Blighted Beach Memoirs

IT’S AMAZING WHAT you find on the beach these days. I was strolling along Venice Beach, trying to have a spiritual encounter with the ocean, when I tripped on a broccoli. Not a random floret, mind you. An entire head of broccoli.

What’s a broccoli doing on the beach, I wondered? It didn’t strike me as the sort of thing that gets mislaid, or accidentally falls out of the combination folding chair / tote. True, it wasn’t a mass of used syringes like you find on New York beaches. But it wasn’t a seashell either.

“Broccoli? What’s unusual about that?” scoffed senior lifeguard Conrad Liberty when I called lifeguard headquarters to ask if there had been a salad bar spill. “There are storm drains and that kind of stuff gets up on the beach. Dead animals--mice, dogs, cats--come out of the storm drains too. Of course,” he added hastily, “we don’t have them wall to wall.”

There isn’t any room. On any sunny Sunday most Southern California beaches look like a gigantic garage sale. I have actually seen video cameras, pillows, playpens, guitars and plastic wading pools strewn across the sand.

People didn’t used to require so much equipment to enjoy the beach. I can understand bringing a small folding chair and a beach towel, even a giant beach towel with a near life-size likeness of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar arching for a skyhook. Or sun block, a sweat shirt, a book, a cold drink and some fruit.

But patio furniture? A different strength sunscreen for each and every body part? A Playmate cooler the size of a compact car? A boom box the size of a station wagon? A portable TV?

“I’ve seen TVs everywhere,” Liberty said. “That is not a good thing to bring, because it’s so bright that you really can’t use it.”

“Why would anyone watch TV when they could watch the ocean?” I asked my ex-husband, a television addict and the only person I know who actively detests the beach.

“It’s just water,” Richard said. “Why would you want to watch that? Usually it’s just dirty water. Would you tell people, ‘Don’t bring a Walkman’ so you can listen to the children screaming?”

I know better than to argue with Richard. For years, he has tried to convince me that the beach is a large ashtray. “How can you relax when you’re lying in cigarette butts?” he asks.

But even less-cynical friends are beginning to complain. “The beach used to be a place to go because it was serene,” Doug said. “But now there’s too much action. If you’re not killed in the time it takes to duck the Frisbee, you’re hit by a softball. It’s like going to the Olympics.”

It’s also like going to the zoo. There are dogs. There are police on horseback ticketing people for bringing the dogs. There are monkeys. There are parrots. “And now they’re bringing reptiles,” Marissa said with a sigh. “When someone sits down next to you with this giant thing coiled around their neck and they say, ‘Touch him, he’s not slimy,’ what can you do besides move your blanket?”

You can pray that the boa gets run over by the “Santa Monica Art Tool,” an enormous sculpted concrete roller that stamps a miniature impression of Los Angeles when it is towed across the sand. I don’t understand why it was necessary to spend $60,000 on a contraption to create a faux sand city when there were already 300,000 people lying there, so I called the Santa Monica Arts Commission.

“You didn’t see people pretending that they were Godzilla and walking over Los Angeles (in the sand)?” asked Henry Korn, executive director.

“Most of the people I saw were just trying to get out of its way,” I said.

“People love the ‘Art Tool,’ “ he assured me. “Have you seen the ‘Singing Beach Chairs?’ “

Yes, I have. And in my opinion, the boundary between the ocean and land is not improved by $17,000 14-foot-high musical chairs. Why not commission art for places that need improvement? The corner of Sepulveda Boulevard and Saticoy Street in Van Nuys springs to mind.

That would be a greater test of the artist’s skill. After all, as advertisers well know, anything looks good next to an ocean: cigarettes, trucks, soda, wine coolers, beer, Dennis Weaver on a horse. There’s even a commercial featuring an air conditioner on the beach, surrounded by sea gulls and test pilot / Right Stuff expert Chuck Yeager.

The air conditioner probably enjoyed the beach more than the new white Chevrolet Beretta I saw being photographed in the surf. It was surrounded by klieg lights, reflective panels, generators, cameras and even a backup black Beretta. (“We’ve got to see which looks better against the ocean,” the assistant director explained.)

A police officer yawned as the crew raced to position the cars in time to catch the last fleeting rays of sunset. “The cars got stuck four times on the way down,” he reported. “They finally sent for someone to build a track.”

“It would have been easier to build a beach,” I suggested.

The sports car was supposed to emerge from the ocean like Venus being born from the wave foam and race merrily along the water’s edge like a frisky pony. The director barked, “Action!” Three seconds later the pony was embedded in the sand up to its axles. “Help!” barked the director. Crew members frantically pushed the car out of the path of the incoming tide.

Suddenly, I realized that my puzzle was backward. The mystery was not “Why is there broccoli on the beach?” The only mystery was “Where is the Hollandaise?”