Reflections on a Beach Blanket: Westerners Prefer a Little Distance : Customs: Californians flee cities to find privacy outdoors; Easterners go on vacation to talk to one another, which they don’t often do in cities.

Porpoises ply the waters off both the New Jersey shore and California coast, but the similarities between the populations inhabiting the two seashores end there. Even beachgoers differ in the way they lay their blankets down. Westerners prefer to sit apart. Easterners tend to self-congest, on narrow strands of sand where all the action is. Perfectly ordinary habits carry implications, conveying in this instance why cities differ from coast to coast. Big cities like those of the East have little place in the growing West.

The first boardwalk in the United States was constructed in Cape May, N.J., to facilitate masses of beachgoers lying cheek to cheek, their umbrellas--rented from nearby kiosks--bumping up against each other. It remains that way today. Beach tags are required within the city limits, at 10 bucks a season--cheap compared with ski lifts, I suppose. The tag inspector walks the sand, checking out swimsuits, to ensure tags are all displayed under penalty of law. It’s a cushy job, to say the least.

Just a few miles away at Poverty Beach or at the lighthouse to the south, beaches are sparsely populated. Instead, the loons and herons gather in nearby marshes, unobserved except for birders. There’s no place to promenade or interrupt a tanning session with arcades, crab cakes and fries.

There’s a certain love of tackiness about the Jersey shore. People like to cluster, buy gaudy trinkets and digest fried fat. They like to promenade and eat. It’s not just Jersey, though. It’s that way up and down the eastern seaboard. It’s also true in Europe, where kilometers of deserted beaches are punctuated by mobs of huddled masses.

I prefer the interstices between resorts, avoiding boardwalks and the crowds. A California favorite of mine is Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, just north of Big Sur State Park. At the end of an obscure road dotted with turnouts and potholes lies one of the world’s most spectacular beaches, with waves crashing through windows in the rocks, seals, gulls and sand dunes. People visit there in families or with friends--or even by themselves--tranquilized by nature rather than kiosks and arcades.

At the northern end of Pfeiffer Beach, farthest from the road, some sunbathe in the nude. And lovers occasionally seek out its isolation. Those who engage in sandy acts of intimacy are not always exhibitionists. They simply look at nature as a place for privacy. Those who find their privacy behind apartment doors in eastern cities crowd together on sidewalks, city squares and boardwalks. Californians take their cities very differently, as public places to retreat from, finding privacy in the Great Outdoors. Easterners, on the other hand, gather on vacation to talk with one another the way they would not often do in the cities where they live.

It isn’t really that surprising that people on vacation take a vacation from themselves--Westerners withdraw and Easterners engage. But there’s more to this than that. As the population shifts from east to west, city life is changing too. That change is worth considering as the model American megalopolis becomes Los Angeles, rather than New York.

Eastern urban anonymity was built against a background of community. As the communities began to fray, anonymity took over, but the premise still remains that everyone is part of things. The homeless and the rich are both New Yorkers. With lessened stress from being on vacation, eastern urban dwellers return to their native state again, feeling openly comfortable in crowds. So, they congregate in bunches on beaches or promenade on the boardwalk. The same thing can be seen in cafes of Paris or piazzas of Italy. This is the way most European cities and those modeled after them work. All such city dwellers see themselves as members of a club, whether it be in Boston, Mexico City or Madrid.

Things are different in Southern California, where the big-city concept does not hold. Orange County, for example, has no central city. Los Angeles is, at best, a holding company for several different towns, from Westwood to Highland Park. The Los Angeles City Council is not the council of a city but only a committee representing different interest groups, a smaller version of Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors. City Hall is more a landmark than a seat of political power.

As Angelenos and Orange County residents lay their blankets down, their tendency to lie apart is symptomatic of an inner distance they’ve achieved. There is no common city they’re a member of. Only on the outskirts of Los Angeles do real towns remain, like Santa Barbara and Riverside.

It is one thing to be a part of a larger whole that is fragmenting, such as the fate faced by New Yorkers or suburbanites commuting to a dying urban center. It is quite another to distance yourself from city identity altogether, not to be a member of the city where you live. It is this second model that’s currently evolving in Southern California, counties without centers, cities without hearts. Instead of a European model for city life and city ways, in Southern California we have created a rather different scene, of neighborhoods and counties, without big cities in between.

This is an important difference between Southern California and the rest of the urban world. Once beach-blanket implications sink into consciousness, new opportunities can be seized for solving urban problems. Big city government can be de-emphasized in favor of neighborhood councils and regional and county legislation.

Los Angeles and Orange counties are closer to each other philosophically than either would dare admit. This offers a solution for our future in Southern California and other places, too. By abandoning the illusion that we live in one big city, we might be able to get things done which can’t be done back East, as we retain a sense of local neighborhood while living regionally.