A Run Through the Corn

A Run Through the Corn

By Ken Ely

I’ve liked being without clothes ever since I was little. I think it’s a bit strange, then, that there were only two occasions I can remember when my brother and I played naked in the back yard, as many kids do. We lived on Air Force bases and most of the yards were not screened off, although looking back on it, I don’t see why that should have made much difference. And we didn’t spend much time naked inside the house, either, as our shared bedroom was always air conditioned for my brother’s asthma:  it was hard enough to play in there without a sweater, let alone without clothes. When I was older, after I got my own room, I could do silly things like practice my trombone naked but I had to be careful about who was in the house and what they were doing. Or, at least, I thought I did; most of the time no one would come into my room while I was practicing, anyway – but I could never be sure.

My high school senior year was ’65-’66. This was the tail-end of a rather long period in the western world when males commonly swam naked – just about anywhere, it seems – and females could not; but there were no uniform standards for the practice and it varied country-to-country and region-to-region. By the mid-60’s, the only places in America where men remained unshackled by bathing suits were some YMCA pools and scattered high school swimming classes. The last gasp for both of these male sanctuaries came in the early 70s.

I was never very good at school sports, the kind played with a ball, because I could never keep track of where the ball was or where it was supposed to go. But I was a good swimmer and I looked forward to at least a portion of my senior year’s physical education classes because swimming was to be part of the curriculum. The school had swim teams, of course, but I would never join one of them, even when invited. I should have.

In those says, PE classes were not co-ed. Today, I think most of them are still segregated by sex but you can find some that aren’t. Our high school had two pools rather than have the boys and girls share a common one. The boys’ pool was just off our locker room and had a big window in the upper half of the door, which was always locked. Only the boys’ swim teams and the senior boys’ PE classes were allowed to use it, so I never saw anyone in it, not being on a swim team. Finally, though, on a day when we were lined up in the gym waiting for our work-out instructions, our teacher announced that we were going to swim and told us to go back to the locker room, get out of our gym clothes, and form up on the long sides of the pool.

I don’t think any of us had given much thought to the fact that we might be asked to swim in nothing but our skins and it came as something of a surprise to all of us but we were used to showering together and dressing in the locker room, so we did as we were asked, chuckling at the novelty and calling raunchy taunts across the water while we waited along pool’s sides.

When the teacher came in, he mounted one of the diving boxes at the deep end and asked us to cease with the hallooing so he could tell us how the class would go.

Swimming would last for eight weeks (we had gym class twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays). The next three periods, beginning with this one, would be devoted to sorting out our individual proficiencies in the water. We had two weeks to acquire bathing suits. He did not say that bathing suits were mandatory but since “if you want to wear one” was not included I assumed that at the end of two weeks, we would be expected to wear them. I also thought it funny that we were allotted two weeks to get them. I had two bathing suits and it would not take me two weeks find them. I brought one to the next class but didn’t wear it, just left it in my locker.

In fact, no one wore a suit for that next class. Maybe no one wanted to wimp-out and appear girlishly modest.

The following week, two or three suits were in the line-up but most of the boys still chose to swim naked. I say “chose” because I doubted that most or all of them did not have bathing suits and I rather thought that even the poorest fellow in the class could have acquired one overnight if he had wanted to. No, I think that most of us could have admitted to enjoying skinny dipping and would have acknowledged feeling camaraderie not experienced outside the pool. It was a definite social leveler.

I still wonder why the teacher gave us two weeks to acquire swimming suits. I did not know at the time that swimming sans vêtements was a norm for boys that was being phased out. Was it a school board mandate that our teacher did not agree with so he drug his feet? Or was he making a sociological point, showing us that many of our differences were artificial and that bonds of commonality might be forged where we had not expected?

The last class of that week, Friday, was the end of the two-week period allowed for getting suits. Or was it? I reasoned that the third week should actually have begun our ‘suited’ period. Most of the other boys turned out for Friday’s class in suits; five of us did not. Nothing was said by anybody when we lined up along the pool that day. But no one took off their suits to join the five of us, either.

It wasn’t until I quit college in my 3^rd year that I was among people that found being naked almost as natural as being in clothes. I went to live with an eccentric family of two young boys, two adult boys, two adult girls, and their parents. They were not nudists but neither were any of them bashful. This was good because we only had one bathroom.

The house had been built before bathrooms or toilets were indoor features and it looked to me as if the large upstairs bathroom had been installed post hoc in one of the several bedrooms. And it was a ‘bath’ room: it contained a tub, not a shower. And it might as well have had a revolving door, or no door at all, for whoever might be in the tub or on the pot, would have the company of everyone else coming and going. We all pooped, peed, bathed, and brushed teeth in the company of one or several other people, not necessarily of the same sex. Many family conferences ended up in that bathroom while essential bathroom business was conducted.

