This column is rarely about Malibu politics. That’s why it appears in the Life & Arts section instead of the Editorial page. In my days as a reporter and editor, I used every excuse possible to avoid covering City Council and Planning Commission meetings, mostly because I had so much trouble staying awake. It’s the hour, not the company, as they say.
However, recent events compel me to insert my two cents about the escalation of conflict between those who think they own the beaches and those who actually do.
During the many years my family and friends owned property in Malibu, I sometimes saw the California Coastal Commission as a nuisance, wielding enormous power over the lives of residents, often with a heavy hand and little humor.
So it was with some amusement that I viewed the story and picture of Commissioner Sara Wan plopped on the sand at Broad Beach, defying a rent-a-cop astride an ATV and the five sheriff’s deputies he summoned to try to remove her. Naturally, she had documents to prove her right to sit on that particular patch of sand. To prove a point? A publicity stunt? Maybe. Effective? We’ll have to wait and see.
I stayed with my parents when they lived in Malibu Colony, walked my dog on the beach, swam in the surf and sunbathed on the sand. People we didn’t recognize sometimes walked along the shore from Surfrider but never seemed to cause a problem-unlike residents’ dogs running loose and attacking my puppy, who jogged obediently at my side. The Colony had a guarded gate and no public accessways to the beach.
When my parents sold the house and moved to a Malibu Road duplex, they thought nothing of sharing the beach with nonresidents who walked in from the public beach at the west end of the road. It was really no big deal. Celebrity residents generally said hello or nodded and smiled even though they had no idea who I was or if I had any “right” to be there.
Years later, I would spend my lunch and dinner breaks walking onto that beach via public access steps and enjoying a sandwich on the sand if the tide was out. I never saw a rent-a-cop or was asked to shove off. When the tide was high, I walked or bicycled on Malibu Road, one of the only level places near my Civic Center Way condo, which had no beach “rights.” The only other level place to walk was Bluffs Park, and I often thought how nice it would be to have a landscaped bicycle path in the Civic Center. Maybe a few low-key, affordable apartments for seniors (I’d have moved there in a heartbeat). But I suppose that’s not meant to be.
I have always respected celebrities’ need for privacy. I think they’re willing to pay whatever it takes to live in a place where nobody seems to notice who they are. They can shop at the drug store or supermarket, go to the movies, buy an ice cream cone and watch their kids play at the Country Mart, unmolested.
In my editing days, this newspaper had a strict policy about protecting that privacy: no cameras with long lenses hidden in the shrubbery and no ambush interviews. When stars had a project or a book to flog, they or their press agents would seek us out. That worked all around.
Once, when my daughter was to meet me at Coogie’s for lunch, she asked where she could take her 2-year-old to the beach. I told her where the public accessways were on Malibu Road. When I met her later, she was a bit shaken, angry and appeared to have been crying. It seems she had let her son wade in the water, and when he got cold, she moved up onto the dry sand to towel him off and warm up. Her behind had no sooner hit the sand than a “big burly guy” appeared and ordered her off the “private” beach. He set his big, burly dog loose and it knocked her son down, she said. “He threatened to call the sheriff if I didn’t get out immediately. He was so rude and obnoxious, I couldn’t even say anything to him.”
Like Sara Wan, I would have said: Please do call the sheriff so he can cite you for having your dog off leash. And, incidentally, we are seaward of the mean high tide line.
And there’s the rub. The mean high tide line is a moving target. Beach erosion and global warming probably are raising the tide and pushing the line closer to homes. During the last El Niño, huge waves took out several houses, even one or two on Broad Beach.
Obviously, swimmers are better off on public beaches where there are lifeguards and facilities. But to sit quietly and read or eat one’s lunch by the shore should also be an option, even for those who don’t have the means to buy it.
Come on, guys. Lighten up.
And thank you, Sara.