There was a pause. Then he blushed. “No pun intended.”
From the distance, carried on a warm breeze, came the sound. Not birdsong. Not wind. It was the low, electric whirr-thrum of a scooter engine, but higher pitched, almost playful. A moment later, a flash of scarlet emerged from a corridor of sunflowers. It was a Piaggio Ciao, a vintage moped, ridden by a man with a magnificent gray beard and absolutely nothing else.
“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,” whispered Lena, our documentarian. “This is pure, unedited life.”
We stayed until the stars came out, a billion pinpricks of light far sharper than any camera could capture. And when we finally rode away, our headlights carving tunnels through the dark, the scent of sunflower pollen and warm engine oil clung to our clothes. We weren’t naked. But for the first time all day, we felt a little overdressed.
“You got the shot?” he asked me, nodding at Lena’s camera.
We followed the dirt track.
“Beautiful lines,” he said. “Like a naked woman.”
As the golden hour approached, painting everything in a buttery, forgiving light, Bernard the ophthalmologist returned on his Ciao. He parked next to our fleet and stretched his bare legs.
The road to the Val d’Or region wasn’t on any official map distributed by the tourist board. It was a thin, sun-bleached ribbon of asphalt that curved through a landscape that seemed to be slowly waking from a geological nap. Our convoy was modest: three Vespas, a vintage Lambretta, and a modern electric scooter that hummed like a contented bee. We weren’t bikers. Bikers wear leather and frown. We wore linen shirts, polarized sunglasses, and the kind of easy smiles reserved for people who have discovered that the journey matters more than the destination—though the destination, as we would soon learn, was utterly unforgettable.
We exchanged glances. “Did we just hallucinate a nude Santa on a moped?” asked Marco, who was filming everything on his 4K handheld rig.
“We got everything,” I said.
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.
But the magic of the format is that it captures the peripheral. In the background of one shot, a man tried to light a camp stove with a flint, his concentration absolute. In another, two women played chess, their fingers hovering over carved wooden pieces. A child—a toddler who had not yet learned that clothes were a thing—chased a grasshopper with a shriek of joy. The footage was crisp. The colors were surreal: the violent yellow of the sunflowers, the pastel blue of the sky, the warm earth tones of human skin.
Below us lay the Plateau du Soleil. It was an ocean of Helianthus annuus , stretching for miles. Every flower, every single one, had turned its face in the same direction, creating a vast, tessellated carpet of gold and brown. The air was thick with the dusty, honeyed scent of pollen. It was the kind of view that demands silence. But silence wasn’t what we got.