Julian Is Where the Living Is Easy : Rural Crawl Appeals to Those Wary of Suburban Sprawl

Mike Edwards had been an optician in San Diego for 16 years. He never liked the job or the city.

He struggled with an inward battle until his wife won a lawsuit over use of the Dalkon Shield.

The Edwardses took their money and headed to the hills of Montana to live for a while. His wife still has health problems, Edwards said, but the couple now have a new life in Julian, a town of 1,500 in the mountains 60 miles northeast of San Diego.

Edwards was born and reared in “America’s Finest City,” as San Diego is called, but he said he never saw what the sloganeers found bountiful.

He saw a city eroding before his eyes.

“I think it’s crazy,” he said of urban life in the 1980s. “When I was growing up, you could drive from San Diego to L.A. and it was nothing but orange groves for miles and miles. Same way with San Jose and that area.

“We’ve taken our prime agricultural land and put asphalt on top of it. Is that insane . . . or is that insane?”

New Breed in Town

Edwards, 40, is part of a new breed in Julian, which is to ex-yuppies--young urban professionals--what Miami once was to burned-out executives. These days Julian is teeming with former fast-track ladder-climbers who decided, as Edwards puts it, who you are is more important than what you are.

Edwards is a gentle man with a craggy face and a flowing gray-flecked beard. He owns Julian Gems and Pearls, one of several new businesses in a bustling shopping mall--Julian’s first, opened a little more than a year ago.

His 14-year-old son approaches for a short conversation, and the speech and manner seem different--a throwback to another time. The boy says, “yes, sir,” “no, sir,” and “thank you.”

As an optician, Edwards hardly climbed ladders in corporate empires. He tired, however, of “an endless urban life,” of “paycheck-to-paycheck” with weekends a too-short, shallow reprieve. He gave it up to exist on “$8,000 to $9,000 a year.”

“I just decided I’d retire and enjoy life while I could still walk,” he said with a laugh.

Edwards is one of many in Julian who talk of retiring prematurely--while still holding jobs. Mostly, they talk of a need to fade away from the high-stress, low-personal-yield existence of a workaday commuter.

They talk of smog and traffic as spiritual pitfalls.

Gary Passavanti, 33, has lived in Julian eight years. He moved from Anaheim, where “wasted days and wasted nights” were spent recruiting and training agents for Prudential Insurance Co.

Escape From the City

“Too fast a pace and not rewarding enough,” he said. “Living in the city was never rewarding. To escape the rigors of the day, I’d often drive to the country, just to get the feeling of relaxing. I grew up in Chicago and came to hate the feeling of living in concrete.”

Passavanti makes custom cabinets. He takes pride in making them sans particle board. The designs are hand-carved and expensive. Passavanti likes the pace of Julian, “knowing my neighbors, who’s around me.

“It’s difficult to put a finger on,” he said. “The charisma, I mean. It’s something like rolling the calendar back to the ‘50s, where you knew your neighbors and could count on ‘em. Where you walk down the street and it’s not just a sea of nameless faces.”

Still, Passavanti craves privacy. His gate, often locked, is never challenged. When he wants company, he can have it.

But he sees stormy issues in Julian’s future. Parking and long lines are chronic problems on weekends, when it’s estimated 10,000 people make the pilgrimage to Julian to visit its quaint shops and restaurants and sample the seasonal mountain weather. Booming development is debated, as are water and sewer issues.

Passavanti sees the grim possibility of Julian becoming no better than the urban “cesspools” its yuppie emigres have sacrificed to avoid.

“You see it in Ramona,” he said of a nearby town riddled with franchises and fast food. “To see people who have been here less than 10 years, planning and developing--that worries me. But nothing much bothers me about living here. Not now anyway.”

Magda Beckman, 35, feels the same way. She grew up in Guatemala and met her husband, a former Hewlett-Packard computer chief, in San Diego. They lived for a while in Mira Mesa, where Beckman felt alienated, lost, utterly confused.

“I wasn’t wild about San Diego--boy, can you say that again!” she said. “It’s so much better here. Small-community life--healthier. San Diego was tract homes, everybody next to each other, keeping up with the Joneses, pulling weeds on weekends. My God, what a turn-off!”

Beckman likes the fact that her two children walk to school and play outside with the wonder of budding naturalists. San Diego friends often ask, “What do you guys do up there?” to which she replies, “A hell of a lot more than we did in San Diego!”

She found suburban life a “cold, empty, sterile, never-know-your-neighbors” existence. In Julian even weeknights are filled with Trivial Pursuit and “hours of meaningful conversation.”

