Even the beaches are blond

BEFORE THE summer ends, we thought we should get the children outdoors at least once. Introduce them to the sun. Familiarize them with fresh air. “Hey, Dad, what’s that?” one will probably ask. “Sweetie, that’s a tree,” I’ll answer.

I fear for the pasty-skinned children of America, who now shun the outdoors at every opportunity, content to sit inside and play Tetris all day on their cellphones or e-mail each other with catty comments.

Not my kids.

“We’re going where?” the older daughter asks.

“Malibu,” I explain.

“Yuck, Malibu,” one of them says.

What could there ever be to do in Malibu? First, it’s hemmed in on one side by a remarkable -- but pretty dull -- ocean. The other side is mountains and boutiques.

“Did Dad say ‘boutiques’?” someone asks. And we’re off.

We’re house-sitting in Malibu, for about a week, and to spend a mere week in Malibu is like being squeezed fondly on the elbow by Marilyn Monroe. It’s really not enough. But you remember it forever.

The air is sweet with salt and sage, the temperature just so. Malibu is what you get when you combine rustic beauty with near-perfect weather. So what if they don’t have sewers.

“They don’t?” my wife says.

“Maybe next year,” I say.

But Malibu offers plenty of other pleasures. There is never “nothing to do” here. You can wander the beaches or climb the canyons. Ogle the local populace.

“I don’t think they’re all that great,” my wife says after a trip to the grocery store for milk and ogling.

I don’t know which populace she is seeing, but to me they all look pretty great. There is, it seems, a “Malibu look,” a sort of Western Gatsby. Many of the men have wavy Michael Landon hair. Surfer hair, it appears thickened with dried seawater and various crustaceans, living and dead.

The women? They are almost equally as pretty. They are thin and supple as oak saplings. Many look like the young actress Kyra Sedgwick. Those are the grandmothers. It just goes up from there.

“I think that’s Cindy Crawford,” my daughter whispers one morning in the pet shop.

“No,” I say.

“Look, the mole,” she says.

When she turns around, I see the mole, the world’s most famous living mole. She is in the pet store with a small entourage of kids, nannies, nutritionists, skin-care specialists, hairstylists, seamstresses, accountants and astrologers. Ah, the rich. They’re richer than you and me.

“I’m pretty sure it’s her,” my daughter says.

It has been a busy week for the pretty people up here at Camp Malibu. The other evening, at Britney Spears’ baby shower, somebody shot a paparazzo with a pellet gun. No one can tell me when the season for paparazzi runs up here, but I hear there is a three-photographer limit.

Another night, we think we see Amanda Bynes standing in line to buy frozen yogurt. They are everywhere, these celebrities. Toothy as their Lincoln Navigators.

“I saw Jessica Simpson,” I tell the kids.

“Where?”

“She was buying motor oil,” I say.

“No!”

Or maybe not. Point is, beautiful people are almost an epidemic up here. But they’re still no rival for the rugged surroundings. Unspoiled. Vaguely Paleolithic. The beaches are dishwater blond. The sea, Dodger blue.

“I could live here,” my wife says.

“Gas is a little expensive,” I point out.

“They don’t even have a movie theater,” complains the older daughter.

Sorry, kid; it caught fire. The beloved Ben & Jerry’s too. I guess no place is perfect. One day, while running to the beach, the toddler tumbled and scraped a knee. Basically, he outran gravity is what happened.

“The gravity here isn’t very good,” I told him later.

“There’s not even a Burger King,” noted the little girl.

Sunday night, sedated by the easy lifestyle, we don’t even turn on the television. We just sit around letting the Malibu sun seep from our skin, enjoying a rare moment of total family unity. I don’t really recommend it.

The kids complain that there isn’t all that much to do, so I explain that this is a family vacation, and being around the people you love the most should be satisfying enough.

“Not for me,” says the boy.

“What’s your point, Dad?” says the older daughter.

So I entertain them with stories of wacky relatives they’ve never met, like the distant uncle who claimed to have invented the bottom of the coffee cup. You know, the part that keeps the coffee in.

“Before that, coffee used to pour out all over,” I explain.

“It did?”

“Then your Uncle Bob came along,” I say.

Then one night -- the most exciting night -- a little mouse sprang from the shadows and scampered through the kitchen. It was a lovely mouse. A sexy, Malibu mouse.

I think she’d had some work.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.