More About Tahiti's Nature Man

IT is easy to guffaw at the nudist, and jeer at E. W. Darling, but the “PI Monthly” for February, 1953, at least published his photo graph—a very handsome and dis tinguished face it is.

Mr. Oscar Nordman does not tell a tithe of the Nature Man’s story, which I heard when I visited Darling in Tahiti in 1912.

How did he become a “crank?”

Apparently by the same route which jreates many other nature enthus :sts —ill health. At Stanford Uni versity he contracted tuberculosis, and was told that he had not long to live. Well, that is discouraging to any young man who has no neans to buy himself an expensive jure, and give himself the best Jhance.

“If I’m going to die, I’ll die the way I want to, at least,” he said, [t seemed worth taking a chance on i totally different way of life. He ;ook his clothes off and went to ive in th Q Arizona desert. He ate whatever he could afford and was jasy to prepare: I do not think he was a strict vegetarian. The doctors shook their heads; they said he would merely hasten his end, but somehow it did not!

He threw off the infection and aecame healthier than he had ever asen before, and in his delight and surprize he became slightly be wildered. Perhaps he had stumbled m a truth —that all the petting and ’are of consumptives was wrong?

He had risen from the near-dead, md he wanted to tell the world.

But it laughed at him.

Having lived for a year or more without conventional clothing, and ;aken great pleasure in simple mdity, he began to believe that per haps God and the Indians were not so far wrong as respectable people mought; but it was a lonely life.

He was cold-shouldered everywhere.

By Stephen Haweis

No place in the United States would tolerate his way of life. He tried several, but the respectable always hurried him along; he was despised by people with colds in their noses.

There must be some place, he thought, where a man could live without pills. Eventually he took ship and went to Tahiti.

There he bought a few acres with the last of his slender resources, and built himself a shack. “U.R.

Free 2 D-nude rite Now,” he wrote up for visitors to read, and other similar information. He did not have many visitors, but he worked hard at growing his food, and he kept rabbits. He told me that he allowed the bucks to run free, be cause they would always come home to their does.

Most of the time he wore shorts because they made his work in the bush easier, but the simple life is not an easy one anywhere, and the trouble with a cult is that it mav always turn around and bite you: He often hurried back to his hut when he saw visitors approaching —to take off his trousers! Then life had become too hard, his money ran out, and in 1912 he put on clothes and got a job in the Customs House in Papeete. He loved to go naked, but could not afford it.

Later I heard that he was gone.

When I arrived in San Francisco and saw my first American New Year’s Day celebration, with elderly gentlemen in paper hats, blowing whistles and shaking rattles, the Nature Man’s life did not look so ridiculous or childish, and then sud denly I saw Mr. Darling again.

He passed me so quickly in the passages of the San Francisco Ex aminer Building that I did not speak to him, he did not see me.

He was striding along wearing nothing but shorts and carrying a

sack upon his back containing, pre sumably, his food and all his worldly possessions. The glow of perfect health was still upon him. He was the only man in San Francisco who was not cold on that bleak, damp January morning in 1913.

I do not think that he went to the United States to find a wife, but rather a job and an audience. He still felt that he was an apostle bearing good tidings which he felt would save doctor’s bills, if not the world. He, the tuberculosis patient, was the living proof of the doctrine he preached, but nobody would listen. He was twenty years ahead of the nudist-camp craze.