Wreck Beach

An eyeopening look into the history of a place I'd never even heard of before, and now, thanks to Carellin Brooks' diligence, I feel I know all about it. "Best nude beach in the world?" Maybe, but doesn't it get a few points subtracted from its tally based on the difficulty an ordinary person would have reaching it? Fully a quarter of the guidebook is spent talking about how the beach can only be reached by climbing trails that jut out from the highway or bus stops and then staircases that mount up to four hundred steps. Then the horror stories of out of shape victims who manage, finally, to make it down to the beach--but then they collapse and flounder, like whales literally beached on their back, their sluggish limbs unable to move again. And further stories about middle-aged men and women who used to like to go to Wreck Beach but have given it up, it's just too arduous a hike now. What I need is some of those sherpas people hire to carry them in litters up to Mount Everest, like Jon Krakauer wrote about in INTO THIN AIR, but possibly that would be en expensive undertaking even if I could get some "nude activists" to take me there, like the King of the May by general acclaim, on their shoulders. Brooks seems to know everything about the beach, and like the best travel writing she makes you long to be there with her, and yet she points out, humorously or otherwise, the pinpricks in the bubble--the way that, when newbies arrive, they're all excited about spotting some perfect nudes and yet all they find are "wrinkled hippies." She outlines the ideology of "naturism," in which the old school nudists are vehement about the separation of nudism and eros, insisting that the two have nothing to do with each other, whereas as Brooks points out more reasonably, the two are inextricably articulated in the ordinary mind of the citizenry, and might always be. The nudists, led by First Citizen Judy Williams, are disgusted when people actually make love on Wreck Beach, and she called the police one time when she noticed a film crew shooting an X-rated movie on her beloved patch of innocence. Brooks seems to stand aloof from these debates, as though uncertain where to perch on the fence, and her writing, ordinarily lucid, witty and sharp, goes a little lackluster in these spots. But buy this one for the magic, for it takes you to an undiscovered country, one where you might reach out and lay your hand on an anemone, or on one of the pure products of Canada.