We spent the afternoon filming. Lena moved through the crowd with her camera, capturing footage that would later win awards at a documentary festival in Berlin. She filmed the way the setting sun turned the sunflowers into a wall of molten gold. She filmed the scooters from a low angle, their shadows stretching long across the grass like recumbent giants. And she filmed the nudists.
“He’s a retired ophthalmologist,” she said, laughing. “He’s been naked since 1972. You get used to it. Now, park your beautiful machines by the sunflowers and take off your clothes. Or don’t. We don’t have rules about clothes. We have rules about judgement.” -Candid-HD- Scooters- Sunflowers and Nudists HD
Our arrival on our rumbling scooters caused a ripple of curiosity, not alarm. A woman with silver hair piled on top of her head approached us. She was perhaps seventy, with the posture of a ballet dancer and a necklace made of river stones. “Visitors!” she announced with delight. “Did Bernard find you? He’s our scout. He takes the old Ciao to the ridge every morning to look for lost travelers.” We spent the afternoon filming
“Good,” he said, pulling two cold beers from a cooler that had been hidden behind a sunflower stalk. “Because nobody back home will believe you. They’ll say the resolution was too high to be real. They’ll say the light on the sunflowers was too perfect. They’ll say naked people on scooters are a metaphor for something.” She filmed the scooters from a low angle,
He wasn’t wearing a stitch. No helmet. No sandals. No socks. Just the beard, the scooter, and a confidence that bordered on the messianic. He waved a casual hand, as if naked scooter-riding through a sunflower field were the most normal thing in the world, and vanished down a dirt track.
He handed me a beer. “Tell them it’s not a metaphor. It’s just Tuesday.”