A Clean, Well-Lighted Place of White Houses

Six o'clock. Late summer. An hour and a half of sun left. Typical San Clemente day. Clear, but with high, cottony cumulus brushed across the sky. (There is an average of 342 days of sunshine per year in San Clemente, you keep reading somewhere.) San Clemente is in Orange County, an eponym for political conservatism to psephologist and gag writer alike. The county was not named after the orange but, according to muddled historical accounts, after the Dutch House of Orange. The principal crops of Orange County are cut flowers, chicken eggs and strawberries. Valencia oranges are fourth.

I can see a small restaurant at the end of the pier with a neon fish coolly burning above it. (You don't see much old--style neon these days.) It really doesn't matter what the restaurant is called. Each successive owner gets the neon tuna with it. The present proprietor features in his menu an "abalone sandwitch," which somehow tastes better than an abalone sandwich. The food is good and real cheap. But don't fly out from the East Coast with a party of eight on my recommendation. The half--day fishing boat Sum Fun is just docking. The skipper doesn't tie up but sort of cozies against the landing, gives it full right rudder and tachs the engines. At the restaurant counter at least one tourist is looking about him with a wild surmise as the telephone--pole pilings of the pier sway giddily beneath him under the assaults of the Sum Fun. Another is wondering if that second bottle of Bud could have hit him that hard.

When the sport fishermen have debarked and dumped their gunny sacks of fish into the gasoline--powered cart for delivery to the parking lot, a tally is run. Today on the half--day and full--day boats there were 103 passengers, 80 bass, 135 barracuda, 461 bonito, 7 yellowtail and 28 miscellaneous. The water temperature was 70 degrees, high tides were at 8:20 A.M. and 9:20 P.M. and low tides at 4:15 P.M. and 3:12 A.M. Surf conditions were green (safe, that is) and wind was 18 miles per hour, NNW.

I pass through the underpass, which goes beneath the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. A small metal plaque over the tunnel reads, Improved By WPA 1935--36, but it is barely visible, having been painted over, as though we are a bit ashamed of once having had to take help. (It is interesting that Mr. Nixon, who not long ago rediscovered Keynesian deficit spending, has now come out for Government make--work programs. He's rediscovered WPA! Is there no end to this man's insight?)

A notice on the underpass wall in crayon reads:

Lonely Marines?

Meet us any Sat. nite at beach entrance

Drifty and Twinky.

Ah, Drifty! Ah, Twinky! Where are you? Hardly a man I know alive has ever seen you.

A reluctant farewell to the pier area. Then on to Stan's Snack Shop (Since 1950). Over a million customers. come in and Browse. The Resort Motel and Apartments. Low Winter Rates. The Tackle Box. Fresh and Frozen Bait. Karnival Korner. Hot Dogs Umbrellas Chips Milk Submarines Pop Cigs--beach town shorthand.

It's now low tide and good for walking, because the tideland is firm to the foot. If I keep going south, I can walk about a mile and three quarters. There is a lot of public beach in San Clemente --there's another mile the other way. In a quarter of a mile I will reach the overpass, which is a steel pedestrian bridge high above the Santa Fe tracks. (You can't get to the beach in Clemente without crossing the railroad tracks.) The overpass beach is where the townspeople hang out. (The pier group is mostly weekenders and day--trippers.) Another mile of resolute walking will get me to the State Park Beach. Here the people are different again. Their skin looks unused to the sun. They seem to gaze at the ocean as if it were a wonder that they see but once a year. Nor do they move in the water easily, as California young, with their Tanfastic bodies, do. There is a great deal of picnickery and potato salad and camp-fire-blackened weenies and children who are tripped out of their minds at this great body of water--a sense of mystery and union, like returning to their own salt-germinal beginnings. And there are families. Old-style nonnuclear families. With members of all ages, right up to Granddad, standing there in his Monkey Ward suit trousers and black hightops and white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and no tie. The makers of Hang Ten beach gear haven't made a dent in this market. These people all live in the state park, which sits atop a fantastically wormholed, rain-eroded bluff There they park their Travaleze Trailers and Week-N-Der campers and Cruisaire Motor Homes and they cook in community kitchens with the sweet smell of fried potatoes and bacon in the morning and the kids sleep on the ground in their Sears Dacron sleeping bags and this to them is Vacationland.

