We won’t take all the credit, but have you noticed that the NBA Finals are particularly SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE-coded this year? From the looks of my “For You” page, the prospect of the 2025 “God’s Country Finals” seems to have provoked the ire of many a coastal elite, who have been sharing such reflections as, “At the end of the day, at least I don’t live in Indiana.” It’s true that the Hoosier State has many qualifications for the worst state in America, and truer still that my three years there were the worst three of my life, though there is reason to believe that this may have been a “me problem.” Nevertheless, it is this newsletter’s opinion that beauty, wonder, and amusement can be found just about anywhere you look, and your ability to find it is more or less a matter of temperament. Besides that, I’d been bandwagoning America’s Team, the Indiana Pacers, all throughout the playoffs. I figured I’d cross the state line and watch a game or two, and meanwhile try to catch a vibe in Hoosier Country.
I scanned Airbnb’s offerings for Northwest Indiana, a mostly uninspiring blur of camper vans and farm stays, when a headline caught my eye: “TINY HOUSE IN GATED NUDIST COMMUNITY — VALPARAISO, INDIANA.” The place had an outhouse, no running water, and was located within the grounds of the Lake O’ The Woods Club, “a family-friendly nudist club since 1933,” where nudity is mandatory in the lake, pool, and clubhouse. Now, I consider myself to be a reasonably modest woman. But there’s not much that I won’t do in the name of journalism.
As it turns out, Lake O’ The Woods Club is the second-oldest continually operating nudist club in America, settled on 130 acres of forest surrounding Sager Lake. The club was founded by a group of Chicago nudists who’d been driven out of Illinois by local vice crusaders; they drew from a German movement known as Freikörperkultur, or “free body culture,” which promoted social nudity as a counter to industrial urban life. (The Nazis banned German nudist groups in 1933.) Along with questions like “Can I fish nude?” and “Can I run nude on the trails?” on the website’s FAQs (to which they answer a resounding “yes” and “yes”) is a “no photos” policy and emphatic prohibition of all sexual activity: “Lake O’ The Woods is NOT a swingers club, a lifestyle club, nor a place to seek a hookup, unless you’re an RV.” “It’s like summer camp for adults with a family atmosphere!” wrote the owner of the cabin when I asked what to expect, though her messages were generously sprinkled with winky-face emojis.
The month of May in the Midwest had been unseasonably chilly, and though the club’s summer season had begun the week before, the temperature was barely 60° on the Tuesday I arrived. I cruised along the South Shore, past Hammond and through Gary, whose dystopian landscape I have almost come to love — industrial ruins slowly returning to nature — and pulled up to the wooded gate just off State Road 2. “Key in the passcode and park outside the clubhouse,” announced the chipper voice of the gatekeeper. “I’ll be waving at you on the lawn!” Sure enough, a remarkably tan woman of maybe 60 was standing there to greet me wearing nothing but a smile. Just beyond her, a silver-haired man raked the beach volleyball court in an unzipped windbreaker and nothing underneath. By the pool next to the clubhouse lounged two gentlemen about my age, dressed in — well, take a wild guess. “Is this your first time practicing social nudity?” asked the gatekeeper, Barb. “Indeed,” I tried to answer, but what came out sounded more like a death rattle.
Dear reader, I have so far failed to mention that I somehow fully lost my voice the day before arriving and was communicating strictly in alarming rasps and wheezes which I feared would not endear me to Valparaiso’s nude community. As noted previously in this publication, the idea does not escape me that there will come a day in the not-so-distant future when I no longer disarm strangers with my conversational charms, at which point my journalistic beat is basically moot. Until then, I shall hang around in bars talking to strangers, writing the Great American Novel by osmosis. But for now I found myself in Northwest Indiana, functionally mute and imminently nude.
As to the question of when exactly one disrobes: “Most people remove their clothes at their car and then check in,” advised the website’s FAQ. But at the thought of popping off my hoodie while Barb struggled with the club’s new check-in website, I froze. “Steve? Can you help me with the check-in?” she hollered, and over strode the man from the volleyball court, whose package met me at eye level in the lawn chair where I sat. “No touching; no staring; no comments,” the FAQs had warned, but I couldn’t for the life of me find a place to look — surely neither at Steve nor Barb nor at my phone, the use of which I reckoned would make me seem like some narc creep. After what felt like an hour, Barb toured me through the clubhouse, where I was free to shower provided that I show up nude. Beside the fireplace hung two dozen t-shirts printed with the LOWC logo. Go figure.
I drove the Caddy through the woods and to the tiny house, promising myself I would get naked tomorrow. But for now, there was a ½ pound of fried lake perch calling my name. Naturally I’d discovered Johnson’s Fish & Shrimp from none other than friend of the blog Chi BBQ King, who I believe has documented the Northwest Indiana food scene more thoroughly than anyone else alive. He’s got 17 years of intel on the area’s best diners, drive-ins, Indian trucker pop-ups, corned beef strip mall outposts, pierogi restaurants, and the deep-fried gringo tacos weirdly popular in the region. But his 2013 post on the area’s lake perch specials had my attention. I headed northwest to Lake Station, the strip club capital of Northwest Indiana (according to Reddit), where the Swedish fisherman family’s seafood shack opened in 1947. The place is carry-out only, so I devoured my order in the parking lot — top three lake perch of my life, and that’s saying something.
