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| Baie Rouge. So pretty! |
It’s a strange thing, not knowing if that person with the
brightly colored bikini bottom is a man or a woman. We sat on the French side of St. Maarten—now Sint Martin—and
what Jackie told me earlier was proving true. There was more topless bathing on this beach.
It seemed that like most things on the island, clothing was
highly unregulated. Even the Dutch
beaches we had been to were clothing optional, and some people decided to opt
out of it altogether.
I’ve never had a problem before, distinguishing sexes on the
beach—woman two piece coverage, man one long piece. It seems pretty simple. But here, you see people with only one piece and you don’t
want to stare too long. Even
though it was our last full day when we went to Baie Rouge it still caught me off guard. And I didn’t want to seem like the uncultured gawking
American. So there were a few
moments when the quick glance over saw tiny bottoms and big man boobs, and I
thought a man was a woman.
It was unsettling to realize I was wrong. It was at least as unsettling to
realize it was an easy mistake to make.
As Jackie said to me quietly while we were swimming, “Hello sir, I like
your bright blue bikini bottoms.”
Before I left for my trip, I was eating lunch with some
people I didn’t know very well from work and one woman close to my mom’s age
said, “You know they have nude beaches there.” She let the implication of that hang in the air and
then felt the need to awkwardly add, “Do you think you’ll try that?”
“Of course. I
can’t think of a better way to spend time with my parents and my brother than
to be topless.”
Okay, I didn’t say that. I might’ve except she might not have heard the sarcasm. Or she might’ve been offended if she
did. But really, who asks someone
going on a family vacation about that possibility? P.S. This story
does not end with me trying it and finding out it’s freeing or liberating. Of course I didn’t try it.
The first day we went to Maho Beach for dinner, though
Andrew and Jackie had only been there for drinks before. “Topless women get free drinks
there. But I doubt we’ll see any,”
one of them had told us on our way over.
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| It's okay, that my brother not wearing a top. |
Okay then.
Andrew continued, “It’s never the people you want to see naked who do
it. It’s just old townies that sit
there at the bar.” Jackie
agreed.
Luckily, in both places, there were better things to see
than topless women.
In Maho, just outside of the restaurant, was the beach where
planes come zooming in just over everyone’s heads to touch down on the short
runway.
The better sight at Baie Rouge was underwater. The rocky
cliff at the end of this beach made it perfect for finding brightly colored
little fishes as we roamed around with snorkeling goggles. I both loved, and felt weird about,
seeing a school of fish right underneath my floating body where I had been
standing a second ago and hadn’t noticed a thing. Close to the rocks there were neon blue fish and fish with
bright yellow stripes. There were
sea urchins and crystal clear water to let you see an entirely different world
(insert Ariel singing in the background here). We convinced my
mom to try it and she loved it—it became her favorite part of the trip—other
than seeing her kids.
When we finally got back to where we were staying, I finally saw what I had suspected—snorkeling had left my back to the sun after my sunscreen had washed off. Part of
my back looked red, but since I’d been wearing a racerback tank suit, I had
what looked like a skunk stripe of white, unburned skin down the middle of the
red.
If I had been bathing topless, I considered, I wouldn’t look like a skunk, but I would look like a lobster. That's not better.
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