There are dozens of cairns - carefully balanced river stones like Jenga towers - that visitors have made on one pebbly shore. The actual swimming hole is an outcrop of glacial rock, a small waterfall glistening in the sun and the water is clear and green. He gave a polite smile and brief wave, and I think I said something like “Mmmbsdfds” as I beelined to the water. “Enjoy yourself!” called a man who looked like Santa, minus the suit. I shut my eyes and yelped as I yanked the last article of clothing off my body and ran after him, sprinting from behind a tree to behind a rock to behind a lawn chair in an effort to block myself from full view. I looked up again and saw his head bobbing down the wooden stairway to the beach, then gone. Meanwhile, I stood on the other side of the car, anxiety getting the best of me.
On his way down, in his classic fashion, he struck up a conversation with another traveler about how we’d found the place, where we were from, and how beautiful Vermont was, how lucky we got with the nice weather. “Well, just meet me down there,” he said, as he turned to walk down to the swimming hole proper. Now, just put my hands on my bikini bottoms. “I want to swim while it’s sunny.” He stood stark naked save for his backpack of snacks - so confident, so self-assured, so un-self-aware, and so innocent, I’d never loved or envied him more. I had told my boyfriend I could do this, we drove nearly five hours to get here, and now I wanted to wrap myself in a Stevie Nicks afghan and go home. The images of me frolicking all Woodstock-hip popped like a cartoon thought bubble. And if someone is actually naked for a minute - weirdo! - we stare hard into our gym bags. We’ll strip down in bathroom stalls, showers stalls, changing stalls, we will find any kind of stall before we flash another woman. Maybe for a guy, a nude beach was like being in a locker room - but even in locker rooms, most women don’t just get naked in front of each other. Maybe it was something subconsciously primal, something about being the only woman of childbearing age in a pack of naked men that made me freeze. There was one other woman there, about 60 or so, sitting and chatting with nude men in a little circle of lawn chairs. There were maybe a dozen people at the Punch Bowl that day, mostly men, none with tan lines, all with gray hair.
Except for a friendly wave hello when we first pulled in, absolutely no one was looking our way or even seemed to notice us - but still, my stomach clenched.
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