River Number Two Beach is a crescent of white sand at the mouth of a river on the Freetown peninsula of Sierra Leone, closed at both ends by rainforest and rock, with the ridge of the Western Area national park standing behind it, and it is owned and run by the village that lives behind it, whose association takes the entry fee, cooks the fish and runs the boats upstream. The peninsula's mountains are the reason the country has its name, since a Portuguese captain sailing past in 1462 called the range the Lion Mountains, and the beach is the finest of the string along its Atlantic side, forty minutes from Freetown on a rough road; the sand runs in one long curve between the river mouth and a rocky headland, coconut palms above the tideline and the forested ridge behind, and where the river pools behind the sandbar the water is fresh, warm and barely waist-deep, calm swimming a few steps from an Atlantic that breaks hard. The village's fishing canoes are hollowed single trunks, painted and patched, and they go out straight through the surf rather than around it, the crews paddling hard into the break.
The beach kitchen cooks whatever the boats brought in, barracuda, lobster or prawns, grilled and carried out to wooden tables set on the sand, and the money goes to the village, which has built a school and a clinic from it. By the end of the rains the river runs full off the mountains and cuts a channel across the sand, and only then is it deep enough for the boatmen to take visitors upstream, past mangrove and into the trees, where the noise of the surf drops away and a waterfall stands at the end. White beach sand is building material in a capital that is building fast, and the villages of the coast guard theirs against the trucks. Humpbacks pass through the bay to the south in September and October. River Number Two is a beach a village kept, and the river behind it is the second swim.