Beckman, who owns Julian’s Toy Chest, said she and her husband, Bill, 45, made a compromise not uncommon among Julian’s new breed. They surrendered the big-bucks income in exchange for life here.

Jim Kendall, 41, owner of Kendall’s Korner (a local cafe and doughnut shop), and the Bison Trading Co. and Gallery, shares Beckman’s values. Still, he sometimes misses the fast track.

Kendall was western division sales manager for a company that manufactures and markets picture frames. He said he misses Los Angeles and Orange counties--the proximity to golf, tennis and cool ocean water. His children, ages 12 and 15, grew up in Colorado and never got used to Los Angeles, he said. Kendall and his wife tried Julian--and the children fell in love with it. Julian is the kind of place children “never want to leave.”

Kendall likes Julian not so much for the pace but mainly for the “crazies” and intellectuals it somehow draws. He knows of one well-known court official with a second home in the Julian hills--a weekend hermit who guards privacy with the zealousness of a palace guard.

He knows of a visiting professor from Hungary, who plans to stay. He knows of an ex-Jesuit priest from Brazil.

Keeping a Low Profile

“A lot of folks come here just to keep a low profile,” he said. “And a lot just pick Julian as a place to get off the train for a while. The list is longer than you might imagine.”

Ron Miller, 46, is another who’s currently “off the train.” According to neighbors, Miller is an ace at arranging flowers.

Miller tired of Hollywood, La Jolla and Del Mar. He still maintains a house in Del Mar, which he left only recently, but his home is Julian.

“I tried to open a smaller store in Del Mar (after 18 years in La Jolla),” he said, “but it just got bigger and bigger.”

He laughed.

“And now, the same thing is happening here!”

As he spoke, Miller was surrounded by newcomers to the Julian Floral Emporium, off Main Street. He likes being the town florist. No longer do high school students have to drive to Ramona for prom night corsages.

He likes Julian’s four seasons, with traces of snow. And unlike Passavanti and Edwards, he doesn’t mind encroaching development. He welcomes it.

“I see us trying to accommodate larger crowds with places to stay, places to eat, and that’s good,” he said. “When that happens, it’ll be smoother for everyone. I see Julian as a Seaport Village-type area. A lot of people drove up here to do Christmas shopping. I hope they can do that in the future.”

Jerry Edwards doesn’t.

Edwards, 43, moved from Iowa, mainly to avoid a booming mobile home business.

“There isn’t anything to do up here,” he said, scratching his beard, pausing for what seemed like ages, until a punch line suddenly arrived. “And I like that. I enjoy the climate, the atmosphere, the beauty of creation.”

However, he deplores those ever-larger weekend crowds. He resents the “snobby big-city attitude” of San Diegans and Angelenos who drive in, bringing their stress with them.

“That’s why they come up here,” he said, pausing. “To get rid of stress. But when they leave, the dogs howl all Sunday night. Now think about that.”

Edwards said he and his daughter, who works in a bakery, felt resentment as new arrivals. It’s a feeling increasingly common in a town where lifelong Julianites struggle to accept the values and life styles of transient yuppies.

“A lot of them don’t want you here to stay,” said Edwards, manning the counter of the town’s only video-rental store. “You have to prove yourself. Find a place to fit in. But it’s pretty much that way anywhere. Society is pretty much set up like that, isn’t it?”

Carl Focarelli, 29, found in his case that society had drafted anything but a happy script. He was making $27 an hour handling asbestos, watching friends get sick and sometimes die. His was a good living, a terrifying life.

Focarelli risked his income on a gamble--moving to Julian to open Calico’s, a small cafe in the downtown mall. He, his wife and two children, ages 3 and 2, came here a year and half ago from San Diego.

Born in Cliffside Park, N.J., Focarelli is a lean, sinewy man with an open smile and a knack for making a diner feel welcome. Calico’s is already a No. 1 high-school hangout--due partly to being open past 6, when most everything closes. Its knickknacks and toys, square tables and blue chairs are a frequent backdrop to the rustle of textbooks. Homework is as much a pastime as high school gossip.

Focarelli moved to Julian, not liking the feeling of leaving home before his children awoke, getting home after they’d gone to bed. Not knowing if he, too, had ingested some chemical his body didn’t need. He tipped the baseball cap back on his head and said, “The wife and I, we’re hardly putting money in the bank. But we’re paying ourselves, in more ways than one.”

He paused.

“This time, it’s a good living and a good life.”