To the Meadow Born

In this Ron Stoner photograph, a surfer is paddling away from a house in a field. There is an almost Andrew Wyeth quality to it, as if we are to sense some significance to the mansion and the golden youth’s association with it. But it will be largely up to our imaginations to supply the import.

Because the house is still standing, we know this photo of Hammond’s meadow in Montecito was taken before 1970. That’s when the mansion would be badly damaged in a fire and subsequently razed. The fire is blamed on hobos or surfers, depending on whom you talk to. Renters had been drifting in and out since the longtime owner, Esther Fiske Hammond, died in 1955. The house itself was built in 1906 and named Bonnymede, for “bonny meadow.”

In the upcoming book in which this photograph appears--”Photo/Ron Stoner,” by Matt Warshaw--the original caption submitted to the publisher identifies the boy as Mark Hammond, heir to the estate. This is not possible. Esther Hammond had no grandchildren named Mark. Two grandsons, Seth and George II, lived nearby at the time. But when I talk to Seth, a teenager in the 1960s, he tells me that he never surfed. Neither did George, though he would pay the surfers visits, nattily dressed in an ascot and tweed coat.

It turns out that Stoner did know a Mark Hammond, a surfer living near him in Orange County in the ‘60s. Was Stoner having a good laugh by posing his friend at Hammond’s Reef? Or was it an unconscious statement about how surfers felt about Hammond’s, that because you loved this place--lived for being at this place--it would come into your soul as your own? That you were, in effect, an honorary Hammond?

Perhaps the photographer, with his intimate knowledge of this part of the world, also foresaw how it would become the battleground of an epic surf/turf war, the longest in Santa Barbara history. That for 20 years emotions about this place would spark like a Catherine wheel. Why else did Stoner, who made a living capturing men slashing across waves, set up this photo like a Byzantine icon?

If we stay in this moment, we can fill in what’s going on around the surfer. The quality of light, glassiness of the water and surfer’s bare skin suggest summer, when local girls rode their horses across the meadow or sunbathed on the beach. They would have it to themselves. Because of the sprawling meadow, the beach could not be seen or reached from any major thoroughfare. The few outsiders who stumbled on it were tourists at the Miramar Hotel to the south or the Biltmore to the north, but they pretty much stayed put.

Pretend, though, that it’s winter, and the northwest swells are hitting Hammond’s Reef just right, so that the beautifully structured waves, as hollow and challenging as those breaking an ocean away in Hawaii, are peeling off to the right and left. A teenage Margo Godfrey might be out there, the only girl, decades before the Blue Crush. She’ll go on to earn seven world titles. She’s better than the boys, and they let her have all the waves she wants.

A few super males could be gliding through the water too. Maybe Mike Doyle, an all-time great, the 1960s his heyday. His commute to Hammond’s, from a house rented by Kemp Aaberg on Butterfly Lane, is but a few hundred yards. Aaberg has serious wave cred, starring in “Slippery When Wet,” Bruce Brown’s first surf film in 1958. He’s supposed to be in school at UCSB, but how can you go to class when Hammond’s is breaking?

Ultimately, it’s the native-born that our gaze will settle upon, boys from the hedgerow district of lower Montecito who can smell the ocean from their homes, in the summer the salty pick-me-up mixing with the sweet tease of honeysuckle. Several of them store their boards with Kim Sturmer, who lives closest to the beach. Sturmer can load up to five boards on the “gremmie” cart attached to the back of his bike and ride them down to the Bonnymede entrance, where the easygoing gatekeeper waves him through.

Sturmer keeps a journal. It’s Oct. 1, 1967, and he writes:

Groovy! Out-a-sight! Uptight! I went to Hammond’s Reef in the morning from 7:45-10:00. The waves were 3-5 ft with the most perfect shape I’ve ever seen in my life! The waves were hollow, fast (but you could crank a turn!) everything. In the early morning, I got tubed out of my mind several times. I got some groovy turns and wow, what super-duper long noserides. This is truly the best day I’ve ever surfed Hammond’s in my life. I finally got so hungry, I decided to quit while I was ahead and go home. I surfed Miramar [Point] on the way back but it was too high tide and kind of small. Tomorrow after school should be good and so should tonight. Arrivederci!

A year later would find Sturmer in a grimmer mood. A November swell would be ruined by “millions” of surfers from Los Angeles. The locals, in turn, would escalate their war on the outsiders: When they’d spot their cars, they’d urinate in the gas tanks and let the air out of the tires, “maybe not the best thing to do, since then they would stick around,” one warrior reflects. On a trip to Mexico, Sturmer would come back with cherry bombs that he’d fire at the interlopers to scare them away from the water. “L.A. Go Home” bumper stickers would surface next, and by the 1970s, the cars with the surf racks in the Santa Barbara High School parking lot would bristle with them.

Which brings us to one other clue that our surfer is an outsider. His board is not a Ren Yater creation. The revered designer is a Hammond’s regular, and the boards coming out of his Santa Barbara Surf Shop are the guns of choice at the reef. Appropriately, a Yater board pops up in “Apocalypse Now”; the young private ordered into the Vietnam surf is played by Sam Bottoms (insider wink here), a Santa Barbaran.

A final filmic note: In 1970, surfers are massing in auditoriums to watch “Innermost Limits of Pure Fun,” shot by George Greenough, also of Hammond’s, an inventor extraordinaire whose kneeboard and camera designs put filmmakers right in the waves. Lore has it that Greenough never wears shoes, not even on the planes that take him around the world in a career to rival Bruce Brown’s. We love him for that.

If only Stoner had been as resilient, laughing at his own personal wipe-out, a breakdown that would lead to his exile from Surfer magazine in 1971, then his disappearance in 1977. Then we could ask him about the day Mark played a Hammond of a different sort.

