In the Altogether with the Almighty

There’s a golden beach with a massif looming to the west, at the end of a dirt road in Sonabia, halfway between Bilbao and Santander. The beaches along the coast of Cantabria, Spain are so clean!

We watched some young guys going up a trail and we thought we’d try it. We got up as high as where the rock massif shoots up out of the green, and I said thus far and no further. I wasn’t wearing proper hiking shoes because we hadn’t expected to do much more than visit the beach.

We went WAY high up! The trail was a bit of a goat track and we got up there by not looking backwards, just watching our steps and moving forward.

Down on the beach we had noticed a curious thing. There were 4 or 5 men there, not sitting together or talking to each other, who one by one took off their shorts and walked in their birthday suits to the water’s edge. Separately, each began to walk purposefully across the beachfront, back & forth, back & forth, fait-ing son promenade. Odd. I ventured that it was some kind of walking prayer or meditation, in the altogether with the Almighty.

They were still marching back & forth when we got back. I said, “Bill, why don’t you ask one of them why they are doing that?”

He said he wasn’t about to interrogate a naked man…