Illustration by Barry Blitt

Back in the seventies a nice-looking woman told me she had left a farm commune in the sixties because she got tired of “hoeing naked.” I could see that. In my mind’s eye, I could see her doing it, in fact: hoeing that way. But I didn’t tell her that. I get too worked up, deep down inside, when anything reminds me of the Garden of Eden.

What makes this pertinent now? The economy. It’s regressing rapidly back toward the dawn of humanity, isn’t it? And people are talking once again about having to live off the land. They’re not talking about doing it in the nude, though. That’s good.

A couple I knew in the seventies informed me that they didn’t regard themselves as Americans, but as forest animals. My response was not cool: I snorted. Not that I wanted this couple to be more patriotic, I just doubted they could survive for long in the woods—they did live a good ways back off the road—barefooted.

By the way, people of the North have tried to tell me that the word barefooted is Southern; that barefoot is standard. But “barefooted as a yard dog” is a fuller-bodied expression than John Greenleaf Whittier’s “barefoot boy, with cheek of tan.” The feet involved are not only more pronounced, but more grounded. That -ed at the end is the toes. If you prefer barefooted over barefoot, you are less likely to get romantic about living as a woodland creature or tilling the earth au naturel.

But that couple was sexy, in a desert-island kind of way. Bear in mind that the story of Adam and Eve was the first spicy one to which I was exposed. When I was a boy, there was not a lot of nudity around, especially in Georgia. And by the time nudity became the height of fashion (rendering obsolete, at least for a time, Mark Twain’s observation, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society”), I was married, with children and cats and dogs. I have noticed that children and household animals would prefer the nominal head of household to have clothes on.