As I move on, a swarm of heavy Marine choppers goes by with their loud thwappathwappa and I get a dim conception of the hunted feeling the Vietnamese must know down below. Friend or foe. A third of a mile on, there is a James Bondish sign staked in the sand:

No admittance

No trespassing

Cyprus Shore Community Association

Beach Patrolled

(The phrase "by armed guards" used to follow the word patrolled on the sign, but evidently someone decided that it belabored the obvious and it has been carefully scrubbed off.)

Up on the cliff, there are guard posts and lookout stations. On certain days, no boats are allowed within a mile of shore and only highborn members of the species Surfus Californicus (mostly sons and daughters of Cyprus people) may enter these waters. On these days, there is rumored to be an army of plainclothesmen up there, backed up with hidden TV cameras and uniformed Treasury agents. All this interdiction and watch and ward comes from the circumstance that located on the palisade is what is popularly known as the Western White House--vacation home of Dick and Pat and Trish and Julie--or the Summer White House, if you prefer the legend on a felt souvenir pennant selling for 49 cents at the local Cornet Store, corner of Del Mar and Ola Vista.

The President and I live in the same town. He lives at one end and I live at the other. He has to cross the tracks to get to the beach, too. And the annoying tar that sometimes collects on my feet--which some say comes from tankers cleaning their tanks offshore--must likewise cling to Chief Executive arches, too. The only real difference, I suppose, is that my junk mail comes to "Resident" and his comes to "President." (Nixon, incidentally, literally put San Clemente on the map. A lot of the map makers used to leave it off their charts, even though the town has some 16,000 people. Since Nixon, however, the town is very big at Rand McNally.)

Well, of course, our living quarters are not in the same class. His cost $340,000--$100,000 in cash and the remaining $240,000 at seven and a half percent interest in five years. Besides a large house--which somewhat resembles a deconsecrated mission--there are five acres of grounds, a swimming pool, a four--hole pitch--and--putt golf course (donated by Orange County citizens, calling themselves, somewhat restrictively, Golfing Friends of the President) and a view of and access to the Pacific Ocean, where the President could catch a few sets on his Hobie (a gift from Trish and Julie), if he cared about surfing, which he doesn't, thereby blowing the entire Hang Ten vote of America (.0075 percent).

The Nixon Place, as it is now known, was formerly the Cotton Estate and is located at the very south of town--so far south that a good wedge shot would literally put you in San Diego County. A good wedge shot in moon gravity would land on the geodesic dome of one of the world's largest nuclear reactors, which is two miles south of the Nixons at San Onofre. Turn right on the frontage road going south alongside the San Diego freeway and you come to a guard gate that protects the fenced--off community of Cyprus Shore--and abutting this enclave is the Western White House. Outside the gate a sign reads, No sightseers beyond this point--with a shift space between sight and seers. A uniformed guard sits at the gate to rebuff surfers, sight--seers, Democrats, Walter Hickel, Abbie Hoffman, Weathermen and, I suppose, devotees of disagreeable religions. For the application for membership in the Cyprus Shore Community Association has a significant space for Religion. The Prez, no doubt, could have had himself made an honorary member of the association; but in case he did fill in that blank, he probably put Quaker, an affiliation that no doubt would make Cyprus people happy but has been rumored to make a lot of peace-loving Quakers unhappy. A Cyprus Shore resident conspiratorially informed writer Arnold Hano that the President has "two Negroes and an Italian" on his Secret Service staff. Of course, the deputy special agent in charge of the President's personal security is named Arthur Godfrey. So, you see, anything is possible.

If the President wants to complain to his local Congressman, he'll have to write to a member of the John Birch Society--Representative John Schmitz of the 35th Congressional district. Schmitz would consider Nixon a liberal--so you know where John's head is at. He's against just about everything but the population explosion. He has seven kids.

The piece of property bought by R. M. N. was the estate of Henry Hamilton Cotton, head of a syndicate that literally owned the whole town before it was built, horse breeder and fancier, onetime financial leader of the California Democratic Party and warm supporter of F. D. R. Nixon is not the first President to set foot on the Cotton Estate. H. H. Cotton held a ranch barbecue there for F. D. R. in the Thirties (where they enjoyed beef, beans, watermelon, horse races and "lashings of beer"). F. D. R. and Henry also played cards in the turretlike room that stands in the yard. Cotton deserted Roosevelt when F. D. R. decided to run for a third term; he never voted again.

Meanwhile, downtown in San Clemente, a somewhat uncomfortable-looking policeman is writing out a citation to a couple of Krishna Consciousness cats in saffron robes and wearing little hand chimes. Better nip this mantra thing in the bud before it gets out of hand.

