The first time I went skinny-dipping was at a church picnic.
If I’m lying, I’m dying. As of this writing, brothers Ron and Steve Wilson are still alive — by some miracle — and can verify the bare facts of this tale of adolescent adventure at that Tennessee-Summer-Sunday-Supper at Panther Springs State Park.
There was one other boy there, too. Maybe David Solomon. Maybe Randy Malicoat. There were not many guys in our small youth group at Magna View Baptist Church in the unincorporated community of Talbott — the rolling acres between Baptist-college-hamlet Jefferson City and industrial Morristown.
Brad Bull
Isn’t it funny how people contradict themselves about youthful behavior? We say city kids get into mischief because of all the temptations of urban life. But then we turn around and say rural kids’ misadventures are because they’re bored. Maybe we’re all just curious and rambunctious.
Anywho. The pastor had preached one of those picnicky sermons, and we had eaten our Southern-fried feast. The grown-ups were sitting around talking about recipes or how President Reagan had recovered so well from getting shot. The three girls our age — Gretchen, Odette and Ronda — were walking the road and had no interest in venturing a few hundred meters down the steep heavily wooded trail to Cherokee Lake. The trail involved scaling some small bluffs, but we finally arrived at the shimmering water.
We stood on the shoreline of massive smooth rock that looked like something from the original Planet of the Apes. The moss-green, waveless water beckoned. Adequate transparency revealed safe depths.
Someone jokingly suggested skinny-dipping. We looked up and realized the trees blocked the view from the picnic area far above and, even if the girls changed their minds and ventured part way down, they wouldn’t scale the bluffs. We all looked at each other, grinned and shrugged “Why not?”
Then someone said something like, “Last one in is an Alabama fan!” And with that, what originally had been said in jest suddenly evolved into action that had us stripping off our clothes faster than the Dukes of Hazzard could say “Yee hooo!”
We found ourselves suddenly bare beside the TVA lake created by Cherokee Dam, built by members of our grandparents’ “Greatest Generation.” To protect our now most sensitive and vulnerable parts, we did tight fetal-position cannonballs and submerged into bliss, our birthday-suited bodies rejoicing in their return to the maternally immersive embrace of water. It felt both holy and deliciously decadent.
Complete revelry reigned supreme. Briefly.
Then someone asked, “Are there snapping turtles in this lake?”
The opening scene of Jaws shows a young woman stripping and skinny dipping just like us, except at night. I knew this because I had stealthily — and stupidly — watched the movie on TV one night after my parents went to bed. I had seen the infamous camera angle from the shark’s perspective — looking up and torpedoing toward the silhouetted disrobed meal. We’d all seen it. We knew bad things happened to naughty teens — ranging from being eaten alive to merely not being able to sleep after covert horror-movie watching. However, we also knew there were no sharks in East Tennessee, so we kept treading water and splashing each other.
Then someone asked, “Are there snapping turtles in this lake?”
A few years before, I had been with my two foster brothers — Gene and Timmy — at an abandoned rock quarry filled with dark-green water. A gallon-jug trotline was bobbing ferociously in the water a few feet from the bank. We used a long, sturdy stick to snag the handle of the jug and pull it within reach. We then reeled in a snapping turtle the size and hardness of a massive pressure cooker but with legs and a beaked steel trap for a head. It had a chicken-baited four-inch hook in its mouth. Even though it was hissing viciously and clearly wanted to eat us, we felt sorry for the beast. So, we decided to try to remove the hook.
I was to take the stick and press down on top of the shell to pinon the thing to the ground. Gene — a year older than I and who once got suspended from school for throwing a boy out a window — was daring enough to try to grab the hook and attempt to remove it. I was pushing down as hard as I could, but when Gene reached for the hook, that snapping turtle jumped a dang foot off the ground and toward Gene who fell backward, as my stick took off like an Apollo rocket.
This was the kind of image in everyone’s imaginations as our minds’ eyes took the perspective of snapping turtles looking up from the depths toward a buffet of tender loin.
“I’ve sure enough seen four teenaged boys running on water.”
Now, skeptics doubt the whole thing about Jesus walking on the water. They doubt what happened when Peter said, “If that’s you Lord, tell me to join you,” and then Peter himself walking on water a bit before getting scared and sinking. You can doubt all you want about Jesus and Peter walking on water. But I’ve sure enough seen four teenaged boys running on water.
