Frills-Free Lifestyle Gets Tangled in Red Tape : Backcountry: Code enforcers threaten his Spartan way of life from all sides.

Meet Laurence Peabody: rugged individualist by some standards, lawbreaker by others.

He lives near the scrawny little hamlet of Sunshine Summit, tucked beneath the eastern slopes of Palomar Mountain.

On a 6-acre knoll peppered with chaparral and manzanita, lilac and ribbon wood, he sleeps at night inside a weathered 1950s-vintage mobile home.

He has no sewers or even a septic tank. Every day, he digs a hole next to a tree. Another day, another tree.

He has no electricity; a small solar panel recharges a car battery.

He’s got no running water; he pumps it out of the ground, 40 to 60 feet below the crusty surface, and stores it in a tank and an old water bed bladder he salvaged from a garbage Dumpster.

He showers outside, in a plastic-enclosed stall of sorts. Standing in a child’s plastic wading pool, he opens the hose valve from the gravity-feed tank up the hill, and is sprinkled by water that sprays through, appropriately enough, a Squirt soda pop can dangling a couple of inches above his head.

I’m a live-and-let-live kind of a guy, he says; so as long as I’m not bothering anybody, leave me alone.

But somebody in these parts is not leaving Peabody alone. Somebody--Peabody’s not sure who, but he figures it could be just about any one of his neighbors--complained to the county about his way of life. And now county bureaucrats are taking Laurence Peabody to court.

That mobile home he’s living in? It was built in the ‘50s or ‘60s, by Peabody’s own admission. The county only allows people to live in mobile homes if they’ve been constructed after 1971, and if they also meet certain other standards. There’s citation No. 1.

That vacation trailer on Peabody’s property? It can’t be stored there unless there’s a bona fide, honest-to-goodness home on the property. And there’s not. Citation No. 2.

Nice geodesic dome, Peabody. Erected it yourself, eh? Use for storage, huh? Where’s the building permit for it? There’s No. 3.

So Laurence Peabody is going to court next week in Vista for a preliminary hearing to determine if he should face trial on the various misdemeanor violations that the county is alleging.

Peabody doesn’t deny any of the allegations. But he’s going to fight the county anyway. He says he’s being picked on and, moreover, he’s being denied his constitutional right to live as he pleases as long as he doesn’t bother others. Pursuit of happiness and all that.

“There are very few legal anythings out here,” Peabody says, his voice soft and slow. He raises his arm and draws it from one end of the horizon line to the other. Look at that trailer someone’s living in illegally, he says. And that one, and that one over there, and that one, too.

“The county is trying to solve its homeless problem, yet they’re going to force me to become homeless if I can’t live here any longer,” Peabody complains. “I’m not a drain on society, so what’s the county trying to accomplish? They want to put me in jail for six months, and then make me a homeless person living in Balboa Park? If they do that, then I will be a drain on society, a burden.

“Not only do I not have the money to build myself a house, I don’t even have enough money to apply for the permits,” he said. “Besides, this isn’t just the only lifestyle I can afford; it’s my lifestyle by choice, to live this basically. I cherish this.”

Part of what he values is sitting in a lawn chair atop a large granite boulder, from where he looks out over the neighbors below him to the southeast.

At dusk, he cooks over an open fire, stoked by the wood he’s cut off his own property, and looks out to the northwest, a sweeping vista that is punctuated by the top of Mt. Baldy, about 60 miles away.

But even out here, where at midday the loudest sound is the gentle breeze tickling 15-foot manzanitas, the bureaucracy still reigns, and county officials say Peabody has to live by its rules, philosophy aside.

“The county’s desire is not for people to be forced to live on the streets. But we are trying to establish minimal standards of living, both for his sake and that of his neighbors,” said Sue Gray, the county’s principal code enforcement officer.

“The older (mobile home) coaches are not built to the standard that they can continue to be maintained adequately as full-time, permanent residences,” Gray said. “Besides, there’s the aesthetics value, and what it does to adjoining property values when there’s a trailer that’s certainly not a house, on property next to regular homes.”

County zoning regulations, Gray notes, are land-use compromises, establishing the limits of what’s proper, and what’s not, in a given neighborhood.

Said Peabody: “My job is to challenge those limits, as an American. Don’t I have the right to live in whatever kind of shelter I want?”

Besides, Peabody says, he’s not the only person living in substandard housing in the rough-and-ready backcountry, so why pick on him?

