From the Publisher: Odds and Ends

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Arnold G. York

Some clouds were black; it looked like rain but it never happened, except for a little drizzle on Pt. Dume. Last year’s announcement that the great California drought was over was apparently a bit premature. If we don’t get some rain in March, the legislature has a number of very restrictive measures they’re going to enact to try and save water.

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The auto traffic along the California coast has gotten so bad that they’re beginning to look again at some old solutions like ferry travel. It may seem far-fetched, but a number of years ago, Pacific Coast Highway was blocked by a gigantic rock that slid onto the highway in the general vicinity of Big Rock, meaning no auto traffic possible in either direction. Some people left a car on both sides of the slide. They drove up, parked their car, walked through (as there was enough room for a few pedestrians) and then got into their other car to go home or to work. For a while, there was a ferryboat that ran from Malibu Pier to Santa Monica Pier but once the highway was cleared, people went back to their old habit of driving. The new ferryboat they’re talking about would be from the South Bay area to the Santa Monica Pier. It’s just an idea now but who knows?

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The clash between the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (SMMC) and its satellite, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA), versus the residents of Sycamore Park in mid-Malibu just went to a court-ordered mediation, and they spent an entire day without any success. Apparently, this is headed for a courtroom since Joe Edmiston’s plan seems to be to open the Backbone trail and other mountain trails to PCH access. To accomplish that, he’s buying undeveloped land in the various canyons—some buildable, some not—and claiming that he has a right to invite the general public as his invitees, the same as any other landowner in the canyons. Since these are private roads, generally open only to the landowners and their guests, you can understand the toll on locals when 1,000 people show up on a weekend to go hiking, as has happened with Winding Way. Most visitors are decent but there are always a few slobs. It’s easy to talk about the public’s right of access; the far tougher problem is management of the access, which requires traffic and parking controls, rangers on duty, sanitary facilities and some limitations on the number of people with access at any given time—and all that costs money. The National Park Service as well as State Parks manage their assets and often put limits on access, but, unfortunately, you can’t always say the same for SMMC, and that creates problems when there is heavy usage.

One of things that is apparent is that when you have Malibu locals in battle with public agencies, like SMCC, the city has to engage on behalf of their citizens. It just can’t just wash its hands of the matter, which appears to be its inclination. Broad Beach is a glaring example of this—a citizen’s group (in this case, the Broad Beach GHAD), is trying to fix a beach losing sand by using its own private money, has spent a small fortune trying to solve the problem and has nothing but resistance from all sorts of different government agencies, federal, state and local. It’s not that the government agencies are evil (Although I’m sure that, at times, it must feel that way.); it’s that there are too many of them, with broad powers, deeply conflicting agendas and often very different ideas of what’s important. These battles go on for five, 10, 15 years and no matter how deep the private pockets are, the agencies are all running on the public purse and often seem to feel little inclination to solve the problems quickly or even slowly for that matter.

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And now for something completely different…

The Winter Olympics are on and Karen and I, along with some friends, were watching the Olympic figure skating, men’s and then the pairs competing. They’re beautiful, talented and graceful, and the male skaters in particular are pencil thin. As time goes on, the women appear to be getting buffer and the men slighter—in fact, so much so, that I wondered how the men do it?  I just read an article about the men’s weight problems and apparently they’re kind of like jockeys, always fighting the scale. Anorexia nervosa, which we think of as an exclusively woman’s disease, has apparently also found its way into the world of men’s skaters. I assume there are some competitive advantages to being thinner but it highlights how hard these athletes work and what they have to do to try and win. Some years ago, I knew a fellow whose daughter was an Olympic-quality ice skater. In fact, she went on to win a medal in the Olympics. But the preparation is grueling. It means getting up at 5 a.m. to get ice time at a rink to practice for an hour or two. It means that one of the parents had to be as engaged as the athlete. In this case, there were a number of siblings who were all a little put out because of all this parental attention, and also, family budget went to support the potential contender. It produces a lot of tension and family discord if one kid has Olympic potential and the others do not. Ultimately, the family survived but he told me there were times he wondered if they would all make it as a family. They did but many don’t; many work just as hard and catch a blade or fall, and there is a bad ending. So, we should all appreciate how much they and their families have to give up to make it to the Olympic stage and the size of the gamble they are taking.