"Why be given a body," Katherine Mansfield asked, "if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?" My rare fiddle was first exhibited to a mixed audience in Marin County, Calif., circa 1991, on a nude beach north of the Golden Gate Bridge where leering men failed miserably to impersonate sunbathers. If you didn't mind being addressed while your breasts were scrutinized, it was a fantastic place to go. I also discovered, on the city side of the bridge, the Osento Bath House for Women, which, with its multiculti sister vibe, offered a serene, almost utilitarian clothing-optional experience. But I, the budding naturist, craved something in between the total pervfest and the total perv refuge, a place where a sensual yet risk-free frisson stirred the waters, as when naked men and women, strangers all, share a single, often slimy-bottomed wooden hot tub.

So, my college boyfriend suggested we spend a weekend at Wilbur Hot Springs, a two-and-a-half-hour drive northeast of San Francisco. Wilbur straddles a dirt road in the middle of an 1,800-acre nature preserve. On one side of the road leans Wilbur's turn-of-the-century hotel, cockeyed and rambling, with bunk rooms, a communal kitchen and some private bedrooms; on the opposite side is the "bathhouse," a roof on stilts with fancifully curling eaves that shade a series of long, resistance-pool-shaped tubs. It was there that I learned my first lesson in nude coexistence: your naked body is not the most potentially embarrassing thing about you. If I felt any self-consciousness or anxiety, it was on behalf of my boyfriend's naked body, which exposed more about me than mine did.

Which was not that much of a problem among the earthy yet aloof Wilbur clientele. At Wilbur, nudity is permitted in certain places but not in others, the result being that you feel utterly comfortable while sitting elbow to elbow in water that smells like rotten eggs (in fact, a pleasant smell), but weird and tense when forced to chop vegetables at the kitchen island with strangers whose genitals, now hidden beneath drawstring pants, are vividly familiar to you. After dinner, prepared stiffly and judgmentally by each couple or group of friends, we sat in the common area, flipping through magazines or playing cards. One twosome, a man and a woman of practiced peacenik pretension, dramatized a telling scene from their relationship. The man played a bamboo flute while his wire-thin partner perched at his feet, nibbling a rice cake and gazing up at him with desperate adoration as he ethereally ignored her.

I was smitten. Not with being naked with strangers per se, nor with being naked in nature - because California, unlike New York City, where I now live, is teeming with quasi-secret hot springs. I was interested in the places where a domestic routine is imposed upon a hippie-leaning community that I, without my clothing, could invisibly infiltrate. Far more revelatory than people's sexual organs are their kitchen habits, their reading habits, their romantic relationships in action. After many awkward dinner preps in communal kitchens with strangers whom I'd seen naked, I've realized that the awkwardness has nothing to do with the genital factor. Cooking next to a stranger requires far more intimacy than exposing your body; it's an extension of the shame you occasionally feel while scrutinizing strangers' groceries, their habits and predilections bobbling along the conveyor belt.

The most enjoyable, and friendly, place for human observation that I've found is Orr Hot Springs, 13 miles west of Ukiah, Calif., in the shaded crotch of the oak-and-eucalyptus-sided hills - so enjoyable that I try to go back at least once a year. The Orr décor is funky 1970's Whole Earth Catalog: dark, dank wood and homemade stained-glass windows, along with the lingering odors of wet wool and menthol. There's a communal kitchen featuring kindly suggestive notes on water conservation; a library that has everything from decade-old Vanity Fairs to "The Natural Healing and Nutrition Manual, 1991"; and an English garden tended by an actual Englishwoman. The main hot tub is capable of holding up to six strangers comfortably, more if the foreign flab boundary isn't a concern. About flab and other bodily unruliness: the obsessively hair- and flab-free do not frequent the likes of Orr. Coed hairiness is O.K., as is sag, as is flab, even the kind that bobs gently on the waves created by the languid, in-utero movements of your tub mates. Everyone's comfort with their bodies, however flawed, means that you don't stare as much. Casual eye contact (and eye-body contact) is encouraged, if only because you quickly realize that refusing to register a person achieves the same alienating, even rude, effect as ogling; there is, thus, a certain enjoyable freedom at Orr, to be accepted for who you are: an unexceptionally naked stranger.

Until, of course, you start chatting with your tub mates. Then it becomes clear that, like an American traveling through Cuba, you are engaged in a less-than-ordinary pursuit inspiring both a sense of camaraderie and a vague tingle of competitiveness. I've often been asked, "Is this your first time at Orr?" No, I reply, not without relief (my shaved armpits are enough of an outsider stigma). Then the talk turns to other hot springs. (Orr devotees complain that Harbin Hot Springs, near Calistoga, Calif., is too big, and the New Age vibe is oppressive; Wilbur is more low-key but too small.) Soon you begin exchanging harmless personal details: where you live, what you do. Because the world is an inevitably teensy place, connections with your clothed life begin to accrue. During my last visit, I found myself talking to a couple in their late 20's who were visiting from Portland, Me., which is my hometown and where I was scheduled to give a reading from my novel in two weeks. "You should come!" I urged. As I departed the tub, unselfconsciously flashing my lobster-red bum, I realized that this could create a distressing social situation.

For the most part, however, I've managed to keep a low profile; eavesdropping is more enlightening and requires less pretending. (Of course I know about the homeopathic remedy for acid reflux!) I've listened as a woman asked whether another woman had her Bragg Liquid Aminos on hand or, barring that, tamari sauce. I've watched an irretrievably lonely woman - her loneliness on hold because of Orr's sense of community, as well as the sense that happiness is just a soak away - pad around the garden in her robe, herbal tea in one hand, a book about spiritual self-discovery in the other. I've overheard impassioned people seated around the low Japanese tables - these lifestyle-only inheritors of the 60's radical left - engage in wide-eyed conversations about the threat of genetically engineered food, about fluoride in the water, about vaccines. Where clothes and even gravity are an occasional superfluity, these microscopic menaces take on a dire importance, whereas war, politics and global warming do not weigh as heavily. Here, you fool yourself into believing that you can control an enclosed universe: your own insides.

A native East Coaster, I find this focused self-regard on the mysterious interior fun for a two-day vacation, the hippie equivalent of Civil War role play, but I always leave before my relaxation is counteracted by inbred skepticism. In "Ways of Seeing," the critic John Berger wrote, "To be naked is to be without disguise." My forays into clothing-optional hot springs have been as much about slipping convincingly into a culture that isn't mine and partaking of the pursuit of inner physical purity as though I weren't a stranger to its ways. For this, there is no better disguise than the naked body.