LAGUNA BEACH
A Note From The Author:
Laguna, like anyone’s hometown, can’t be fully “told”; an added dose of “shown” is often better in conveying the message of one’s youth. So enjoy these sub-prime photos I took on my film camera during the COVID-19 quarantine, wandering around the place where Time began for me in a period when we all reluctantly agreed that Time itself must be put on hold.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
“Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away."
"But, Lena, that's sad."
"No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness.”
From Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine
What do we mean when we say a place is dead?
That Williamsburg “isn’t the same anymore”? That Aspen is “ruined”? That the Lower East Side is “long since gone”?
We lament the loss of periods of time, not of locations.
Locations look back at us and snicker, laughing at our species for our anthropocentric pseudo-comprehension of the totality of existence and the mechanics of what we crudely refer to as “Time”. We construct galaxies of brick and mortar so convincing that we forget they’re temporary, soon falling in love with their perceived permanence. We extend this permanence further through the attachment of culture and memory to their physical structures. Generations pass on history and lore and tales and myth until their descendants are assured that there’s an Atman behind every facade and storefront, a beating heart in the furnace room of every old building, a pulse running through the medians of every boulevard. We embed our nostalgias into objects, our thoughts into solid state artifacts, until our minds...the most capable in the history of life as we know it, are left incapable of divorcing the two-that-are-one.
Old-timer members of the extant ape subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens (who are at best, a measly one hundred years old) cry with horror as San Francisco (of no relevance to this article, rather an accessible example) is transformed from bastion of artistic expression and counter-culture into legions of badge-wearing avatars who shit out well-cadenced bricks of code with which we build “the future” (Not sure if anyone told you, but the future’s likely not happening at all...at least not with us as the central characters...but don’t take my word for it, refer to this web-based climate change simulator from MIT Management’s Sustainability Initiative). They forget the San Francisco of Jack London, of Mark Twain, of Levi Strauss...of the Spanish before them, of the Native Americans before that. They forget the San Francisco known to its many specimens of Quercus agrifolia, the mighty Coast Live Oak, some watching over the Presidio for over one thousands years and long prior to the arrival of the first cargo ship. But we can go further back still, for the oaks are but toddlers under the gaze of their wise elders off in the hills surrounding the city, the great California Redwoods, sequoia sempervirens. The tallest trees on Earth and among the oldest living things of any sort, well older than Jesus Christ and Keith Richards combined. Go whine to them about the demise of “way things used to be”.
And yet, did I have your attention with the first section of the above paragraph? This collective saudade for the good-ole days is admittedly appealing. I’ve been the ultimate offender. The worst of the worst. The proverbial guy-with-sign. Why?
Because I’m from Laguna Beach.
Yes, that Laguna Beach.
The one now known for fake tits and infinite money. For young kids who receive free Porsche Cayenne’s on their 16th birthday (Audi Q5’s if their parents are a little more “humble” and Volkswagen Toureg’s if they’re outright “poor”...mind you all three of these cars have the same chassis and parent company so if it were me I’d ask for something actually cool like a 1959 DeVille or a motorcycle but this isn’t about me...man if you wanna go luxury you can get the Ferrari F40 for less than any of the aforementioned options that’s in all the 80’s and 90’s coke-inspired Miami-themed cable TV shows but I may be an outlier in thinking they’re timeless).
The place of ignorance and glamour and scripted drama. The stuff of reality TV and whatever Netflix decides to feed you this evening.
That was not, however, the childhood nor culture I knew growing up here (I write this from Laguna as I prepare to return to New York City).
Laguna was a low-key, devoutly humble and generally soft-spoken town. Where the most important numbers in your life were the tide tables and swell charts, not your bank accounts. Where you wouldn’t be able to tell the richest from the poorest, where modesty was a cardinal virtue and the ostentatious tendencies of wealthier beach towns like Newport Beach to the North was laughed at in all its absurdity (one of our few remaining original bars, The Saloon, to this day has a sign reading “Be Nice or Go Back to Newport”).
As this began to change, as luxury hotels were built and national attention came to us in the form of one of the first reality shows (and one of the worst), I watched in horror as the bucolic artist colony I’d wanted to spend the rest of my life in crumbled away. Frustration turned to bitterness, bitterness to anger and anger to rage.
My hometown, my first love, was “gone”.
