California’s Beaches Aren’t Just for the Rich and Powerful

Wendy McCaw, ex-wife of cell phone billionaire Craig McCaw, can hardly be blamed for wanting the public off the beach below her Santa Barbara estate. Who wants all those strangers strolling past her $9-million hideaway? Her lawyers, of course, insist that this isn’t why McCaw sued to force the California Coastal Commission to revoke the easement across her 500 feet of strand--she’s just deeply concerned, they say, about a matter of abstract legal principle. But who wouldn’t feel so, so much better about their 25 acres of paradise if only it had a completely private beach, too?

McCaw can’t have much use for state parks these days, so public access probably doesn’t resonate with her the way it does with the other 30 million of us Californians who live a few doors or a block or 150 miles back from the water, not to mention every single American who might someday love to see California’s fabled seashore.

McCaw’s already got her fat slice, and, being human, she’d probably love to scrub the rest of us out of the picture. But when you’re not now, and never going to be, in the ever-more exclusive multimillionaires’ club that can actually buy a chunk of the West Coast waterfront, then access to your--that’s right, your--coast is priceless, the very heart of what we’re all doing out here. So bravo to the courts for holding McCaw off thus far.

For the last 15 years, I’ve been surfing and walking the beaches north of Santa Cruz, many of which are on the far side of private lands. I use public easements through farms, between private homes, down wooden cliffside stairs. On the far side I find--as does everybody who goes looking--the one part of the West Coast that isn’t forever vanishing before our eyes. Under splashy late summer sunsets, we get to watch goofy young otters hunt their first crabs; in the cool blue winter mornings, it’s the pigeon guillemots tumbling out of their cliff-dwellings and diving for bait fish.

Around Santa Cruz, surfers have been startled off their boards by orcas (and, of course, by the odd white shark too); surf-fishermen teach generations of boys and girls how to cast that sinker into a riptide; spear-fishermen find carp in the kelp forests, and families harvest mussels at the right time of year.

An awful lot changes in this state way too fast--no long-term resident is without their version of the “That mall was a farm only five years ago!” lament, or the “Wow, I almost bought a house there for 20 grand once, and now you can’t look at one for under a million” refrain. Neighborhoods change character overnight, populations endlessly come and go, and the only thing that stays even a little bit the same is the public land we share.

In the last month alone, I’ve heard that hundreds of people came down to Scott’s Creek north of Santa Cruz to watch a family of gray whales lingering by the sand, and a friend called to describe the largest school of dolphins he’s ever seen--hundreds of them. These experiences get us where it counts, and go a long way toward making life worth living; just walking the wide open sand in the clean marine breeze, with all that air, sky and water swimming off to forever, can do marvels for your workaday anxieties.

California’s civic culture, land-use laws and place in the national imagination all reflect the belief that our natural places provide us a solace so valuable that those places must never fall into private hands. But even state-owned lands, like the entire California coast below the median high-tide line, don’t do us any good if we can’t get to them. Let the super-rich lock up coastal access now, and the California dream will begin slipping away. Once gone, it will never, ever come back.

The great irritation of social existence, and its expression through the will of governments, is that even the ex-wives of billionaires can’t absolutely always have just exactly what they want. Our system has long placed public limits on the uses of private property, from rent control to zoning, and these limits are all more or less meant to serve somebody’s idea of the collective good. They usually do work against somebody’s narrow self-interest--in this case, by keeping the seashore open to us masses at the expense of McCaw.

But she ought to know that the value of her property, both aesthetic and economic, is a direct function of the work the coastal commission does. McCaw doubtless wouldn’t make a peep about abstract legal principles if the commission ever turned down, say, a neighbor’s plan to build an off-road motorcycle racing facility adjacent to her land.

Our coast, from McCaw’s spread clear to the Mexican border and up to the Oregon line, is still as glorious as it is only because of the battles the coastal commission fights and wins against people like her. And thank God (or, rather, the voter initiative process) for the commission. Public ownership of our magnificent mountains, deserts and shores is the great democratic miracle of California, and the life we all share on these ancient beaches is the very soul of our state’s communal life. Let’s keep it that way.