But Don’t Go Near the Water

Hot days in the City of Angles.

Mommy and little Travis and Shana Lee pack a picnic basket, gather their swimsuits and beach towels and head for the car.

“Where we going?” 5-year-old Shana Lee asks happily.

“Santa Monica Bay,” Mommy says, piling things into the trunk.

Travis, who is 9, stops dead in his tracks. “I’m not swimming in that crap,” he says.

Mommy gasps. Shana Lee stares. “What’s crap?” she asks.

“Stuff from toilets,” Travis says, “and dead dogs, oil, Styrofoam cups . . . “

“Where on earth did you hear that?” Mommy says.

“Miss Evans,” Travis says. “She says it’s crazy to go into the ocean in L.A. She says we could turn into yucky green slime monsters and rot away.”

“Teachers don’t know everything,” Mommy says tightly.

“They know about slime monsters,” Travis insists.

They stand in the driveway arguing. Shana cries. She doesn’t want to be a slime monster.

“All right!” Mommy says, sighing. “We’ll go to Ventura instead!”

And off they go.

That’s a true story. Only the names have been changed to protect the slime monsters.

I hear it all the time. Skip the ocean off L.A. The beaches are closed anyhow. Only surfers ride the fouled waves of Malibu. Affluence on effluence.

*

Miss Evans is right. “You’d be surprised what comes floating down the creeks into the ocean,” Jack Petralia said. He’s director of environmental protection for the county Health Department.

It’s like Travis says. Dead dogs, grease, oil, chemicals, garbage, animal fecal matter, and all that jazz. Evil flotsam comes from storm drains when it rains and from creeks when they flow. And that ain’t all.

Five years ago I wrote about stuff in the Santa Monica Bay. Sludge, raw sewage and carcinogenic croaker fish. I wrote about the bacteria that closed the gleaming shorelines from Long Beach to Malibu.

“Swim there,” everyone warned, “and you die.”

Only the surfers have adapted to the witches’ brew that laps our shores. They, like sharks and alligators, will survive the environmental chaos and rise to the surface of the Darwinian seas. They’ll be blond and blue-eyed and tanned forever and ever.

Sewage came to my attention again last week.

Five miles of beach were shut down when untreated effluence once more gushed into the ocean. Vandals had uncapped a sewage pipe to cause part of the problem. We don’t know what caused the rest of it. We’re working on it.

Maybe a pipe broke, maybe a pump went out, maybe there was illegal dumping, maybe the sewage treatment plant is already out of date, maybe there are just too damned many of us and maybe we’re destined to drown in our own doo-doo.

“Hey, dude,” a surfer said the other day, “we’re gonna surf no matter what!” Excellent.

*

L.A. dumps 400 million gallons of treated sewage a day into the ocean five miles off Playa del Rey. OK, I hear you say, that’s not bad. It’s treated, dude. That’s the best we can do.

But what about the millions of gallons of raw sewage dumped into the ocean last February? Or the 10,000 gallons last November? Or the 120,000 gallons in April, 1990? Or the 8 million gallons in February, 1990? Or the 100,000 gallons in May, 1989? Or the 40 million gallons in 1987?

And that doesn’t count all the stuff that comes down the storm drains and the creeks when it rains, or, hell, when something is just flowing.

Well, Jack Petralia says, it’s getting better. We’re monitoring it more. We’re improving the equipment. There are more environmental organizations agitating to clean up what Petralia calls “something there that shouldn’t be.” Stuff.

But the solution doesn’t lie there, he adds. “People have just got to learn to care.”

I was hoping we wouldn’t have to depend on that.

If we really cared about anything we’d be marching in the street against gangs, against smog, against the cynicism of big business, against bad government, against hunger, against . . . well . . . against people who don’t care.

But we’re not, and we won’t.

Sorry Travis. Sorry Shana Lee. Unless a lot more of us give a damn you’re going to have to keep finding someplace else to romp in the ocean. And the trail may lead farther north as each shoreline is closed.

From L.A. to Ventura. To Santa Cruz. To Eureka. To Seattle. To Ketchikan. To Yakutat . . .

Or we’ll all turn into yucky green slime monsters and all rot away, and only surfers will remain to ride a sea of sewage until the end of time.