I carried this privileged “burden” with me around the world, rendered permanently butthurt by the hijacking of Paradise via people who find gold leaf attractive, wear pink fluffy slippers, and don’t even enjoy the beach nor give a single fuck about the ocean and its ailing health. The friends whose parents were school teachers, artists, electricians, musicians...they were long booted out by rising rents and higher costs of living. Mine were fortunate enough to stay after decades of home ownership. And yet still, it felt like all I’d loved had been crushed. Annihilated. Destroyed, and with thoughtful, malicious intent. My first love had died. Laguna had been murdered in the first degree.
But no.
I was wrong.
This rage is nothing more than a manifestation of craving. Theology and psychology alike hold that our attachments create discordance and pain. Samudāya,The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths, holds that attachment is the root of all suffering. Likewise, beloved Dominican theologian Meister Eckhart summed the perspective up with noble brevity, stating simply that:
“He who would be serene need but one thing; detachment”.
The reasoning is simple in concept yet decidedly difficult to hold in one’s consciousness throughout a given day: belief that anything is permanent stands in direct opposition with the inherent impermanence of all things. When we cling to temporary entities and impose expectations of immutability on them, our disappointment and sadness is inevitable.
As a semi-pro-but-definitely-on-the-bench geographer, I tend to look at the world from the perspective of one intrigued by the concept of place. In human geography we’re trained to afford particular importance to the concepts of space and place.
The notions of space and place were considered with impressive wisdom by geographer/philosopher Yi-Fu Tuan and geographer Edward Relph among others. Entertain my academic tangent here if you will and read the following summary of their perspectives from Prof. Huib Ernste at Radboud University in the Netherlands:
’Space' can be described as a location which has no social connections for a human being. No value has been added to this space. According to Tuan (1977, p.164-165) it is an open space, but may be marked off and defended against intruders (Tuan, 1977, p. 4). It does not invite or encourage people to fill the space by being creative. No meaning has been described to it. It is more or less abstract (Tuan, 1977, p. 6).
'Place' is in contrary more than just a location and can be described as a location created by human experiences. The size of this location does not matter and is unlimited. It can be a city, neighborhood, a region or even a classroom et cetera. In fact ‘place’ exists of ‘space’ that is filled with meanings and objectives by human experiences in this particular space. Places are centers where people can satisfy there biological needs such as food, water etc. (Tuan, 1977, p. 4). According to Tuan (1977, p. 6) a ‘place’ does not exist of observable boundaries and is besides a visible expression of a specific time period. Examples are arts, monuments and architecture.
Out of these considerations I add my own corollary that we allow our need for stability as described in psychology and theology to mutate into the assignment of quasi-physicality when it comes to place at the expense of our sanity. We materialize our emotions and caulk them between cracks on the sidewalk, wire them into old neon sides and cremate their considerations to be sifted into the dusty backroads of spaces of our past. In the process we trade the Now for the presumed permanence of the Past. We miss the Present before us. And what is the Present, but pure, unbridled Change?
I object to my former insecure coddling of fond memories and choose to sit through the waves of reordering with unperturbed curiosity. Like Ray Bradbury noted in Dandelion Wine:
“It won't work,' Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. 'No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”
Laguna has changed. Little remains of the crusty patina of salt and chipped paint that a beach town connoisseur expects and demands, replaced by pompous, modern, washed concrete, unoriginal minimalism staring down in Xanadu-ical fashion on the mere mortals wandering the sidewalks and streets and sands.
Give them too much attention and you’ll miss the proverbial and literal dandelions right before you. And the sourgrass. And orange and red and yellow explosions of overgrown nasturtiums. The entire worlds to be found in a single tidepool, with their hermit-crab-fueled economies lorded over by anemones and a single stranded perch acting as the stand-in Super Mario 64 end-of-level Boss while awaiting the next high tide. The migratory birds indulging in beach layovers between domestic flights along the Pacific Rim. Dolphins, sea lions, leopard sharks. Eucalyptus oil resting heavy in the air after a long spring rain.
The town of Laguna Beach is alive, not dead. Its aliveness hides in plain sight, deflected by a self-imposed sheen of curmudgeonry on my sapped trigenarian corneas.
