Laborious fruits

Cultivating connections and harvesting the heritage of a nudist family tree

Author’s note: With a little luck, there will be more of these. With some time, there could be plenty. With some effort, they may just make a book. But for now, it’s only this, a personal short (true) story just for paid subscribers. Enjoy.

Under Antone’s apple tree is where I pull to a stop, alongside a large front yard on a sprawling plot of land spotted with several distinct varieties of fruiting trees.

The blonde woman who signals for me to park here is Tawnie, my second cousin once removed. I step out of the rental to greet her and I can finally see her up close. I estimate she is probably in her mid-fifties; I couldn’t ascertain her age from our limited interactions on Facebook before this moment. Above our heads are some of the largest apples I’ve ever seen, hanging languidly like cantaloupes. Tawnie doesn’t bother with any kind of introduction which makes me feel like family already despite our having never met. She talks fast. I wonder if she’s nervous.

“This is Zeke,” Tawnie gestures to a man of maybe fifty-eight who is laboring deliberately between a five-gallon bucket of apples and an old fruit press. I gather he’s her husband. Zeke looks up with a casual wave but quickly returns to scooping mashed skins out of the wooden basin of the press.

Tawnie and I chat for a few minutes, quickly getting to know each other and beginning to find the shape of our ancestral connection. The talk is directionless but intentional. We talk about her grandfather, Michael Johnson, and my great-grandfather, Antone Johnson, brothers separated by almost twenty years who both grew up on the land where we now stand.

Zeke’s ears perk up a little when the gab turns to Antone’s apple trees, the ones under which he’s been toiling. Antone had a penchant for transplanting and growing varieties of plants from all over the country onto their Washington property, a passion he inherited from his dad, Rudolph, who used to bring home a specimen of fauna whenever he traveled to a nudist club in another region. Antone was known to graft fruit trees together. One piece of lore I’ve heard ever since I was a kid visiting my grandma here told of a tree that was once on the far north end of the property, which was said to grow five different types of apples on it.

The reason for my visit

Amid a busy two-week camera gig for a corporate video in downtown Seattle, I decided to make the most of my only day off and set out on a fifty-mile drive south to Yelm, Washington, about an hour and a half away.

I went to the rental place right when they opened and drove down Interstate 5 until I’d cleared the urban areas of Seattle and Tacoma. The monolithic peak of Mount Ranier was looming large on my left, swathed in a layer of morning mist. I continued on smaller tree-lined country roads for another 20 miles until things started to look familiar. I couldn’t have picked a better time, I thought; here in the waning days of October, it seemed my trip was timed perfectly to catch the changing colors of autumn.

The land I was determined to find, where I now stand with Tawnie and Zeke, is a couple of acres in the Bald Hills of Thurston County, and it is home to Pat Johnson—Tawnie’s dad and cousin to my ninety-year-old grandma, Lovina. I’m here to meet Pat and for him to meet me. This land, or at least different segments over the generations, has been in my family for nearly 120 years.

In the five years in which I’ve been actively researching the life and legacy of Rudolph Johnson—Lovina and Pat’s shared grandpa and my great-great-grandfather—I’ve collected all kinds of previously undiscovered images, photos, and film footage of him, his writing and writing about him, newspaper clippings; I’ve recorded interviews with Lovina and a few of her living cousins about their memories of him. I’ve come to manage a Facebook group called Descendants of Rudolph Johnson, through which I’ve connected with at least two dozen previously unknown relatives, all of whom, on some level or another, grew up with stories about their crazy nudist grandfather. Through this work, my family has grown.

Despite Lovina’s repeated insistence that her cousin Pat would have some valuable stories about Rudolph, I have yet been unable to arrange that rendezvous until today.

I’ve visited this land multiple times, most recently in 2006, a few years after Lovina had sold her house to Pat and moved south to Nevada to be closer to her kids (my dad and uncles). Growing up in Nevada, I visited her here in Washington multiple times on summer trips. I have vivid memories of picking blackberries on this land with my great grandpa Antone before he died; memories of catching gardener snakes and banana slugs with my cousin Mikey; stories of Rudolph and the nudists frolicking (I assumed) outside the great stone house; memories of watching Lovina, in her sixties, raising chickens, gardening, cooking, doing backbreaking work and cursing up a storm with an intensity that, even with the boundless energy of a kid, I recognized as impressive.

That’s the nature of this side of my family. They’re unbelievably hard-working, feisty, foul-mouthed, crafty folk who have seemingly no upper limit to what they can accomplish on their own with a little grit and gumption, and they know it. It’s Lovina’s nature. Looking around at Pat’s land, spattered with work trucks and appliances—the construction and yard work he manages to keep up on even in his eighties—it seems clear to me that it’s Pat’s nature, too.

It was Rudolph’s nature, and that’s perhaps why so many of his descendants honor him by proudly embodying these same traits they inherited or cultivated.

Rudy the nudie

Rudolph Johnson is a tall tale figure in my family, with many stories, some true, some embellished through repeated telling. What's verifiably true is that he was born in Denmark and immigrated to the United States with his mother and father as a kid. He joined the Navy at a young age, changing his name from Jensen to Johnson. He bought 160 acres of wooded land and married Mary Prock in 1905. They soon were rearing kids, first Andrew, then Antone, Helen, Thurston, Augusta Mae, and finally Michael, each born consecutively every few years over the course of two decades.

Rudolph Johnson and his apples, c. 1945. Courtesy of the American Nudist Research Library

My grandmother paints her grandfather with a palette of boldness and warmth. My late uncle Teddy’s portrayal was markedly more formidable. “His balls clanked,” he would say. “He could freeze the shit in your bowels just by lookin’ at ya. The son of a bitch was so goddamned tough.”

The picture of Rudy that formed in my mind was of a folk figure, the archetypal benevolent tough guy, a man of contrasts. An immigrant carpenter who etched his mark as a pioneering nudist leader.