The PCH Blues
If Malibu ever needed a new logo, other than the dolphin with wings and a halo, a depiction of the goddess Eris would be appropriate.
In Greco-Roman mythology, she is the goddess of strife, which is what Malibu has been enduring for as far back as I can remember.
Eris was, among other distinctions, partially responsible for starting the Trojan War when she wasn’t invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, two celebrities of the time. Her response to being snubbed was to throw a golden apple inscribed “For the most beautiful” among the guests. The chaos that ensued by those claiming the title ultimately caused the war.
The story is particularly appropriate today due to the wedding in Malibu of Barbie and Jimmy. One trembles at the very idea of throwing a golden apple marked “For the most beautiful” into that mob.
It would require every medical facility from Santa Barbara to Laguna Beach to care for those crushed in the violent efforts to secure the apple. Beauty is taken very seriously in the Land of Blond.
The reason I mention Eris and crisis is because Malibu has survived another crisis, more or less, which was the closing of Pacific Coast Highway for 11 days. It is open again even as I write, which both surprises and amazes me.
I know it was supposed to be reopened but “supposed to” is a term in Caltrans mythology that is not to be trusted. In an organization that requires 15 men and seven pieces of equipment to dig a hole, there are no certainties.
*
The name Malibu derives from the Chumash village Humaliwu, which lasted for 5,000 years near the Malibu, or the Humaliwu, Lagoon. Malibu, on the other hand, has been a city for about seven years and not likely to last much beyond the next El Nino.
Fires, floods, slides and a rising of the sea itself have shut down its very lifeline, PCH, this scenic road to paradise too many times for anyone to officially record.
Our files show that it has been closed, for instance, at least a part of 32 days so far this year. A few headlines since 1984 indicate its travail:
“Slide Closes PCH Again.” “Coast Highway Section Closed by Surf.” “Slide Closes Coast Highway.” “PCH Lanes to Close.” “PCH Lanes to Close in September.” “Storm Causes Slides.” And so on, ad infinitum.
Many have claimed over the years that PCH should never have been put there in the first place, but, as one headline pointed out in 1985, “Since It’s There It’s Got to Be Fixed.”
Efforts to “fix it,” however, have been met with rage bordering on hysteria from those who live on Planet Malibu. Suggestions have included a freeway over the top of the existing highway, a parallel expressway slicing through the hills next to PCH and an ocean causeway off the coast.
Once there was talk of more mass transit out of Malibu, but as a California Highway Patrol officer put it, “You can’t ask Neil Diamond to get on a bus.”
*
It is approximately 13 miles from Malibu to Santa Monica. PCH, the only link between these cities and the real world beyond, carries 71,000 cars a day, about 37,000 of which go through Humaliwu, I mean Malibu, itself. The numbers increase during the summer by about 5,000 cars a day filled with tourists from Nebraska and Iowa in Hawaiian shirts and red plaid shorts.
The likelihood is that sometime during the summer PCH will again be shut down by one of the usual disasters or maybe this time by a comet, an earthquake or something reptilian that crawls out of the sea and eats the bridge over the lagoon.
If that happens it may be time to conclude that Malibu just isn’t working and ought to be abandoned. Sell it to a film studio as a back lot setting for disaster movies, no special effects required.
But eliminating any public thoroughfare in L.A. County, where the car is king, is tantamount to a declaration of war and no studio would be willing to subject itself to the kind of negative public notice that war occasionally invokes. CNN would be all over it, reporting some, making up the rest.
I guess we’re stuck with both Malibu and PCH and the goddess Eris doing her number on both of them. Malibu may always be difficult to get to but, as someone once remarked, when you get there at least you’re somewhere. That makes it more convenient for Eris.
*
Al Martinez’s column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com