Shoulder to Sigh On : Campers Find Their Blue Heaven at PCH ‘Overnight Parking Zone’

Jack Schneider, flanked on either side by a receding blur of motor homes, stood by the boulders that guard the shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway above Ventura and bubbled with the giddy cheer of a man who has it all.

At hand, just paces from the whoosh of cars and not far from the thunder of an occasional train, was a tumble of loved ones--children, grandchildren--milling about their piece of asphalt while the scent of steaks eddied with the wind.

Before them, like a jewel under the sun, was the sea.

“Where else can you get this in your front yard?” the 67-year-old Santa Paula man said, beaming as if he had just gotten away with something.

Down the beach, a man at the other reach of the economic spectrum, Robert Cameron, gazed out at the sand, the sea, the Channel Islands peeking seductively through the blue, and agreed.

“This would be an expensive view. How much would a house cost here?” the man without a house wondered.

At his side was his answer to Schneider’s 30-foot Pinnacle motor home--a third-generation bicycle loaded down with some of the necessities of a hard-scrabble life, and some of its eccentricities.

“You have to be creative with the hours you use,” Cameron, 28, said of his lifestyle. “You have to have about three or four places where you stop to sleep, and they have to be strategically chosen.”

Welcome to the Rincon Parkway, specifically a one-mile stretch of Pacific Coast Highway between Faria and Hobson county parks, five miles north of Ventura. It is a novelty, officials said, in that they know of no other beachfront shoulder of a state highway that has been designated by local ordinances for motor home camping, for a fee.

Ten years since becoming an “overnight parking zone,” as Ventura County officials call it, this braid of motor homes now is an ever-shifting village on wheels whose only constant, it seems, is change.

Where long-term campers once took up permanent residence, there is now a study of contrasts between those who are well-off and those who are not so well-off, and the young, the working,

the retired.

“It seemed like it was tense (in former times) because you had the homeless types, the hippie types,” said Simi Valley resident Ron Williams, 60, who was sharing his motor home on a recent weekday with his son and his son’s friend. “But now it’s more like the working types, the retired types.”

County officials could not be happier, either.

Concerned that long-term campers were crowding out surfers, sunbathers and other day-users--in addition to causing sanitation problems--the county Board of Supervisors moved in 1984 to strictly limit the number of days that motor homes could remain along the parkway.

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They set aside 112 spaces on the beachfront shoulder--far fewer than before--and visitors now must pay a fee to stay no more than five consecutive days from April to October and no more than 10 from November to March.

The result is a greater, more fluid mix of people, said parks operations supervisor Pam Gallo.

There are the families, like the Schneiders.

There are the retirees, like Manhattan Beach residents Maynard (Smitty) Smith and his wife, Polly, who have been coming to this stretch since 1949.

There are the newcomers, like 56-year-old Doug Payne of Glendora and his 6-year-old daughter, Christal, their dog, Storm, and Sammie, their hamster.

Then there are the “snow birds” who travel in their motor homes the year around, like 63-year-old Mary, who declined to give her last name but said her mailing address is in Newbury Park, and her husband, 65-year-old Marv.

Now 10 years into their mobile lifestyle, they have settled into a circuit that takes in Las Vegas, Tehachapi, Lancaster, Simi Valley and Oregon, to name a few, she said. “The Rincon” is a favorite.

Although not necessarily conspicuous, there are the former users there, too, Gallo said--the “long-termers” whom her park rangers try to keep in line with the five- or 10-day limits, but not always with success.

“At night, they move on,” she said. “At times, they don’t. It’s a game.”

The majority of the other guests, however, are clean and orderly, mindful of the length-of-stay limits, parks maintenance supervisor Ed Evans said. The only problem, he added, are the occasional users who empty motor home septic tanks into the portable toilets spaced along the shoulder.

“It’s our most popular camping area,” said county Recreation Services manager Blake Boyle, so much so, he added, it is “the only campground that we operate that returns a profit. . . . It’s almost always full.”

That might surprise those who seek the more out-of-the-way setting, “the wilderness,” as Gallo put it.