The paradox of Northwest Indiana is that it’s barely Indiana at all. If anything, “the Region” — the nickname for the corner of the state just east of Chicago and just south of the lake — is a rural extension of Chicagoland, separate from Hoosier Country not just in culture but time zone. (Time is a slippery concept in Indiana: the Region uses Central while the rest of the state’s East, and don’t even get them started on Daylight Saving Time.) Region Rats watch Chicago news and root for Chicago sports teams, get the same commercials, and from the beaches of the Indiana Dunes National Park, you can see the Chicago skyline on clear days. And yet the landscape is a fascinating clash of city and country — just past the steep and rugged sand dunes that sweep down into Lake Michigan, apocalyptic steel mills pump black smoke into the sky. It’s farmland, fish fries, and guys in construction neon talking about how kids these days are too gay to fight in wars (as went one sparkling conversation at a bar in Michigan City). But it’s also decent hot dogs, Malort on offer at most bars, and as I would discover at Porter County’s oldest tavern, an abundance of sexy, mean goth hoes.
A good amount of 19th century taverns are still open in the Region, including the Franklin House, established 1857. Forgetting that I was only nominally in Hoosier territory, I rolled in for game four of the Eastern conference finals only to see hockey on every TV screen. “Mind if we put on basketball?” I whispered to the bartender, my shredded vocal cords straining against the sounds of Creed. “Who’s playing?” replied one of the place’s several hot goth barmaids, whose ghost-white face and heavy-handed eyeliner gave her the appearance of a sultry sleep paralysis demon. “Um, the Pacers?” I rasped, and she dispassionately obliged. To my right, a fellow in a leather cowboy hat and a t-shirt which proclaimed “I IDENTIFY AS A PROBLEM” drained an 8-oz. glass of vodka in one enthusiastic gulp.
I awoke to pouring rain on my first morning in the nudist camp, which meant a rather dismal journey to the outhouse and a deferral of my grand plan to free myself from the shackles of apparel. Truthfully, I hoped it’d rain all day. The prospect of returning to the clubhouse inspired some despair, and I was beginning to suspect that I was not, in fact, a naturist, but a run-of-the-mill “textilist” — a non-nude person, in the naturist parlance. (The nudist practice and naturist philosophy go hand in hand, though some prefer the latter term due to misconceptions about nudism’s horny connotations.) In attempt to kick that can a little further down the road, I headed to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, the 20-mile stretch of Lake Michigan’s south shore designated as a national park in 2019. It’s not the most rousing entry in the national parks program, but there is a quiet allure to the land shaped by wind and waves — a network of dunes, wetlands, prairies and woodland forests, animated by what you might call Midwestern magical realism. You could leave with an idea of sand as supernatural: on certain days, visitors can hear the rumble of singing sands, and Mount Baldy, its biggest dune, is known to be alive, wandering an average of four feet every year. Foggy silhouettes of steel mills and transmission towers provide the landscape with a touch of doom, accentuated by the streaking howl of passing trains.
At the park’s eastern edge is Michigan City, home to Indiana’s only lighthouse, the Indiana State Prison, and the Ritz Klub Tavern, which opened 1890 as a Polish buffet. Nowadays it’s the kind of place I like: tin ceilings, Christmas lights, and a full bar at 4 in the afternoon, full of the Region’s hard-working boomers. (“How’s Dave doin’?” “Broke his neck. Still workin’ though.” “How old is he now?” “He’s 83.”) I ordered a reuben sandwich and a $5 High Life, which arrived in a 32-oz. bottle nestled in a paper bag, and spent an hour eavesdropping, mute as I still was. Topics included the “sissification” of professional baseball players and the prospect of Gen Z fighting in the third World War: “These pussies would be looking for their video games and iPods. The Chinese military, they read The Art of War.”
The sky was clear on my last morning in Nude Land, and though the temperature still hovered around 60°, I had no more excuses left — today would be the day. A half-mile hike along the trail around the lake would bring me to the clubhouse, where I could finally shower; I stepped out into the morning chill in sweatpants and a hoodie, then took a deep breath and disrobed once I’d made it past the neighbors. I suppose that it was tolerable to wander through the woods with the wind skimming one’s crevices, through surely there was poison ivy here, to say nothing of mosquitoes... My heart was racing as the path bent towards the clubhouse, outside of which I could now make out the figures of two couples, enrapt in conversation, all of them… wearing clothes!? I approached them on the patio, naked as a jaybird as they sat in jackets and jeans. “Little chilly out today!” a mustached man called out in greeting. I croaked back, “Ya don’t say.”
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