Late, Great Beach Party All Over in Huntington

Who among us hasn’t whiled away a dreamy midnight on the beach, tossing wood into a campfire, necking on a blanket, cramming puffy marshmallows on a coat hanger like birds on a wire?

Everyone feels a tad younger at water’s edge, and can’t help reliving childhood memories of shell collecting and hot dogs and sand in their s’mores.

And so a shred of innocence was lost this weekend when Orange County’s most famous stretch of beach for the last time stayed open until midnight. From now on, everybody’s off the beach by 10. Most of the county’s coastal cities either have or plan to close their beaches earlier too.

Urban woes like guns and drunken brawls have crept onto the beaches, and even a few Huntington Beach lifeguards have been assaulted. Budgets are too tight these days to add staff to police the shoreline. And state officials say they had no choice but to try curbing problems by scooting people out sooner.

The decision isn’t popular.

“The beach is a public domain, it’s really our beach, and I don’t like being told when to leave,” said Cyndee Ely, 27, of Huntington Beach, who spent Saturday night with a dozen friends around the state beach campfire.

Others sadly contemplated having to find new places to go.

“The beach is such a cheap thing to do with friends,” said Patrick Broderick, 18, of Cypress as lifeguards told him and his friends it was closing time. “I guess we’ll have to go do something else. Maybe bowling .”

Tonight marks the beginning of a new 10 p.m. curfew at Huntington and Bolsa Chica state beaches. Fearing late-night beach goers would simply move down the sand, the municipal beach, stretching from Beach Boulevard north to about 2 1/2 miles past the Huntington Beach Pier, also began a 10 p.m. curfew, which started Saturday. The city of Newport Beach will probably do the same.

This weekend, then, thousands of people, knowingly or not, witnessed the end of a particularly Southern California tradition: howling on the moonlit beach until midnight.

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A couple of free spirits roamed along the beach Friday night with romance in mind. Ivan McLean, 31, of Garden Grove and a native of the Cayman Islands, strolled hand-in-hand with girlfriend Sherry Hinckley, 31, of San Bernardino. She carried their blanket along on their last night before the curfew took hold.

“That kind of bad! It not like that back home,” McLean said wistfully. “I thought here you could look at the stars as long as you want.”

The couple had left Hinckley’s two children with a baby-sitter and escaped for some privacy.

“We’re not exactly kids, but just to lay back and look at the stars, to kick off your shoes and walk in the sand, well, it makes you feel like a kid,” Hinckley said.

“And the sky! The solitude and serenity--I find a lot of it on the beach,” McLean said passionately. “Oh! It’s kind of hard to believe a man can look at the sky and not believe there’s a God.”

In her fishing hat and flannel shirt, Stacy Cooper, a 17-year-old Los Alamitos High School student, was dressed for a long night on the sand.

Then state lifeguards Ken Kramer and Kelly Dennis strolled up and politely explained the new curfew.

“It kind of sucks for those of us that don’t drink,” Cooper said with annoyance. “We just wanna kick back by the fire. I’m a night person. I think this is really too bad.”

Kramer, 31, and Kelly, 42, would agree, having had lifelong love affairs with the ocean. Kramer grew up in San Clemente, Kelly in Long Beach. As Kramer trolls for parking lot trouble in his patrol car, he reflects on the curfew as a sign of the times.

He recalls how two state lifeguards--as trained peace officers they carry guns--were seriously injured last summer at Bolsa Chica State Beach when a large group of youths surrounded and swarmed them.

“It’s real common to come across people armed with handguns and knives,” Kramer said. Every problem in the city, it seems, now finds its way to the shore.

“At the beaches, it’s unfortunately not a safe haven anymore and people don’t leave their problems behind,” Kramer said. “We have a substantial problem with drunk drivers. It’s hard to think of any fight out here on the beaches that hasn’t involved alcohol. Most of the problems are with teens and young adults.”

As the night wears on, this eve of spring vacation is a mild one. Tract homes across Pacific Coast Highway twinkle in the distance, as do the oil platforms at sea.