But Shirlee Zahnter, 63, of Chatsworth, is not one of them. Neither is her 57-year-old husband, Ron, who proudly announced, “We call this ‘RVing,’ not camping.”

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Their lawn might be a plastic green carpet, and their plastic awning and its “whirligig” mobiles might shudder whenever a delivery truck zooms by at 50 m.p.h., or a freight train--across the highway--at 60.

But to the Zahnters and others who regularly frequent this ribbon of highway, it is the drama that is endlessly unfolding just beyond their “front yard,” just beyond the boulders that separate the street from the sand, that matters.

“You see everything in the world out there,” Shirlee Zahnter said while sitting on her patio chair.

Not long later, as if to prove her point, the dark fins of two dolphins cut through the water just beyond the surf. Farther out, a pelican crash-dived for fish. Hard to the right, an oil company island that is tethered to the shore by the Richfield Pier glimmered in the sun.

“What we really love are the whales,” she said. Not only has she seen dolphins “playing around the whales,” but she also has seen “dolphins jumping right over one surfer.”

Seated on the steps of her motor home, the wind blowing in from the channel, 50-year-old Susan Thomson of North Hills said, “In March and April, there were dolphins everywhere. They were leaping. They had their babies with them.”

Her husband, Dale, also 50, said he had even seen dolphins surf in front of his motor home, skipping along the faces of the waves like slick torpedoes.

The vehicles that appear along the parkway, like the visitors themselves, vary widely. They range from the $250,000, 43-foot “rigs” with all the luxuries--microwave ovens, satellite dishes--to the $7,000, 13-foot Scamp that Smitty Smith brought up from Manhattan Beach.

“This is a sign-off spot,” said the 66-year-old Smith. “You turn off the radio, the TV, the sirens, and you listen to the ocean.”

His wife, 62-year-old Polly, said it is the neighborliness of the people--including those who walk along the bike lane on the highway side of the motor homes--that especially charms her.

“It’s amazing,” she said. “When you’re camping, people just come by and say hello, the same ones that would not even say that in the city.”

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Unlike the other four county-run campgrounds, the parking area along the Rincon has no improvements--no running water, no electrical hookups--and so it costs relatively little to operate, Boyle of Recreation Services said.

Andy Oshita, manager of the county administration and planning section, said expenses for the 1992-93 fiscal year for the park rangers, garbage pickup and the emptying of the eight portable toilets, and insurance were $153,937, compared to revenues of $219,172. He said the latter were from park fees--$11 a day from April through October and $8 a day the balance of the year--that campers are to deposit into the fee vault at the site.

“We’ve operated in the black from the day it opened up,” Oshita said of the park.

Before 1984, and after the Ventura Freeway alternate route opened in 1973, long-term campers had seized upon this suddenly little-used segment of Pacific Coast Highway to park their motor homes and live essentially free of charge, without a mortgage, property taxes or homeowners insurance.

“I’m a fisherman myself,” said Oshita, who has been with the county since 1976, “and I would go along the sea wall and would see trash along the place. I would see trailers blocked up. I asked them how long they’d been there and they’d say, ‘Three, five years.’ ”

County Supervisor Maggie Kildee, whose 3rd District includes the Rincon Parkway and who was instrumental in imposing the new restrictions on lengths of stay, said of the earlier days: “We were serving a segment of the homeless population, but we weren’t serving the general population.”

The complaints coming in from the public--concerns involving sanitation, litter, public access to the beach, crime--could not be dismissed.

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Carol Moynahan, 62, who for about 20 years has been the concessionaire at Hobson County Park, just up the beach from the parkway, said, “I can’t think of anything there that was desirable before the change, to tell you the truth, although it was wonderful for (the long-term campers).”

Not only did the former users live in whatever was handy--station wagons, small trailers, converted buses--but some of them dumped their septic tanks onto the rocks, the sand and ultimately into the sea, Moynahan said.

“There was a man once who bragged he had a hose long enough that he could reach all the way to the water,” she said.

“It was dreadful.”