Writing Samples
“Imagine,” I said to my wife Terre after dinner on Saturday. “All these people have seen each other naked.”
“I know,” she said. “I like it.”
* * *
It had all started on Thursday when we had called two complete strangers, two people whom we had never met, and asked if we could stay at their house on Friday and Saturday night. Not surprisingly—at least not to us—they said, “Yes.”
I mean, isn’t everyone’s vacation like this? Doesn’t everybody in Holland treat strangers this way? It seems that all the Dutch we had met do.
* * *
On Friday, Jan and Jitske welcomed two unknown travelers from another continent into their home, gave us a key to their house, and then took us for a tour of the area.
After several hours, we ended the tour at the Bruin Café De Amer, a blues café in the nearby village of Amen, a tiny dot in the northern part of the Netherlands. Many of the finest blues musicians in the world seek out this obscure venue to play before an audience of just 100 people “not for the money,” as the owner puts it, “but for the emotional money.” It is not so much a gig as a pilgrimage. Perhaps then, it is not by chance that the village is named “Amen.”
* * *
Later, at dinner, Jan dropped the bombshell.
“Tomorrow, we are going on a bike ride with our club,” he told us, “and we’ve arranged for you to come. It is 24-kilometres, and then we will have dinner at our clubhouse.”
“Oh, thank you,” Terre said. “That would be lovely.”
“But there is one thing you should know,” he added, studying us carefully for our reactions. “We are nudists, and there may be some naked people walking around.”
Oh.
I looked at my Baptist-reared wife who smiled and said, “Sure. That sounds like fun. We’re in.”
If I hadn’t already been sunburned, I would have turned red.
* * *
Admittedly, not everyone stays in the homes of the locals, getting private tours, being taken to people’s secret swimming holes or favorite pubs in unknown villages in minor provinces, or for bike rides with the nudist club. Most vacations follow the same tourist big-city litany.
But for us, the life of a country is in the people of the towns and villages as well as in the big cities. That’s why we joined an organization called SERVAS (www.SERVAS.org), an international group that operates on the premise that the world would be a better place if we all sat down over dinner and got to know each other. So, people around the world have offered to host travelers who have been pre-screened by SERVAS volunteers. In each country, the local SERVAS organization publishes a directory of hosts that is only available to SERVAS members. The directory includes the languages the hosts speak, their ages, occupations, interests, pets, whether they smoke, if they are anxious for more visitors and other factors to help you make an appropriate choice.
Then you write, e-mail or phone to see if they can accommodate you. You stay no more than two nights unless invited. You bring your own bedding, contribute to the household chores, do some of the cooking and shopping and generally pitch in. This is someone’s home, after all, not a hotel.
In return, you get an insider’s look at life in a country, one you would otherwise never have received and, as we’ve already discovered, find some marvelous new friends, most, but not all, fully-clothed.
* * *
Two days earlier, our previous SERVAS hosts had taken us bike riding as well, but it had been Terre’s first time on a bike in three years. Our hosts had been overly ambitious. What was for them a normal 50-km ride was, for Terre, way too much. It wasn’t that she couldn’t pedal that distance. She just couldn’t sit on the saddle that long. By the end of the ride, she was almost in tears.
The Saturday morning of the ride with the nudist club dawned gray and cloudy, perfect bike riding weather: cool but not cold.
Terre fitted her borrowed bike with a gel-seatcover she had brought from home and gingerly sat down, gently shifting her weight from side to side. Then she smiled.
“Yes,” she said. “I think I can do this.”
* * *
The first leg of the ride would be the real test. An unknown 24-km of roadway and bike trails stretched before us. Would we fall behind all these experienced Dutch cyclists, people virtually born with pedals attached to their feet? Would we get lost in the endless maze of bicycle trails in the woods and moors of northern Holland?
With trepidation, we set out, carefully keeping the cyclists in front of us in sight, trusting that we could keep up until the first rest stop where we had been promised that, if necessary, we could switch to a car. One minute went by. We were okay. Then two minutes. Still no problems. Then three minutes, and Jitske called out, “Coffee break!”
The first fearsome 600 metres of the trip were behind us.
* * *
At the second stop, a club member commented that Terre and I were the only two people wearing bicycle helmets. I explained that bicycle helmets were required by law in Canada. I would never think of getting on a motorcycle without a helmet, and I often rode my bicycle as fast when going down a hill. (Dutch readers may have read about “hills” in books or seen pictures. We have them in Canada, very large ones called “mountains.”)
“When I first started to wear a bicycle helmet,” I said, “it felt very strange to me. But now, I feel naked without it.”
I managed to say this with a straight face.
* * *
At dinner that night, Terre had only one question about the nudist lifestyle. “When you fry bacon, do you do that in the nude, too?”
* * *
For the bike ride and dinner with the nudists, I had decided to leave my camera behind. I thought it might be inappropriate to bring a camera to a nudist club. I didn’t know how these people would feel about an outsider possibly taking pictures. So I just left my camera at the house.
But then we stopped at the windmill in Eenrum where Terre and I were invited into the very top of the mill, a section normally off limits. We were given the cook’s tour of the inner workings of the 143-year-old mechanism. It was a travel writer’s feast, a photographer’s banquet. And I was without cutlery.
* * *
Twenty-four hours earlier, Jan and Jitske had taken us to Camp Westerbork, a Nazi deportation camp for Dutch Jews.
Now, on Saturday evening, we were at a nearby nudist camp where being different is okay; in fact, it is celebrated. Everyone is simply who they are. There are no pretenses, no hiding, no flattering dress lines, no vertical stripes to make you look thinner, no control-top panty hose, no under-wire support bras, nothing to cover your stretch marks or your beer belly.
“That’s what I like about this place,” said Terre. “Everyone can be themselves. They bare everything, and it is accepted.”
* * *
So what did I learn this day?
I learned something new about my wife of twelve years.
And, I learned to never—ever—leave my camera behind, even when going for a bicycle ride with the nudists.
Nearly Naked in the Netherlands
Posted on: The Coast Road Travel Blog
Aug 203, 2005