1:11 p.m. at Hippie Hollow
1:11 p.m. at Hippie Hollow is lake smells and crushed beer cans and butt angels on the rocks. It’s a speedboat towing a water-skier to the tune of OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” It’s triple digits and old-timers in hiking gear—backpacks and outback hats—strutting along the trails like members of a Masonic order to which my husband Lucas and I will inevitably one day be initiated. The Druids, we call them, not without admiration. No shirts, no shorts, no hang-ups.
We drive into the Hill Country from downtown Austin—a once proudly weird city now filling with high-end condos and Teslas—to get reacquainted with Texas’s only public nude park. Turns out Hippie Hollow is undergoing a steady transformation of its own. It’s hotter and drier and more prone to drought along this stretch of the Colorado River than when I last visited a dozen summers ago. Lake Travis is a good twenty feet lower today, and the water’s retreat has left an especially steep, rocky shore. Hiking down to the lip of that green tide, Lucas and I aren’t Austinites anymore. We’re mountain goats given human form. Our swim trunks, left behind, don’t make the transition. Thankfully, our sunglasses and sunhats do.
The twink going by blasts Sarah MacLachlan’s “Building a Mystery” from his phone. Hippie Hollow isn’t just one party song, but four of them cranked up against each other—and the stench of as many different strains of super shitty weed. With his Sambas and long hair, this lanky youth looks like Donatello’s David reimagined by Baz Luhrmann. “I told you we were on the gay side,” Lucas says.
Applying sunscreen back at our condo, I’d been embarrassed by the sorry state of my ball sack: pink and chafed from riding the Peloton in damp bike shorts. I was also worried about coming to a queer hangout in the middle of the monkeypox outbreak. “This kind of fear is the whole problem with misinformation,” Lucas told me. “If we’re not going to be barebacking anyone or sharing a towel, we should be OK.”
The signs in the parking lot dispelled any notion of tomfoolery:
Nude ≠ Lewd.
Warning: Sharp Zebra Mussel Shells. Foot Protection Recommended.
No photos or video allowed in the park.
Now dripping with sweat, I scrape my left flank sliding down a boulder. Using Lucas’ freckled shoulder for support, I hop, cajole, and scoot the rest of the way, right leg shaking, side stinging. Adventures with my disabled body can sometimes be lonely or embarrassing. The flex and strain of our descent somewhat paradoxically dislodges the worry that others might see me. It takes the trashy grandeur of Texas to forget that my legs are scarred and stilted. In the absence of self-recrimination, I find strength in each faulty step. Forget lewd; I hardly remember I’m nude. Trying to not die, I’m just another body, no more or less objectified than anyone else, though hopefully a little more.
It feels good once we hit the water. I bob on my back while orange light fills my closed lids, the floaters in my eyes flaring like amoebas under a microscope.
On the climb back up, I scramble on all fours, mooning what’s left of Lake Travis. “Do you think they can see inside me?” I can hear that speedboat in the distance.
“Like a split cantaloupe,” Lucas says.
A hawk wheels above us as we dry off, Lucas placing his bucket hat over his crotch for added UV protection. Journal resting on my hairy knee, I take in my fellow Hippies: soft-bellied, sagging, skinny, thick, sporting the even spray tans only nature can provide. It’s uncomfortable enough on this knock-off Italian Riviera that I can’t contort into an even vaguely Fellini-worthy pose. Attempting to look sexy is ridiculous, really. In the scorching midday sun, we’re just trying to survive. I suppose there’s a kind of communion in that. Don’t Mess With Texas, we warn. Why Bother?
Laying out on the rocks, it feels like Lucas and I have just taken our spots in a grimy archeological dig, the sky hazy with Saharan dust. Even though it isn’t uncommon for plumes of dust to travel thousands of miles from the west coast of Africa to Central Texas, it’s foreboding in the context of our ongoing heatwave. I can picture our afternoon at Hippie Hollow becoming preserved in time for anthropologists to mine centuries into the future, its amber afterglow radiating out through the millennia to an August when there’s no water left, when the lake is a wavy green mirage, and we are fossils in a chalky Crustaceous basin of limestone and marl, crud in a giant’s eye socket. Maybe they’ll figure us for a penal colony or an apocalyptic cult, human sacrifices to bring the rain. Maybe they’ll think we’re mermen, mistaking what’s left of our desiccated penises for vestigial flippers. They’ll try to decipher the ritualistic purpose of our pool noodles and Yetis, our unread novels, and the little black boxes we ancient Texans believed were connected to the Cloud. Skull used as a scorpion nest, tendons turned to jerky, my meager remains will leave much to the imagination—my bones, like everyone else’s, truly naked at last.
About the Author
Greg Marshall is a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Prose. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, his work has been collected in The Best American Essays and has appeared in Fourth Genre, Foglifter, and Electric Literature, among other publications. Marshall's debut memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It, will be published with Abrams Press in June. He lives in Austin, Texas with his husband. Find him on Twitter @gregrmarshall.
Illustration by Amélie Rey Lescure.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
