Posted: 9/5/2001 9:31:30 PM EDT
Now this is what I call beautifying the countryside[:D], not just beaches, but campgrounds and remote wilderness areas across the country are going "clothing optional": September 2, 2001
All Undressed and So Many Places to Go By GUY TREBAY
THE beach blankets were spread on the sand, the Igloo coolers filled with cold drinks, the pages of bad summer books already curling in a salt breeze scented with the mai tai aroma of suntan oil. The five friends on the family beach just a short hike from Robert Moses State Park on Fire Island made for an image with the reassuring look of an all-American snapshot.
There was a difference, however, between this picture and those in most photo albums. The two men and three women in this particular shoreside group, all in their 30's, were naked.
"Why not?" asked Rosemary Murphy, 31, an intensive-care nurse standing surfside on Lighthouse Beach, wearing only an ankle bracelet and a red devil tattoo. "Once you get past the initial jolt of taking your clothes off in public, you realize that it feels much more comfortable." Besides, Ms. Murphy added, "it's not like the Puritans are about to pull onshore in a boat."
If they did, they might be startled to see 3,000 nude people stretched toward the distance, playing volleyball or Frisbee or testing the water, protected by little more than baseball caps, sunglasses and a slick of SPF 30. Where once a handful gathered, park officials say that 200,000 nude bathers visit over a typical summer.
In what some see as a sign that Americans' cultural mores may be shifting along with their tan lines, this scene is being repeated at hundreds of public beaches throughout the country. On a fine weekend at Haulover Beach, a quarter-mile stretch of sand connected to a Miami-Dade County park, as many as 7,000 people migrate to an exclusively nude area that was visited by 200 nudists a day in isolated clusters when it opened 10 years ago.
Crowds are also increasing these final summer days at Blacks Beach near San Diego, at Mazo Beach on the lower Wisconsin River and at Gunnison Beach in Sandy Hook, N.J., a "dress optional" sand strip run by the National Park Service that was recently deemed by the Clean Beaches Council, an environmental group, one of the top 10 beaches in the United States.
Far from being off the beaten path, most of those places are in plain sight of both state and federal lands, and they are legal. Late last year, officials of Cape Canaveral National Seashore in Volusia County, Fla., agreed to set aside part of south Apollo Beach as a clothes-free zone, thus creating a complement to Playalinda, a county beach nearby that has been known to draw 3,000 nude sunbathers on a busy day. View Quote
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