Mari Juana

Mari Juana

Juana Juana

Mari Mari....

"Krishna Consciousness members should not necessarily be confused with hippies," a local paper gravely informs us. Siva, Vishnu and Brahma will be relieved to hear this. A history of the town says that the first Christian baptism in California was performed here in 1769--but that the Buddhists converted the people of the area "13 centuries before the Franciscan Padres."

Hare Krishna

Hare Krishna....

Earlier in the month, a youth was arrested for having an "ecology" flag in the window of his VW camper. It was a dyed-green American flag that he'd hung for curtains in the back windows. But not all of the hip generation are as disconnected as the police here think. The kid turns out to be a second cousin of the Udall family.

Meanwhile, over at the Vital Food Shop on El Camino Real, you can buy Kik-Nik if you want to break the nicotine, or cigarette, habit and Kik-Lik if you want to break the booze habit. Things are simple in Grover's Corners and here in San Clemente.

And down at the San Clemente Inn, the Jaycees are reciting their creed.

We believe:

That faith in God gives meaning and purpose to human life. (Implying that Jefferson, Lincoln, Voltaire, Twain, Einstein and Madalyn Murray O'Hair had, or have, no purpose to their lives.)

That the brotherhood of man transcends the sovereignty of nations. (Better watch that kind of weirdo talk around City Hall.)

• • •

San Clemente was founded in 1925 by a Hispanophile Norwegian named Ole Hanson. Ole laid out what Lewis Mumford would call a Cartesian town--planned from the first brick, "the kind of external order that can be achieved by a single mind, like that of a Baroque prince." Ole favored handmade red-tile roofs and white-stucco walls to give his village a sort of spurious Spanish-Moorish flavor, and he inserted this and other specs in each sales agreement for a lot. He bought the Rancho Los Desechos tract from his friend Henry Cotton, planned the winding streets that follow the natural contour of the hills' (the Anglo terms street and avenue were replaced by calle and avenida), organized sales jamborees to sell the lots, with prospects carted in from L. A. and fed at his expense, and built and donated to the town, without bonded indebtedness, a hospital, a community center and a school. In short, he made a town for himself. Whenever some individualist deviated from Ole's "dress code," he moved right in with workmen and restored the place to uniformity. (That's the way they did it in those days.)

Ole Hanson was one of those restless, westering, sublimated builders and doers who were the pattern heroes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the Midwest he found his way to Seattle and in 1918 ran for mayor and won. As mayor, he called in Federal troops to put down a general strike. In the fashion of the times, he wrote a book called Americanism Versus Bolshevism, presenting his own little kitchen debate against the I.W. W. In 1920, at the Republican Convention in Chicago, he was an almost-candidate for the Presidential nomination and then the Vice--Presidential spot. He lost the Presidency to Harding and the V. P. spot to Coolidge. He left Seattle and finally ended up in the deserts of Southern California, where he helped develop a town he called Twenty-Nine Palms. That was too good a title for Vine Street to resist, and the song Twenty-Nine Palms made the charts in the Forties.

He died in 1940, and shortly after, the Bank of America, which by now owned a lot of local property and wanted to make it more salable, got Ole's architectural covenants nulled. A small irony is that Spanish--style houses--complete with red--tile roofs--are in vogue around here again. In the Thirties, when the Bank of America was delinquent on its taxes, Ole had the mayor order all the streetlights shut off at night. The bank held out for a few days, but, fearing it was vulnerable to a heist, had to capitulate.

In April of 1970, in the predawn hours, a ghostly figure threw a fire bomb through the window of the Bank of America on El Camino Real. It went out quickly in the damp coastal air. The sound of an automobile engine was heard racing away. One unidentified resident said the engine sounded to him exactly like a 1928 Packard.

• • •

The news that the President would become a resident sent a tremor through the town that was almost undetectable on the Richter scale. Police Chief Murray later said, "When it was first announced that the President would buy a house here, the attitude was, 'So what?' " Nixon first visited here in March 1969, and when nobody turned out to bid him welcome, the chamber of commerce became alarmed. As Arnold Hano wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "It's one thing to allow the newcomer his privacy, but it's another to cold--shoulder him."

