Nude Beaches, What Really Goes On

I was born in a sea-side town where 20 years ago someone came up with the bright idea of opening a nude-beach. This didn't go well with the more conventional folks in our home-town and the wise people in the City-Council decided to drawn a line. Literally a line: at the entrance of the beach you could go to the right side if you wanted to keep the bathing-suit on and to the left side it had to come off.

At the time we were young and curious, but not that liberated, and decided to go to the beach but turn right. But we decided to spread the towels close to the division-line and just see and wait what was going to happen.We put on our (at the time very popular) mirrored pilot sunglasses, got out the flask containing coffee and we were waiting for some excitement. It was a small town, and perhaps someone we knew was brave enough to go left. It was still early, around ten and we waited.

The right side of the beach became rather overcrowded after a couple of hours, and by twelve you could not find a place to sit anymore. The left side was eerily empty, you could see sand stretching out to the horizon. If you have ever watched Bay-Watch, that was what we all expected: but then naked. Young gods and goddesses minus the red bathing gear. Rippling muscles, sun-tanned from top to bottom, preferably playing beach-volleyball. We waited. By now some people were taking out the binoculars, perhaps there were some nude-bathers lurking in the dunes. Disappointed they lowered the binoculars again.

Finally it happened: a family turned left. Somewhat surprised they looked around at the space. Then they looked to the right and started the process of taking out the towels, umbrella and food. We all looked as if we were definitely not interested; all of a sudden everybody was reading the newspaper. But behind the sunglasses we kept an eye on them. There was a grandmother of at least 70,an older man, a mother of 40, and a couple of young kids, toddlers. They looked around them, shrugged their shoulders and took all their clothes off. Just like that. And started taking out their lunch. We looked away, ashamed of ourselves. Here was an ordinary family, having an outing at the beach, albeit without any clothes on.

No, these people didn't look like anybody on Bay-Watch, they had grey hair, wrinkles and their figures were not slim and nicely stretched out over the bones. But they looked like they had done a lot of living and hard working, had had babies and breast-fed them. They were not afraid to show it. And there they were: all alone on miles and miles of white sand.

The next day the beach looked very different. There was no division-line anymore. People could sit wherever they wanted. We turned left this time. And from then on people made up their own minds about going nude or not. There were fully clad folks and topless and nude people all mixing together. Some were still on the look-out for David Hasselhoff though.