This article is less of an article and more the reflective reconciliation of someone who’s come home to his town. When I write I write in the spirit of the first generation of bloggers in the late 90’s before the word blogging had much traction. When you’d sign on to Google not to search for a news article or for not-yet-in-existence-social-media, not for the not-yet-born-Wikipedia or for whatever topic you could dream up and millions more you couldn’t...but to peruse the now defunct Google Directory. There were only a few thousand websites on the Web and back then you’d just read whatever the hell someone had taken the time to rant about on their blog comprised of text and, if you were lucky, some HTML. The free form stream of consciousness of an amateur somewhere out there with a personal computer was art in its finest. No pandering for likes or views, no consideration that someone might read your musings at all. Just humans, spewing their unadulterated feelings out into the circuitry of a nubile extra dimension of connectivity whose power and folly we’d yet to have anticipated.
So allow me here and now to declare that I still love Laguna Beach. I really do.
I love that I grew up in a hodgepodge smattering of ingredients that when baked together became the only Reality I truly knew until I left at eighteen: a town with a history as an art colony in the 20’s, a homesteaded anomaly in an otherwise Spanish-land-holding dominated Orange County decades prior, then 40 years in the other direction a hippie stronghold that harbored Timothy Leary and his refreshing embrace of lysergic acid and alternate paths of life. The birthplace of skimboarding and the West Coast’s oldest surf contest, of plein air painters and sculptors. A place that not long ago no one had really heard of, a dot on the map (if even on it) that was a bitch to get to for travelers between the equidistant nearest metropolises of Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana beyond the Wall.
It’s a town with only three roads with which to enter it, cut off from the sprawl of Southern California by a protective crescent of coastal hills nestled against the sea. Conserved lands of chaparral look down upon every home in an everlasting reminder of the primal beauty of this unique environ known in the Köppen climate classification system as Csa and Csb.
This blabbering wannabe of an article is the first in a however-many-part series with no self-imposed deadline, to be written as I please whenever life brings me home to Laguna from the antithetical existence I now enjoy in The Greatest City on Earth. These pieces are cyclical, not linear, a homage to my relationship with a town I both know better than anyone and hardly recognize itself.
Do I love Laguna Beach, the “town”? Do I love Laguna Beach, the “place”?
I can’t say. Towns are places and places are temporary.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
The Presbyterian Church, where I, along with many Laguna kids went to pre-school (regardless of religious affiliation and more so since there are so few options. I loved it).
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
One of the older and intact historic beach cottages found throughout town.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
My main childhood home, from age 4 to 16. Built in 1927, it’s an archetypal Laguna cottage with a garden to match. My room was the one in the center of the A-frame, second floor in the front.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
One of the many alleys I played in around the Woods Cove neighborhood in which I grew up.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
The liquor store I grew up biking to for candy and snacks. We’d head there in a gang of 7 year old kids or sometimes I’d go solo and think about girls or Sonic The Hedgehog along the way. Sad to think parents are too soft these days to let their children fend for themselves in simple outings like a candy run…such imperiousness will bear scars in the form of anxious-ridden, fear-driven generations to come…uh oh, am I ranting? Rest assured my kids are taking the subway by themselves at age 10 and will do so cell-phone-free, not fuckin’ kidding.
Pacific Coast Highway. Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Pearl Street Beach, the beach at which I grew up. As a kid there were few folks other than locals there, now it’s become a world famous destination. To me, it’s still home. I’ll have my ashes spread between here and all five boroughs of NYC one day.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Pacific Coast Highway. Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Spigot Liquor on PCH. Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Looking Northbound on the famed Pacific Coast Hwy (CA State Route 1, and is the only highway in town. Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
My dad walking our dog Scott. Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
A section of “jungle” that I grew up in. I’d allow the interplay of non-native species to evolve within my childhood imagination into alien worlds the likes of which I came to first know in the 1985 - 1995 comic series Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson (still a diehard fan).
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna has had its own herd of goats for fire mitigation for ages. With it comes a town shepherd, who lives in a camper and travels from hill to hill (trailer pictured below, tucked back in a eucalyptus grove).
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
The shepherd’s trailer. Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
Laguna Beach, CA Fletcher Berryman 2020. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.
What I love is Laguna Beach, the location. The part of Planet Earth represented by latitude and longitude 33° 31′ 53″ N, 117° 46′ 9″ W. One day the town that emerged out of the hills will crumble back into it and yet this spot in the Universe, with its blue coves and rolling hills and sycamores, will remain. Whatever it was and whatever it becomes, it’s a part of me.
Tethered by a transcendental umbilical cord, I’ll continue to lunge out into the Unknown, taking in the world with a wide-eyed pantheistic bent that forces me towards the reductionist conclusion that all that I am, all that I’ll ever be…
is a kid from Laguna Beach.
A Lagunan.
