Protest Spirit Has a Home in Laguna

He remembers a warm, sunny day. He remembers thinking beforehand that he was about to take part in something that could influence the course of local events -- or, just as likely, be a monumental flop. All he and the other leaders could do was wait and see if anybody showed up.

They did.

By midmorning on that Saturday in 1989, they poured out of the alleys and side streets and intersections of Laguna Beach, herding themselves as one well-mannered mob toward the appointed meeting place on Laguna Canyon Road. Once there, they kibitzed and speechified and eventually marched four miles.

Richard Henrikson was there that day, unsure if anything would go off as he and the other leaders planned. Wanting to stop an Irvine Co. project for 3,200 homes in Laguna Canyon that had been approved five years earlier, they had envisioned the march as a 1960s-style protest.

It was the eleventh hour, they said, ominously.

The choosing of the 11th day of the 11th month for the march was no coincidence.

“It was one of the few times in my life when I remember there was true community,” Henrikson says. “And it was electrifying.”

Did the march, at which 7,500 to 8,000 people trekked up the canyon road, make a difference?

Well, you’ll notice today there’s no housing project in Laguna Canyon. Instead, the Irvine Co. and the city agreed to preserve the land as open space.

My thoughts drifted back to Nov. 11, 1989, while reading an article a few days ago about the Montage Resort & Spa’s plan to build a golf course and villas in a South Laguna wilderness park. Some residents lamented the project and suggested that the village that once beat the Irvine Co. had surrendered its conscience.

It may just be a fact of human nature that great passion comes from fighting something, not from acceding to something. With that in mind, I wondered if a protester from the canyon walk still remembered the passion that the event generated.

Ah, yes, says Henrikson, now 48. He’d been in Laguna Beach less than a year and joined the Laguna Canyon Conservancy early in 1989 to meet like-minded people. “All of a sudden, out of nowhere,” he says, people were gearing up to stop the Laguna Laurel project.

“I remember standing there on the morning of Nov. 11,” Henrikson says, “and we all had incredible butterflies. It was the proverbial, ‘What if you threw a party and nobody came?’ ”

They came, but unlike the often angry, longhaired radicals from the 1960s, this crowd featured moms pushing strollers, pets on leashes, kids on bikes. Ordinary people had swelled the crowd far beyond the leaders’ hopes.

“We were blown out of our socks at the size of it,” Henrikson says. The march had turned into a media event and, Henrikson says, “We saw how much power we had.”

Henrikson loves reminiscing about that period, because it coincided with a bicoastal courtship of the woman he’d later marry. Today, they have two children.

Henrikson also read the article implying that Laguna’s mood has shifted. He took exception, saying the city’s environmental flame isn’t extinguished. He concedes that, as more residents have become affluent and “people with more radical, chancy ideas can’t buy in,” the city seems more pro-development. But he insists that Laguna has a “substantial core” of conservationists who will safeguard the city’s interests.

Henrikson doesn’t oppose the Montage project but says he’d gladly protest Laguna Laurel all over again.

With what sounds like the pride of a former protester, he says, “I walked the whole route.”