Back on the rock, we laughed at ourselves as we cursorily dried ourselves with our T-shirts and quickly returned our sources of any future children to the cotton fortresses of our Fruit of the Looms. Yet, in our laughter, we still mourned the loss of the abundant-life moments prior to the incursion of imaginary snapping turtles.
Still, somehow, we were reborn. Those moments had been so innocent and joyful yet accented by a sense of the forbidden — since the adults would surely disapprove if they knew. It was this awareness that made it feel naughty. I mean, our shower room at school didn’t have stalls. We’d all been naked together in water before. But this was a church picnic.
The late humorist Lewis Grizzard famously said, “Naked means you don’t have your clothes on. Nekkid means you don’t have any clothes on … and you’re up to something.” That line became so famous, the word “nekkid” even made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.
That day at the picnic, we had a sense we were up to something. But were we? I mean, really. No teens were harmed in the making of this story. How often do we heap guilt upon our lives when God might just be smiling with delight?
The best-selling author Dani Shapiro was raised by an Orthodox Jewish father. Her mother, however, stopped observing a kosher diet. Shapiro describes how, when she was 15, her mother ordered a double-unkosher bacon cheeseburger. Years later, in The New York Times Magazine, Shapiro published an essay about that experience. Her mother called and asked why Dani had felt compelled to specify it was a bacon cheeseburger. In private it was a delightful indulgence. In public, the heavy hand of religious dogma and social stigma was to be feared.
I think Christians’ joy is further marred by images of Unhappy Jesus. I grew up watching the movie Jesus of Nazareth each year at Easter. (“Due to the nature of this film, it is being brought to you commercial free by Timex.”) I’m sorry. But that Jesus looks like he just realized he paid full price for a counterfeit Rolex. A similar gloomy Jesus stared down from a two-story stained-glass window behind the baptistry of a church I once attended. His eyes were drooping in such a way, our first Sunday at the church I whispered, “Jesus looks like he could use some coffee.” My kids and I subsequently called him “Sleepy Jesus.”
By contrast, I had a boss whose office prominently featured a drawing of Laughing Jesus (available at Walmart.com and other fine retailers). What if Jesus is, in fact, not so uptight as most of our iconography and videography makes him out to be? What if he was the kind of guy who evoked children to come to him in such throngs that the stiff-wads tried to shoo them away? I mean, do children typically throng to doleful, legalistic stick-in-the-muds?
Rules are made to prevent harm. So, healthy living requires finding a way to feel appropriate guilt about behavior that causes harm. Abundant living requires we not feel guilty about things that are not harmful. This combination enables us to revel in God having created us with the sensory capacity for profound pleasure.
Years ago, at a family therapy conference on sexuality, I heard a relationship expert whose actual name is Dr. Pat Love. She said for couples to keep their relationships alive, their intimacy needs to engage a balance of the three Ns: nice, naughty and novel. Nice means intimacy is consensual and healthy. Naughty means it’s spicy within the bounds of nice. Novel means we try new things. In a recent email conversation, Love confirmed her remarks. After even more years of working with couples, she said, “I stand by the statement.”
While Love’s focus is romantic relationships, it’s not a stretch that each relationship in our lives — including our relationship with the person we see in the mirror — requires safety (nice) mixed with variety (novel) and a willingness to extend our comfort zone (naughty).
For instance, even his political opponents describe President Jimmy Carter as one of the nicest people ever to walk on this watery marble we call earth. In his book The Virtues of Aging, Carter describes the variety of activities he added to his life well into his adult years. He and his wife, Rosalyn, each extended their respective comfort zones by taking up snow skiing in their 60s. They learned to barrel roll in kayaks in a swimming pool but decided trying it in a river would be too risky for their abilities. He also describes using his newly acquired woodworking skills to apologize to Rosalyn. He made a wooden certificate on which he carved “Each evening, forever, this is good for an apology — or forgiveness — as you desire.”
Safe living and healthy intimacy require we listen attentively to guilt. Healthy guilt serves as a guardian that prevents harm. Healthy guilt says, “Make sure you know how deep the water is before you dive in; and know your limitations.” Then, after we’ve done that, healthy guilt says, “My work is done here. Let’s have fun!”
And so, we boys raised our legs as shields and cannonballed feet-first into the water.
That was the first time I went skinny dipping. It wasn’t the last.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Brad Bull is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Tennessee and Virginia. Under the tutelage of the late Jeff Daniel Marion, he earned a minor in creative writing at Carson-Newman College. He has served as a hospital chaplain, pastor and professor. His counseling and retreat services operate from DrBradBull.com. He specializes in the treatment of fear of snapping turtles.