“We act only on the complaints that are brought to our attention,” Gray said. “We don’t have enough staffing to patrol the county. It’s just too big, and our staff is too small.”

And, although she concedes there may be any number of people living in illegal trailers, Peabody is nonetheless one of the worst offenders.

“Even people living illegally in trailers usually have hookups for sewer facilities,” she said. “They may be illegal hookups, for that matter, but at least they’ve got them.”

Peabody’s run-in with county bureaucrats is big talk in this little place that’s notable mostly for its general store and small, homey restaurant, where the $1.99 breakfast special will get you pancakes and eggs and bacon, and you can sit on the front porch and watch the hay trucks drive by.

It’s not just the pickle he’s got himself in, folks here say. It’s the whole irony of it.

After all, Laurence Peabody is one of the people who fought the county on putting a landfill down the highway. That would pollute the ground water, Peabody said.

And Laurence Peabody was the point man in opposing the cattle company that wanted to establish several thousand head of cattle just down the street from Peabody, on Paradise Valley Road. The company planned on exporting its pricey beef to Japan, but Peabody complained of the dust that would be kicked up, polluting his air.

Peabody knows how the bureaucratic process works and uses it to stop this and that; now the bureaucracy has closed its jaws on him.

Although some Sunshine Summit people speak kindly of Peabody’s work against the landfill and cattle ranch, others say they have no use for his personal intrusion into their daily lives.

“He helped get rid of that feed (beef) lot. People give him credit for that,” said Shawn Esterline, 20, who lives down the street from Peabody, in a mobile home park with his parents. “But he’s a real nuisance. He sits up there on his rock and spies on everybody, looking down on us with binoculars and getting the sheriff out here to bust kids. He’s like the local law enforcement.

“If I’m out shooting somewhere, he’ll give me papers about the county’s shooting ordinance and how I shouldn’t be doing that,” Esterline said. “He messes with everyone. He’s like a one-man Neighborhood Watch.”

Added neighbor Julie Gregor, who lives just below Peabody’s rocky perch: “It doesn’t seem we can do anything around here that pleases him. He’s always getting in people’s business.”

She displayed a letter Peabody once wrote her:

“Please pardon my intrusion but, the plants that are growing in the area previously used as horse pasture are called ragweed. It produces countless sharp stickery seeds and is one of the most serious producers of a type of pollen that many people are severely allergic to, during the months of August and September.

“It needs to be destroyed NOW, before next year’s crop of seeds is allowed to mature. We will all win if you have the area disked under, and your property will again look nice.

“I am willing to put my money where my mouth is, and pay half the cost of this effort. Thanks.”

It was one of several letters--and photocopies of county regulations--that Peabody had sent her, Gregor said. Others had to do with her dogs running loose, and of the behavior of her children.

“Nobody can have a good time and enjoy themselves without him complaining,” she said. “I’m not personally bothered by how he lives, if he’d just do his own thing and leave the rest of us alone, too.”

Peabody takes the criticism with pride.

“I tried to establish a Neighborhood Watch out here, but nobody wanted to cooperate with me or participate,” he complained. “What are they hiding?”

About his missives and personal interventions in neighborhood affairs, he said: “If they’re accusing me of public education, that’s absolute fact. If they make a problem that affects me, I’ll try to handle the problem. When they crank up their boom boxes, I’ll hand them a copy of the county’s noise ordinance.”

He has complained about target shooters, of off-road vehicles, of illegal dumping, of loose dogs.

Peabody says he believes the people who turned him in to the county are neighbors he suspected of cultivating marijuana. The Sheriff’s Department arrested a nearby resident, and shortly thereafter the county showed up at his place, saying they were acting on a complaint.

Now he sees his way of life threatened, a life he searched far and wide to find.

As a teen-ager, he lived in the San Fernando Valley and recoiled at the smog--smog so bad, he said, that breathing was a struggle and it was all he could do after school to go home and rest.

A welder by trade, he embarked on a challenge to find “the cleanest air” in Southern California. He studied air pollution records and, on smoggy days, would drive around Southern California in search of the bluest sky. He decided it was here, near Warner Springs and below the observatories atop Palomar Mountain.

Fortified by his life’s savings, he bought the property 15 years ago and moved onto it 10 years ago. For nine of those years he enjoyed what he considered the good life. He has virtually drained his savings and acknowledges living on borrowed money. No time for a job, he says; there’s too much work around here.

“I’ve never challenged anyone’s right to be on this planet,” he said, “and I wish people wouldn’t challenge my right.”