People vs. Peabody : Lifestyle: Laurence Peabody was happy with the rustic life on his six country acres but county officials said it was just too rustic.

There can be no questioning Laurence Peabody’s communion with nature. A glistening black raven glides above the chaparral and scrub brush below the barren eastern slopes of Palomar Mountain and lands squarely on Peabody’s head. Just like that.

And there can be no doubt of Peabody’s disdain for bureaucracy. Driven by a court order, he wields a chain saw and slices his 50-foot-long mobile home into 10-foot sections like some huge loaf of bread. Just like that.

That’s what it’s come to, in this matter of The People vs. Peabody, of bureaucracy versus rugged individualism.

Peabody is losing.

A Vista Municipal Court judge, siding with the county Department of Planning and Land Use, has ruled that the structures on Peabody’s 6-acre knoll--the old mobile home, a vacation trailer and a geodesic dome--are illegal and must go.

He has until Sept. 10 to get rid of them, or face a year in jail.

There wouldn’t be a problem if Peabody had a legal home on his 6-acre spread. But he doesn’t, county officials say.

The 1950s-era mobile home is too old to serve as a home, the county said. The geodesic dome doesn’t have building permits and is little more than a storage shed, so it can’t qualify as a home. And the vacation trailer can only be stored on property if there’s a home on it--and none of the other structures qualify as a home, so the trailer has to go, too.

This is all quite maddening to Peabody, who has lived on the property for 11 years and, if it weren’t for someone who apparently complained about his lifestyle, would be untouched today by the hand of enforcement officers.

But somebody did complain, the county did find violations, a municipal court jury did agree he was in violation of county codes, and so now Peabody has begun to clear his property.

The mobile home is being reduced to 10-foot-long sections, he said, so they’ll ultimately qualify as storage sheds. But even then, he would need a legal residence to make the storage sheds legal. He won’t say what his plans are for the geodesic dome or the vacation trailer--or whether he’ll construct a legally bona fide home on the property.

But he says he’s got nowhere else to go. “The system is declaring me homeless, even though I’ve got 6 acres of land to live on.

“Maybe some engineer will send me the plans for one of those 220-square-foot efficiency dwelling units.”

Peabody, 43, bought the property 16 years ago, when he was living in the San Fernando Valley and working as a welder--and searching for the best air quality in Southern California. His homework pointed to this northern San Diego County hamlet of Sunshine Summit, just up the highway on California 79 from Warner Springs, a place that’s part time-share golf resort and part cowboy-and-Indian country, nearly 100 miles from the bureaucrats of downtown San Diego.

Peabody moved here 11 years ago and was doing just fine, thank you, pursuing his minimalist lifestyle.

The chaparral and manzanita and ribbonwood provide him with his firewood for cooking and evening heat. A small solar panel recharges a car battery. Holes in the ground are his sewage system. A well gives him water, which he pumps to the surface with the motor of an old rototiller and which he stores in various containers atop the hill. Through gravity feed, he waters his garden and takes showers by standing inside a child’s plastic wading pool, the tepid water spilling through a Squirt soda can.

He has his favorite boulders on which to perch, and his favorite lawn chair from which to absorb a sweeping vista to the northwest punctuated by the top of Mt. Baldy, some 60 miles away.

To Peabody, all of this is home. To the county, none of it is.

“If he wishes to continue to live on the property, he has to do it through a conventionally built house, or obtain a permit to place a mobile home on the land that would qualify as a full-time residence,” says Sue Gray, the county’s building code enforcement officer. “And once he has a legal residence, he’d be able to store those other vehicles on the property.”

The county is quite generous about what kinds of structures and vehicles can be stored on private property--as long as there’s a legal residence on the property, Gray said.

“But if there’s not a home, then it becomes a storage lot, and that’s not appropriate in a residential zone,” she said. Even a residential lot as large as this.

The county district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Peabody, doesn’t feel too sorry for him.

“He can stay on his property with a minimum of alteration to his lifestyle. All he’s got to do is comply with some simple rules that are for everyone’s benefit,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Gary Rempel.

“We feel he can comply with the regulations without interrupting his lifestyle, which we don’t generally quarrel with,” Rempel said. “But he can’t keep digging a hole under a different tree every day, hoping he doesn’t find the same hole twice.”

Peabody says the experience has shown him that “there’s no common sense, no justice, no compassion” in contemporary law to accommodate someone with his pioneering bent.

“Here I am, living on my own land, recycling my water and aluminum and batteries, doing everything that the media and the environmentalists have told me to do, and I’m a criminal--and that I would be legal if I’d just live in a tract home,” he complains.

Peabody holds no job and has no source of income. He has drained his savings and is living, he says, on borrowed money. He gets by on $100 a week--enough to buy food and other necessities to supplement what he gathers and grows on his own land, and what he scavenges from garbage dumps.

He has no car to travel to distant jobs and says he’s had every minimum-pay job he can find in this neck of the woods.

“Besides, taking care of my property--cutting wood, taking care of the garden, pumping water--is my full-time job.”

And clearly he doesn’t have the money to build himself a legal home. He says he couldn’t even afford the cost of all the permits.

“I had hoped (Vista Municipal Court Judge Marguerite L. Wagner) would have found that while I may have been in violation of the letter of the law, that by her sentence (to clear the property), she’d be creating a greater problem than she’s resolving. But she didn’t see it that way, and now she’s created a homeless person, which isn’t solving a problem at all.”

Will Peabody still be sleeping on his property Sept. 11? He won’t say, but it’s clear he doesn’t intend to abandon his property altogether.

“I’d rather be illegal--and safe--sleeping on my own property than sleeping under some bridge underpass somewhere with other homeless people,” he said. “The smartest thing I could do is sell my property and go on welfare, but that wouldn’t encourage self-sufficiency. If the county would just leave me alone, I would continue to live on my land, working my ass off being industrious. But they don’t want me to do that. They want me to be a consumer.”

“In court, it was the People of the state of California versus me. The people are the offended party, according to the system. But if the people knew what was happening to me, they wouldn’t want their names on the court documents as the offended party.

“You can’t apply coastal-urban attitudes to the backcountry.”

Peabody’s case is being appealed to the Superior Court. His court-appointed appellate attorney is John Don, who says he’ll be “concentrating on the Constitutional right of Mr. Peabody to live the way of life that he has chosen.”

But he concedes that in cases like this, the ultimate resolution comes legislatively through new law, and not by contesting existing laws in the courts.

“I could argue that they’re essentially taking his property, which is unconstitutional, but they’re not,” Don said. “They’re simply making it impossible for him to live on it.

“What gets me most about this case is that there are other people out there, living in violation of county zoning ordinances, but for one reason or another, the county is not going after them. They’re only going after a few, like Mr. Peabody.”

County officials concede that there are other people out there, other Peabodys, who are living in violation of the law.

“It’s a fact of life,” says Gray, the enforcement officer. “We respond to public complaints. We don’t go out looking for them.

“Mr. Peabody is an interesting case. He has what he feels is a lifestyle which he wants to preserve, and I’m a government official who has to follow through on the fact that the state of California, and the county, don’t recognize his as a viable lifestyle.”