Running naked in the woods: wilderness living

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Earlier this year, Perseus Books released ‘Naked in the Woods: Joseph Knowles and the Legacy of Frontier Fakery’ by Jim Motovalli; this week, the folks at The Cleanest Line blogged about it.

In 1913, Joseph Knowles, with much fanfare, set out into the Maine wilderness for two months, in nothing but a loincloth, to show how man could live off the land. The media and American audiences ate up his reports — filed in charcoal on birch bark — about life in the woods, surrounded by bears and berries.

‘Above all else I want to emphasize that my living alone in the wilderness for two months without clothing, food, or implements of any kind was not a wonderful thing,’ Knowles went on to write in his book ‘Alone in the Wilderness.’ ‘It was an interesting thing, but it was not wonderful.’ Later a scandal erupted over whether he’d actually lived off the land as he had claimed.

The funny thing is that The Cleanest Line is the blog of the Patagonia Co. ‘Why would these guys send us — an outdoor clothing company — a book about a guy dead-set on proving how unnecessary clothes are for the outdoor experience?’ they ask. The answer they find lies in the way we think about man’s relationship to the natural world.

While Knowles was a nature man, he also set out to prove that man need not fear the wilderness, because he could master it. As one reviewer notes, contemporary environmentalists strive for more ‘harmonious’ balance. Nowadays, instead of walking into the woods naked and walking out in a bearhide, you can keep warm in a store-bought jacket and watch the bears from a safe distance.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Zach Klein via Flickr

Just for fun: a video of Nat King Cole singing ‘Nature Boy’ after the jump.