted she was talking about her adventures on the Pacific Crest Trail but it stayed with me - Africa shows you exactly that. Ponder that gorgeous sentence once more. Isn’t that the thing we’re all looking for, and maybe the reason we even leave to journey across oceans and even space? Just a little more inclusion please...

So I think my birth mother must have stuffed me with some of those liberty genes. I’m always climbing up on a Land Rover so I can watch the wild dogs playing, or running up a hill so I can see the nearby islets or some open plains. And then there are the endless mountains I am hiking up to see what I can see from there. In fact, whenever I get to a city besides finding a pour over coffee specifically, which I’ll share more details with you in a moment, I try to find a rooftop or a hilltop or any uppy-uppy situation to observe just what I am dealing with. 

Let me demonstrate. Think about the city of Santiago, Chile. You hike a little mountain right downtown, and, of course, there is an enormous religious statue looking down at you, and here is where you survey almost the entire city and those Andes in the distance...and so that’s how I understand it, and swallow it. And then there is Birmingham, Alabama, that has the Roman god of fire, Vulcan, on a hilltop right downtown gleaming down at this southern heyday glimmer of hope. Well that’s the first thing I did as I arrived, I went to hold hands with the cast iron burly, bearded, bare-bottomed man so I could really see this city. Well actually I lie, the first stop as I got off the plane in Alabama was a gas station in a little town annexed to Birmingham, for barbeque. Gas, and a rib. I was eating flesh at this point - I am much more plant-oriented at the moment, for all kinds of reasons we could debate. Life is simple when you can drive a truck full of gas, and eat a piece of meat, I was told by the man behind a smoker. 

 

But back to the pour-over coffee. When I am traveling before I arrive somewhere new - whether it’s Atlanta, or Alaska, or Australia - I put into the Google search bar the following phrase “Pour Over Coffee - enter city here” and press search. Not that strange. I am feeling lucky button. But maybe? So the theory is that if they serve pour over - from a Chemex or a V60 - they probably, in lots of certainty, take their beans seriously. So therefore I know that that is where I will find, not only, a fantastic cup of coffee, but also other people who probably also give a shit about their cup. And if we found naked coffee, well. No I’m kidding...

But seriously, of course there is nothing I love more than barring some skin. I’m not saying I am a nudist or anything. Since 23andme says I have German roots we could do a whole episode dedicated to the German love for baden-baden ohne Kleider…

I, of course, proposed to my New Jersey Italian husband in the nude. We were leisurely swimming off the coast of Sicily. Near some terribly old ruins in Agrigento, there were Dover Cliffs style white cliffs over to the left and some fucking crazy Game of Thrones castles to the right. The lovely sounding Riserva Naturale di Punta Bianca.

Proposing whilst traveling makes sense right? In the nude, even more sense. You’re sort of not working-working. The dog isn’t waiting for you to take her out, and some magic shit is always bound to happen whilst you’re traveling because maybe your guard is down and you're more open to it. Or you’re just so relaxed that you’d actually allow yourself to see beyond your iPhone and into the eyes of a stranger with a story that will make you smile deep inside your fucking darkness. 

Travel gives you that little opening cranny in the universe to promise your whole heart to someone. And my Jersey Boy is always busy, it’s hard to get his full undivided attention. A deserted soft pebbly beach with waves quietly kissing your feet and inviting you for a dip. Well, hell fuck yes, that held his attention. Not because it’s a dramatic, selfie-inducing moment - but because we were together and the skies opened up to give us a private moment to share our love. Just us. 

It’s a starting point like any other, Michael and I starting a life together, just like the one my bio-Mom had - and then, a life forever changed. And that was my experience with Sicily now…