On Nixon's next visit, the city scrounged up a cool hundred bucks to finance a gala reception at the Coast Guard copter pad next to Nixon's Place. This time the organizers got out the vote by phone and prudently saw that school was let out. Several hundred people showed up. But the indifference is not the only problem here. Some Cyprus Shore people are getting a bit waspish about their semibucolic enclave being turned into an armed and occupied city three or four times a year. It's probably a little rough to go to the Alpha Beta for some hamburger buns and then feel like you might get frisked before you make it to your driveway. The fact that all this is for the President --even one who is a member of ah approved religion--probably doesn't make it go down much easier. Nor is the fact that the President talks about maybe building the Nixon Museum/Library here to house his Presidential papers looked upon with gusto by locals. It's all right to have a Middle American in the Western White House, but the thought of thousands of them boring through town in Gray Lines buses turns the natives off. You see, from the beginning, the city was cried up by its promoters as being exactly halfway between L. A. and San Diego (66 miles each way). Implicit in that happy equidistance to local misanthropes is that one town is just as far away as the other.

The President's imminent arrival is usually foretold by Secret Servicemen stocking up on Macadamia-nut ice cream (a Nixon favorite) at the local Alpha Beta. Since this Executive predilection was revealed, demand for Macadamia-nut ice cream has gone up incredibly at the store. The President even drops a little of his own money into the local economy. He strode into the Bay Cities Hardware and purchased three beach balls from Claudia Nelson, who later excitedly and rather left-handedly complimented him by saying he had "the softest hands I've ever touched." There are other economic benefits. The San Clemente Inn now runs at nearly full capacity and there are ten more police officers in town, costing $102,000 and paid for by the Federal Government.

Meanwhile, in September 1970, unemployment in Orange County reached 7.4 percent of the labor force and the place was declared a "substantial unemployment area" by the Labor Department.

Even the most modest attempt to cash in on the Presidential presence seems to run into trouble. The city council wanted to put up a sign on the freeway reading, Home of the western white house, but the state, which controls the freeway, nixed it as a traffic hazard. (The sign was later placed south of town.) It was then suggested that the frontage road near the Nixon Place, Via de Frente, be changed to Avenida del Presidente. Residents of the street were polled and it turned out a majority were against changing the name. The city council then voted four to one to "enact procedures" to bring about the change, but there may be a public hearingon the matter. (There was, but nobody showed up and the street name has now been changed.)

One day about a year ago, a sign appeared at the Summer White House gate: La casa pacifica. Someone interpreted this as The House of Peace, but apparently the President, who likes to remind us that he's a peace-loving Quaker, found this a bit much. One of those ubiquitous Teutons on the President's staff informed the papers that it really means The Peaceful House.

• • •

Out at the high school, they have had trouble with--what else?--the dress code. (There is no cure for the common code.) A couple of years ago, 346 barbershops were closed down in Los Angeles County, and they're not going to let it happen here. A local resident beefed to the school board that the predominantly student committee that set up the dress code was "unrepresentative of the community" and that "these kind of committees are influenced largely by people who favor left-wing causes, riots, narcotics traffic, sex education and the American Civil Liberties Union." The school board not long ago found The Confessions of Nat Turner unsuitable reading for the high school students. No one could be found on the board who had read the book--indicating that the board must have found it unsuitable reading for itself. (Down at the public library, however, you can check out a copy of Playboy--that is, if it's still there. The librarian says that Playboy keeps getting stolen.)

A few years ago, the vice-principal at the high school decided that dopers could be spotted by their vocabulary. He put out a classified list of terms and phrases, the use of which should bring suspicion upon the user, and circulated it among the teachers. Unfortunately, the glossary was leaked to the press, thus affording us these gems, selected passim:

Big John: Police

George: OK, all right, he's George

Groovy: Expression used by people high on drugs

Establishment: Organized society as we know it today, which hippies seek, to destroy

Karma: Fate, force generated by a person's actions that he is held to in Buddhism and Hinduism

Nirvana: State of freedom from Karma

Provos: Group that helped the hippies. Their aim is to demolish the world.

Cop-out: Alibi, confess

Added terms: Reader, Sansara, Uptight, Vibration

Teachers were instructed: "If you hear these words being used in your classroom by students, please inform the office as to who they are and we can put a close check on them."

The class of 1970's gift was a peace symbol laid out in the ground surrounding the campus sundial. A local lady (Another Mother for War?) protested to the school board that they "might be defacing public property." She went on: "I object to it because it is being used by the revolutionaries in our country." Someone pointed out that the peace symbol was an "ancient symbol of evil and antichrist," but he didn't reckon with the annoying habit kids have of informing themselves these days. The students pointed out that the figure in the circle stands for nuclear disarmament in Navy semaphore and has come to symbolize peace. The board sustained the symbol as being nonsubversive.