In the summer of ’68, we made a trip back to their family farm in the Midwest. The Suburban did not have air conditioning and it was hot; and we did not have money for motels so we camped. Well, more properly, we put our sleeping bags out at rest stops and moved off early in the morning before we could be run off by the wardens.  But on the third night, we stayed at a state park and it had a creek running through it. The further east we’d traveled the hotter it had become and we all were sticky and smelly so we decided we’d bathe in the creek at sunset, when we could still see what we were doing but be less likely to offend any of the other people staying in the park – of which there were not many as it was mid-week.

At dusk, all we grabbed soap and towels and headed for the creek bank where we stripped off and waded, soap bars in hand, into the creek. Fortunately, the bottom of the creek was lined with small stones, so it was relatively nice to walk in. And the water was cold but, if you held yourself down in it, you adjusted to the temperature and were able to wet down, lather up, and rinse off in relative comfort. The women washed their hair as they’d brought shampoo as well as soap, which the men borrowed to wash their hair, too. Damp-dry, we got back into our smelly clothes, went back to camp, and changed into clean ones.

That bath was totally refreshing, and not just because we were able to get cool and clean. I think it was because, for once, we were all bathing together. It was a family bath.

The next morning, one of the older brothers and I returned to the creek for a proper swim. Just down from where we’d bathed, the creek’s course narrowed, the channel deepened, and the current flowed more swiftly – but not dangerously so. Behind one big rock there was a pool that accommodated a shallow dive which would carry the swimmer out into the current toward some mild rapids. He and I got out of our kits and explored the pool and the current and then began making the swift loop from the rock to the rapids to back up the opposite bank to cross to the rock, over and over. One of the sisters came down to watch us and was at first a little alarmed by our plunging from the rock into the pool to be carried swiftly downstream toward the rapids but several repetitions convinced her we were quite safe. She stayed upon the bank to watch us, however, just to make certain neither of us got into trouble, until her father came down to call us up to leave.

The family farm was just as hot as the drive to it but the nights were comfortable, if not cool. I slept naked under a sheet – the first night in the farm house was the first time I had ever done so – and I have been sleeping that way ever since. The third night, as I got into bed, I resolved upon an early morning adventure: I would run naked through the corn.

Now, if a person were to run down the rows of corn, he would receive scratches from the edges of the leaves as his reward. But the harvester had been through the middle of the corn patch, for some reason, with trucks behind it, leaving a great corridor with tire prints in which the stubble had been crushed. Here was easy, scratch-free running. I had tentatively explored the corridor that day, had not been able to determine where it went, but had been inspired for my lark the next morning.

I awoke at dawn, dressed and carried my shoes to the kitchen, where I put them on and quietly and went out the back door.

The corridor in the corn was shaped like a T. From the farm yard behind the house, it ran north a short way and then went east and west. (I have always thought farmers began harvesting corn by going around the field from the outside working in, like lawn-mowing, or up and down from one side end to the other, until it is all gone. It seemed weird that a harvester would be driven into the corn in the middle of a field and then to the right and left, but what did I know?) I walked into the corridor until I got to the top of the T. There, I undressed, put my shoes back on, and speculated as to which way I should go. West was as good as east, so I went west.

The sun was faintly warm on my back and buttocks, the air faintly stirring. I could feel it move over the little hairs that covered my body. (I have read or heard the term ‘caress’ applied to air moving over those little hairs. That is exactly what it feels like: a gentle caress.) After walking a few yards, I began to feel as if I were coated with Teflon and smooth: there was no resistance to any movement I made. This generated a strange elation in me and I began to run – and running felt even better for it produced a wind over my whole body.

Much to my surprise, the corridor soon ended in a huge atrium where, apparently, they had turned the harvester and truck around! I stopped in the center of it to contemplate this wonder (for why would they do such an odd thing?) and to enjoy the tingly feeling of perspiration evaporating from my skin. Ah, well. Back the other way. This run was longer and, by the time I came to the end of it at the fence line and the road, I was properly sweating.

Across the road, I saw Mr Slavenhoek’s pig corral and decided to look in on the pigs. Looking back, I’m not sure what I was thinking because the corral was not very far off the road and a car could have come along at any moment; but one never did and I wandered along the rails looking at the pigs until I had cooled off.  After a bit, I crossed the road again to the corn field and walked happily back to my clothes, sorry that my lark had come to an end but vowing I would repeat the outing next morning.

I never went out in the corn again during the remainder of our stay there. Every night, I told myself that I would rise early and go but family events or projects or just plain fatigue always seemed to get in the way. We took a different route back to Washington, not staying near any creeks that afforded a communal bath. I lived through one more summer with that family and then moved on.

And what of today?

Well, the corn fields are a long way off, in distance and in time. But there is a lane in a secluded wood here, arched over by vine maples, ending in a shady atrium. I sometimes walk it now, soothed by patches of sun on my back and drifts of a breeze that caresses my body, and I feel again that I am covered in Teflon and am elated by the freedom.

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Copyright © Kenneth E Ely February 2017