Times They Are A-Changin’

Sex was discovered in the primeval swamps of Africa about 900 million years ago, when tiny, self-fertilizing protozoa learned that there was a better way of making babies. The method was refined by the French some years later and the practice has remained fairly constant ever since.

Nudism as a social practice was created by a group of unhappy Germans about 100 years ago to protest the rigid moral attitudes of the 19th century. Naked men and women interacted freely in private clubs that allowed looking and drooling but little else.

The link between nudity and sex, however, was inevitable, since, in general, participating parties must remove their clothes in order to fully enjoy the, er, situation. Trouble followed.

The combination was seen by Christian fundamentalists and others of a similar nature as pure evil. They stamped nudism with the mark of the devil and announced, in somewhat lyrical terms, that nudity was lewdity.

In other words, removing one’s clothes for reasons other than, say, a nice hot bath or preparing to don a pair of flannel jammies at bedtime creates the potential for animalistic behavior beyond acceptable bounds. One look at your nude self in the mirror and out the window you go, howling and panting.

Which brings me to Topanga’s Elysium Fields.

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The Fields, as it is known around Joe’s Market, is a bucolic, clothing-optional camp nestled among the trees on six acres just above Topanga Canyon Boulevard. It was named after that paradise in Greek mythology where heroes, undoubtedly naked, went after being granted immortality.

Topanga’s Elysium Fields, established in 1968, has proved in recent days that it is not immortal. It was inherited by the two daughters of Ed Lange, the camp’s founder, who died six years ago. They placed it on the market recently, and rumor has it that a group of fully clothed physicians wants it as a retreat for cancer patients.

Thus will end the last vestige of a free-floating style that has characterized Topanga from its inception. Oddly, Elysium Fields will fall, not from the machinations of the mouth-frothing moralists who have been after it for decades, but from financial considerations. When you’ve got something worth $2.6 million, it’s tough not to think of cashing out. They are looking for a new spot, but who else wants a nudist camp in the neighborhood?

It was Lange, a onetime freelance photographer, who led a defense against those in and out of government who considered Elysium Fields a kind of sex school. Mike Antonovich, God’s best friend on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, was one of those Lange battled.

But then Mike got married and no doubt discovered nudity wasn’t half bad and left the camp alone. Lange won other fights to close the place and, just as peace was prevailing between the clothed and the unclothed, he died and the era began to end.

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The demise of the Fields in a way symbolizes Topanga’s fading free spirit. What we have now is a replacement of cabins with million-dollar mansions occupied by those who belong, not in a canyon, but next door to Aaron Spelling’s castle, possibly the ugliest structure in the Western Hemisphere.

Forget laid back. Forget mellow. Earth mothers have given way to eager stage mothers who push their kids into glossy performances at Topanga Elementary School, where once kids just had fun being kids. BMWs and Porsches crowd streets once occupied by VW buses and battered pickups.

That Elysium Fields is going is no surprise. I’m just glad the moralists aren’t shutting it down. Ed Lange’s idea of paradise never did include sex, but they thought it did. Maybe they hoped it did. “How,” he asked me once, “can they do it when they’re all out there swimming or playing volleyball?”

I visited Lange at the camp once (well, actually, twice) and saw only one person nude. A woman served us coffee on Lange’s porch. When she was finished, she took off a robe and, well, there she was.

Sure I looked, because, you know, she was right in front of me. I didn’t look very long, however, because wives have a way of knowing what’s been going on. I’d come home and Cinelli would study me and say, “Been looking at nude women, have we?”

I’ll miss Elysium Fields, but not for that reason. It’s just that the camp told us nudity was OK and didn’t necessarily equate with lust. There never was trouble at the Fields during all of its 32 years.

But soon it will be going, just like the psychedelic-painted hippie bus across the street, and I wanted to say goodbye. Times, Bobby Dylan sang, are a-changin’. I guess.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com