I blame my children.
The 3 a.m. diaper changes. The Ferberizing. The teenage years. Tuition. Driving lessons. Their taste in “music.” By the time my kids were through with me, a one-time champion of slumber, I had become a sleep-starved, bleary-eyed zombie.
A typical night: I go to bed at eleven, doze fitfully until three, get up to pee, and then stare at the ceiling until 6:45 a.m., when the dog comes in to remind me that it’s time for the day’s first session of fetch. As I haul myself out of bed, the one thought I have—the one thought that will hang over me like a cloud for the rest of the day—is that I can’t wait to go back to bed. Sixteen hours later, I go back to bed, and it happens all over again. Nights are hell. Days are even worse.
Except, that is, at the cottage.
Is it the air? The water? The call of the loon? The trees? All of the above? I don’t care. All I know is that at the cottage, I sleep. I sleep deeply, resonantly, soundly, and joyfully. And as dawn spreads over the lake, I rise from the depths and find that I am happy to be awake.
Nudity at the cottage: Yes or heck no?
But getting up presents a new problem, namely actually getting up. Because if I don’t get things just right, I’ll sit on the couch yawning until lunch. And as years of research have proven, there is only one way to optimally transition from deepest sleep to ideal wakefulness—jumping in the lake. Naked.
You stand, toes curled over the dock edge, squeamishly frightened of the imagined chill. Then you jump. For a breathless instant you are in that quantum zone of being neither on land nor in water. Then comes the plunge. Bubbles. The green, endless void. The always strange feeling of water up your nose. You swim in a lazy arc to the ladder and pull yourself up onto the dock.
There are, admittedly, challenges, the most obvious being the possibility that someone might see me. Morning nakedness is the one occasion where I don’t detest PWCs, because I can hear them coming. Self-propelled watercraft are my nemeses. My worst fear is that a canoe trip of middle-aged women paddles into view, munching GORP as they point and giggle.
The difference between nudist and naturist
There is also the issue of the dog. He is a Labrador, which means if you jump in the water, he is genetically programmed to jump directly on top of you, which is all the more ridiculous when you’re naked. I throw a stick. But he gives me a look that says, I refuse to retrieve such a small and pathetic stick. I have to zip back to shore to get a more formidable offering. It occurs to me I should put my towel back on, but I think, To hell with it, and dash back naked, and as I bend over to reach a piece of driftwood under a hemlock bough, legs splayed, one hand on the ground and the other extended, I realize this would be the absolute worst moment for that canoe trip of middle-aged ladies to arrive.
Last summer, a kayaker, some guy from a couple bays over, stopped to chat. This was post-plunge. All he sees is my head in the water, so he pulls over, all friendly-like. It is strange talking to someone who isn’t naked when you are naked. It’s even stranger when they don’t know you are naked.
But you go with it. You play the part of the swimming cottager, like you are at an audition. You act so ultra-normal—treading water, talking about, say, dock bumpers or how we could really use some rain—that it can’t possibly seem normal. And then you’re seized by the thought, Maybe he does know I’m naked? Maybe he’s also acting ultra-normal and the whole reason he stopped is because he thought not stopping would be an admission that he knew I was naked and he didn’t want to seem like he was fleeing? Or maybe he paddled over, realized I was naked, but by that point, it was too late.
The best nude beaches in Canada
Why not just wear a bathing suit? Because it doesn’t work. It’s just wrong. It’s wrong the way wearing ski boots to bed is wrong or wearing oven mitts at a funeral is wrong.
I emerge from the lake reborn. I walk over to my towel, dry my face and hair, wrap it round my waist, and walk up the stairs. The air is perfect. Inside the cottage, I pour a cup of coffee and sit, bareback against the dry upholstery. I take a sip and stare out at the lake.
This article was originally published in the June/July 2025 issue of Cottage Life.
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