Eight cars are backed up at the Beach Boulevard municipal beach entrance as 9:30 p.m. strikes, and it’s mostly teen-agers streaming in. They read the new curfew sign and look surprised, though mostly resigned to it.

A foggy mist hovers around the light standard that Kimberly DuBarry is tossing a football beneath. An 18-year-old La Habra High School senior, she was celebrating the blastoff of spring break with her classmates.

“I don’t know where else they want the kids to go. They’re (authorities) just going to send the problem somewhere else,” said DuBarry, tossing her long brown hair behind a shoulder. She sees the 10 p.m. curfew as a threat to the beach as party central.

“From here to the pier is the biggest hangout, especially during spring break,” she said. “They’re taking things away from teen-agers. Spring break is pretty much screwed now,” she groused.

Down the beach a ways, Kramer and Kelly have stopped a teen-ager from Riverside who they think is drunk. It’s a most typical encounter, and straight out of “Wayne’s World.” The kid sits with chin in hand by some ice plant, desert boots nervously digging into the sand. “Are you gonna arrest me?” he asks.

He tells the lifeguards he’s had three Natural Light beers. He tells them he weighs 145 pounds. As a standing Kelly shines a flashlight onto the youth, he explains that his words are slurred because of a speech impediment. Next to him is a gangly friend who lobs stream-of-conscious questions at the officers: “We have a scanner at home what frequency are you guys on we have 21, 5, 6, 7, 8, what’s your channel down here? Huh? Why? ‘Cuz my dad’s a fireman, and they listen to channels, lots of channels. . . .”

Some time later and out of lifeguard and police view, a fight breaks out on the sand after a teen-ager stumbled by the fire ring of mostly male students from Rosemead High School. The youth was either in his underwear on arrival or lost his pants in the donnybrook, but friends of both combatants broke up the fight after what seemed like 10 tense minutes.

It’s the kind of thing that has prompted the new curfews.

“Hey,” said Ernest Ong, 17, of the fight. “That’s life in the ‘90s, man.” A 16-year-old from Los Angeles called Eclipse explained: “We’ll see. He walked through the wrong hood, at the wrong time, and he got his ass beat.”

Two fire pits away, a dozen young people, mostly students from Azusa Pacific University, in the east San Gabriel Valley, breathed a bit easier after the fight as they roasted hot dogs in the flames.

“You never used to see run-ins like that,” said Frank Hale, 20, of San Dimas. He spent most of his youth on this stretch of beach. His grandfather owned a trailer park down the street.

Farther north on the city beach, two long-haired guys faced off in boxing stance, circling each other, the blond one teetering around. Their friends formed a circle. Out the side and back doors of a nearby car a rap song throbbed into the parking lot: “Yo Joe, Yo Joe, Joe Cooley!”

The teen-age combatant with brown hair dropped his fists, walked away suddenly and pulled his hair into a pony tail. “Get loose, get loose!” the song kept screaming. “The King!”

Then the group of friends went about their conversation like nothing had happened.

“Riverside Arlington Class of ‘93! Woo woo!” Mike Fleming, 17, yelled at no one in particular. He nodded with a satisfied look and cracked open sunflower seed shells. Next to him at the nose of the blaring car was Jim Linin, 18, who had been drinking and suffered a dash of the spins. Fleming explained to Linin that there’d be no more carousing until midnight, “because of all you alcoholics.”

Linin, also of Riverside, waxed profound. “When you’re drunk, you say what you mean, and fights happen. People are real . People are high stress and stuff but it’s like that everywhere in life.”

“Oh,” Fleming said, snorting, “Jim’s a psychiatrist.”

Said Linin: “All’s I know is, for us, we’re from Riverside, and we have nothing to do, so this is like, a retreat here.”

On a quiet stretch of sand, the Castle family from Paramount cuddled together beside their campfire as it dwindled to embers. Midnight neared as they stewed about the last one they’ll see at this beach.

They come every Friday night, said Chris Castle, his three kids and wife sharing a blanket. “We like to stay late. It’s too bad. There’s something magic about the beach at night like this that we’ll miss.”