Except for the three lifeguards huddled together up in track suits and hoodies, and about a dozen textiles barely less tentative about the day, the beach was empty. To be fair there was a fresh breeze blowing onshore and the surf was a bit excited so for most people, at least the kind that tend to take up one position on the sand, then lie there unmoving – like a dead whale – it might seem a bit cool. But the wind and surf have another effect, that of throwing dead and living sea creatures ashore, which attracts the terns, gulls and sandpipers to make the beach much more appealing by their presence and their cries.
I’m not the dead whale variety of beach person so I set off southwards along the tide line at a determined pace. I’d already lost shoes and shirt to my backpack and wanted to put the requisite distance between myself and the textiles before losing the shorts as well. One thousand paces suffices for that. I pressed onward walking along and realizing the other benefit of the wind – no flies. Bonus!
At about three kms I ditched the backpack, added some low SPF sunblock and continued southward, reaching the end of the barrier dune at a point 6.5 kms from the boardwalk without have seen another person. This was good, in that it meant no hassles with wandering textiles. It was also unfortunate, in that all those kms of white sand beach were being severely underutilized. There should have been hundreds of naturists on the beach. There is ample room for thousands. Yet there I was, alone except for the seabirds, some seals at the very end of the dune and, oh yeah, the medusids being slopped ashore by the surf. It is a good year for medusids and therefore a poor season for swimming right now. But the jellyfish will be gone by August so its no big deal.
I turned about and headed back up the beach to regain my backpack – there was still no sign of other naturists, or of textiles this far down the beach. Since I was still not inclined to simply loll about on the sand I paused to build a sangar and a stockade where there was ample driftwood and a supply of lobster buoys close to hand. It seemed the least I could do. This summer’s weather having been, so far at least, particularly suckworthy there hadn’t been many built this year. This accomplished, I trekked northward again.
In the distance I could see that the textile beach was enjoying much more business than it had when I had arrived. It wasn’t crowded but there were now some dozens of people there. When I reached the magic line in the sand – the Pudenda Line, the line at which distance people without binoculars might conceivably be able to tell if one is naked – I paused to step into a pair of shorts.
Farther up the beach, quite near the lifeguard station, I reached the first of the textiles. These people are serious consumers of fabric. Here it was, a nice day at the beach – a day on which the clothen had chosen to go to the beach – and very few of them had any skin in the game. Only a few children and a couple of women were actually wearing swimsuits. The rest were swaddled in combinations of track suits, hoodies and knee-length shorts or, in several cases, parkas! I swear to God there were people – male and female, young and old – wearing parkas on the beach. It made me feel cold just to look at these goofballs. There were two attractive young women wearing bikinis and working on their tans. Beside them sat their boyfriends huddled in fleece pants and hoodies – hoods up – shivering as though they were actually cold. Odd, the women seemed comfortable enough.
Maybe that is one of the problems of attracting young people to naturism these days – the young men are a bunch of wussies!
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