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My first encounter with the National Park Police came on a fine summer day in the Great Smoky Mountains in the August of 1993. Before that day I had been a model visitor, quiet and considerate, taking only photographs and leaving only footprints as I was so often beseeched to do. But the experience loosed something wild in me, something mean, and I fear that I shall never set foot in a national park again — to say nothing of national forests — without committing some act of petty indecency.

A friend and I, who shall remain nameless, had taken a splendid hike up the Chimney Tops, a pair of slender rocky peaks on the western side of the Smokies. (The friend, at least, shall remain nameless: my name is evident enough at the top of this page for all who care to know. In truth, the friend is no more nameless than I, for he has a name indeed, and a very fitting one I might add; it is just that his name shall not be revealed here.) It was late in the afternoon, around 5 p.m., and it was decided that a swim was in order. I knew just the spot: a secluded swimming hole sunk deep in a gorge, known to very few and unmarked on any map.

We reached the spot, stripped as was our notion, and took a refreshing swim in the mountain water before stopping to sun ourselves on a nearby rock. We were talking aimlessly of columbine and carburetors when I chanced to glance to my immediate right and there spy a large and rather stern officer of the peace, staring silently at us from his streamside perch. The officer, a certain David Carver of Sevierville, Tenn., told us he had been standing there watching us for more than five minutes. Gulp. He ordered us to put on our clothes and follow him to his squad car.

Now, I realize that in some cities people pay good money to strip naked and be watched by burly men in policemen’s costume, but I assure you this was not our intent. At the car, Officer Carver took down all of our pertinent info, radioed headquarters, and generally waddled around in a solemn and officious manner. (There was no need, I suppose, to frisk us.) After allowing us enough time to tire of his antics, he reinvigorated us with news of the charge: Indecent Exposure. He expected we’d want to pay the fine, a modest $50 for nonaggravated nudity, but he was duty-bound to tell us we could contest it in court if we wished. See you in court, tree-boy.

For the record, allow me to state that I do not walk around naked in my daily affairs; indeed, I am generally quite bashful when it comes to such immodest behavior. However, I maintain to this day that there was nothing indecent about my actions on the afternoon in question. I further claim that we were enjoying the swimming hole as God intended, and if Jesus had been there he’d have lost the loincloth too, but that is a minor theological point and cannot be debated here in any depth. Officer Carver argued, with obvious feeling, that he could not tolerate such a display where a stray “child” might see us. To this I respond that no unaccompanied child could reasonably have found the spot, being unmarked, without a trail, and a hundred steep downhill yards from the nearest road. Had a child chanced upon me in my natural state, I would have been embarrassed, but the possibility never crossed my mind. (Officer Carver had only stumbled across us because he was searching for the perpetrators of an illegal campfire. Imagine his surprise when he found stark raving perverts instead.)

“Natural state” is a charming euphemism for nudity. It pales, however, compared to the regal “in all his glory,” which I ran across in a high school Latin textbook. It appeared in a second year translation in which some Roman “chica,” who apparently had Jupiter in some kind of hard spot, demanded by way of a bribe to see the brawny god “in all his glory.” We were about to trip past this phrase as yet another in a semester’s full of unnecessary poetic embellishments when I pondered the phrase, and upon interrogation, forced a scandalous confession from my teacher that my suspicions were true. You go, girl.

When my Mom heard the charge she hit the ceiling. “You’ll never teach kindergarten again!” she bellowed. True enough, as far as it goes, although I had never taught kindergarten before, and had no plans to start. Personally, I relished the thought of going before some dour, sour-faced old Baptist judge in Sevierville — a man no doubt with upright principles, a man with brimstone on his breath, a man for whom frivolous nudity was a contradiction in terms, for whom all exposure was indecent, regardless of the circumstances, a man who would not abide such hedonistic paganism in his jurisdiction, so help him God — and trying to explain just what I was doing down by one of his swimming holes in all of my glory.

But it was not to be. Two days before my court date I got a call from a repentant Officer Carver, his tail tucked firmly between his legs. Seems he’d been lambasted back at the head office by a supervisor who felt he’d been a “little harsh,” who sympathized with our cause, who’d probably skinny-dipped a bit himself as a youth (if not last week), who might have been to the swimming hole in question, who knew, by God (there He is again), that the only proper way to enjoy it was in the altogether — as a matter of course, as a matter of respect, as a matter of reverence. Halleluia.

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My second skirmish with the national park police, or tree fuzz as I had since learned to call them, came three years later in the cozy confines of Swiftcurrent Lodge in Glacier National Park. It was also the result of my recreational improprieties — my lust for life I like to think — and again I was saved by some nameless benefactor deep within the National Park Service bureaucracy. (My feeling is that most NPS bureaucrats don’t want to be bureaucrats: they want to be trees. God bless’em.)

I had gone to Glacier to visit a friend of mine who was working as a line cook at the lodge; we were housed in the employee quarters, a grim collection of “unimproved” shacks clustered behind the lodge’s restaurant. It was two in the morning and everyone was drunk on hooch. Quite drunk. (The hooch in question was a strong homemade wine sprung from fermented grapefruit juice and yeast; the recipe had been given them by an ex-convict Blackfoot who had picked up the skill while in the pokey.)

Being both of us Tennesseans by birth and Texans by fate, we understood that the best thing to do when drunk on homemade wine is to grab your instruments and get to pickin’. Shortly we had commenced a genuine hootenanny in the abandoned dining room of the Swiftcurrent Lodge. We played for a couple of hours, picking and singing amidst fevered calls to “pass the hooch,” and I was ensconced firmly, if not stably, in front of the lodge’s upright grand. A small crowd from the employees’ village had come to watch. (There are some places, believe it or not, where live music — no matter how bad — is still an occasion. Glacier National Park is one of them.)

We were knee-deep into a runaway C blues boogie — the sort of which I specialize in — when my friend, on banjo, began nodding at me and grinning, a conspiratorial look in his eyes. I took it as a signal to bring it up a notch, and so I renewed my assault upon the eighty-eights, losing in precision what I gained in volume, and happy for it. I played this way for some minutes before launching my patented too-much-hooch three-minute blues turnaround grand finale, which is designed to beat the audience into submission if not respect. As the last trembling chords were issuing from now bruised fingertips, I turned to my left and found two NPS officers clearly unimpressed with my recital. As with Officer Carver, they had been watching (again with a certain prurient fascination, I imagine) for better than five minutes. The rest of our audience was long gone.

“We would appreciate it,” the severe magistrate at hand said with mock politeness, “if you stopped playing when we came into the room.” They used to say the same to Elvis.

Needless to say, the hootenanny ended abruptly, and authoritarian disapproval was again much in evidence. Names were taken, lectures delivered, merrymakers chased. The charge: Disrupting the Peace. (Another groundless charge: we were well received by all those within plausible earshot. I can produce sworn testimony to that effect.) Again, the charges were dropped before

I had a chance to deliver a stirring courtroom soliloquy on the occasional necessity of doing things in a loud and naked way. Again a supervisor saw more spirit than harm in my actions and persuaded the officers to leave me be, free to pursue my pointless but oh-so-gratifying anarchies as I wished. A good decision, by my mind, but they best be careful. A coddled criminal, as any erstwhile Republican ideologue will tell you, grows more dangerous, and I must admit I’m developing a taste for life on the criminal edge. Catch me if you can.

(Jay Hardwig is a teacher and writer who lives in Asheville. He can be reached at smardwig@charter.net)