Everybody knew the surfside meadow was paradise, starting with Ellen Fiske Hammond, who brought her brood of six--sans husband--to California, where she bought Bonnymede in 1912. On the bluff in front of the mansion, gigantic swings were erected so that the children could literally fly over the ocean. Son George would stay airborne; years later, he learned to pilot a plane, turned the meadow into an airstrip and ran a business flying supplies to a family on San Miguel Island.

All the children flourished at Bonnymede: Elizabeth with her dogs, Esther, Mary and Frances with their horses. Even if there had been TV and the Internet, Mrs. Hammond surely would have kept her children from idle richness. She built Blue Bird Stables and Garage, where the girls saw to the horse operations and the boys, George and his brother Gardiner, to the taxi service. There was a vegetable farm and lemon orchard and, for recreation, tennis courts and their own bowling alley.

Though George remained at Flaps Down, a house he built at the rear of the estate, the rest was sold in 1958, three years after Esther’s passing. (“Not all the heirs saw things the same way,” Seth says.) Before you could blink, there was a condominium development at the side near the Biltmore Hotel, designed in the atonal sprawl of the 1960s and called, sadly, Bonnymede.

One L.A. realty company hired to hawk the remaining 33 acres wrote this pitch to potential developers: “The present zoning calls for 12 units an acre, but the owners feel that a zone variance can be obtained that will allow you to go six stories high with 30 units to an acre. However, they have been told and are sure that if you were to build a hotel and/or condominium combination with a large convention hall, all of Santa Barbara could go all out with open arms to give you whatever zoning and height you would want to make practical, profitable and feasible.” In the copy I have, someone scrawled “ha ha” in ink along the margin. Indeed, this assessment was so far from reality that when the Realtor misspelled the site as “Bonnymead,” you had to wonder if he wasn’t drinking too much mead when he wrote it.

But let’s have one more quiet moment before the firestorm over Hammond’s continued development ignites. In fact, that moment’s very essence--hope, freedom, bliss--will explain the resistance.

It’s 1971 and we zoom in on another perfect night at Hammond’s. The meadow is hooded in darkness. About a dozen kids are dancing around a bonfire singing “Maggie May” and “Every Picture Tells a Story.” Out in the water there’s an algae bloom lighting up the water with an eerie phosphorescence. Boys are in the water howling at the sensation of night surfing, which feels like flying.

Back in town that year, a group of activists, among them a number of surfers, has been mustering as Friends of Hammond’s Estate over a proposed condominium project called Vista del Montecito, submitting an inch-thick impact report to the Environmental Quality Advisory Agency of Santa Barbara County. Of particular alarm is a huge seawall that would, the report calculates, cause a massive buildup of sand over the reef and its remarkable tidepools.

The report goes on in some outrage over the impact on the aesthetics of the property, finding on one winter day its use by 82 community residents: 15 adults, 47 teenagers (14 surfing) and 20 children. Calling the 19-foot-high, 450-foot-long wall “a disaster,” it goes on to predict that “this monolithic pyramid will reach skyward blotting out the entire sweep of the prehistoric terrain, the lush grass carpet, the exotic and natural tree clusters and even the majestic Santa Ynez Mountains beyond.”

Vista del Montecito is never built, but a scaled-back condo complex called Montecito Shores is, its groundbreaking in 1973 christened with, well, rocks. Frank Frost, son of an anti-growth county supervisor, would pitch a stone at a worker on the site. Frost thought he was firing the opening shot in the battle to save Hammond’s. The judge hearing the assault case would fine Frost $175. Frost’s lawyer would ask the worker why, when he saw the rock coming, he didn’t duck.

In 1977, with 22 acres still untouched, comes the announcement of a planned 50-home project called Ocean Meadow. The save Hammond’s movement presses forward, registering interesting support along the way. Some would come, symbolically at least, from local legislator Gary Hart (not the Colorado heartbreaker), who “hopes to retain it for public use” (this would go nowhere fast). It would come, most colorfully, from archeologists and the Chumash, who’d point to the presence of Indian artifacts on the site. And it would come, ironically, from attorneys for the Pasadena bank behind the new development, who’d question the right of the Indians to comment on the plan, saying they lacked federal documentation as Chumash descendants. The posturing would only get everyone angrier.

By 1984, the beleaguered plan would be scaled back to 20 condos and 12 private homes--with three acres of the meadow preserved for public use. It would also gain an all-important swing vote on the Board of Supervisors, that of David Yager. For his treachery, Yager would find himself vilified by Eva Marie Saint, Hitchcock’s ice blond and a supporter of the meadow preserve. “Twelve people will get it all; meadow, sea, beach, and mountains, and all this on top of, or close to, the sacred burial grounds of the Chumash Indians,” she wrote in the local paper, asking of Yager: “Why would he do that?”

The last wave of opposition would come, in a twist, from the L.A.-based Surfrider Foundation (L.A. Don’t Go Home), whose 1986 lawsuit claimed that because of a long history of public use, the meadow had fallen into public ownership. In 1989, the two sides settled out of court. Although it failed to stop the development, the foundation secured public trail access to the beach and meadow.

Flash forward to now, a Friday night in June. The main path to the beach bypasses two of the 12 homes; they have been built in the French Normandy style and have magazine-perfect interiors. It’s still, for civilization, very dark. On the cliff where the Hammonds once swung, a teenager, arms raised like the wings of a Hopi eagle, is spouting what sounds like poetry--Bukowski on the beach?--to the haunting beats of three drummers around a bonfire. Farther along the sand, next to a smaller fire, two friends drink beer. Yes, they grew up surfing here. But what with children, work, wives, they haven’t been down the Hammond’s trail in 10 years. They’d forgotten how much they missed it. The fire burns.