Well, things are not much different here in Grover's Cor--Oops, San Clemente than anywhere else. Little hassles about sex edjeekashun. Feller named Curtis, member of the local Birchers, says these here family--life films teach masturbashun is OK. Says that's against Cathlick doctrine. Didn't say what Cathlick doctrine had to do with public schools. But the bored of ed agreed and voted down the films. Kids around here grow up just like other kids, with lots of cavities in their teeth. Birchers and their "fellow travelers" always defeat any attempt to put sodium fluorides in the water. Dentists do grate here.

Meanwhile, down by Plaza Park, a (continued on page 214)Place of White Houses(continued from page 166) girl drives by at the wheel of an old Galaxie. Looks like Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces. The kind that wears baby-doll nightgowns from Frederick's of Hollywood with I Love You embroidered on the side. On the bumper of the Ford is a bust-inviting sticker: Get Your Shit Together, it reads.

On a Saturday afternoon in January, the forces of Dr. Carl McIntire, the warlike preacher, meet in Plaza Park and march down El Camino Real to Linda Lane Park (you remember Linda Lane, sister of Priscilla?) by the beach. They're protesting the war. It isn't warlike enough. We're not winning it. McIntire and his followers apparently believe peace is something to shoot for. They march down to the beach toting signs like, Why Aren't We Winning? and Ask Mr. Nixon and Total Victory, where they are met by a McIntire regular, Uncle Sam on seven-foot stilts. Uncle Sam wears boxing gloves and has his hands bound at the wrists, a Houdini-ish metaphor that is meant to demonstrate what a pitiful helpless giant we are in Vietnam. On the downhill road to the park, a gaggle of bikini boppers walk alongside the march. The textbook reaction would have delighted the heart of Sigmund Freud. These citizens who were calling for, in effect, the elimination of the populace of a distant Asian country that had never done them any direct harm were outraged at the sight of the seminaked female body. "First they allowed burlesque indoors," said an irate middle-aged man carrying a flag, "now it's in the public streets ... shameful!"

The thought that occurred as you watched them was--are these the war lovers? Is this the violent right? These meek, scrawny, lugubrious, feckless citizens, mostly children or middle-aged, the men wearing five-year-old Penney's sport shirts. You wonder what these people would do if enemy paratroopers suddenly dropped from the sky. Run in circles and scream? There doesn't appear to be a combat-ready infantryman in the whole lot. (I would like to see a paper done someday on the war records of hawks. I suspect that they've seen much less combat than those who are called doves.)

• • •

Five miles north on the beach is Dana Point. The most famous residents there are Hobie Alter, who makes surfboards and the Hobie Cat, a catamaran that you sail right into the surf; and Bruce Brown, the Fellini of surfing films. John Severson, founding publisher of Surfer magazine, used to live here. Surfer has lately begun to resemble a throw-together of the Berkeley Barb, Nugget and the Paris Review. The offices of Surfer are actually in Capistrano Beach, a stone's throw from Dana Point. A much earlier visitor was Richard Henry Dana, Jr., who landed in the natural harbor there in 1836 as a crewman of the brig Pilgrim, and who turned his experiences into Two Years Before the Mast. Three miles north of Dana Point is Mission San Juan Capistrano, where the swallows return every Saint Joseph's day (March 19). They often begin arriving three or four days before and continue arriving a week or so after, but it's a charming bit of folklore and the curio shops (Middle America's head shops) aren't too unhappy that the tourists swallow the swallows story. They'll do a brisk sale in a pamphlet titled "The Story of the San Juan Capistrano's Mission Swallows," as the annual Fiesta de las Golondrinas goes on its merry mariachi way outside. But there's a spider in the valentine. Some Capistranans resent the swallows, which they call "messy birds." They dribble mud while building their nests, and then there is bird shit from the baby swallows. Many homes are festooned with strips of foil to discourage swallow nests. About 50 of them, many containing eggs, were knocked from the eaves of a new church near the south edge of town. Then it came out that some homeowners had been clandestinely knocking nests from under their eaves for years.

When the President visited the mission, he was greeted by señoritas in long full gowns. "I much prefer these to miniskirts," he said. He later ran into a miniskirted artist. He praised her painting but not her skirt, and she offered to sell it to him when it was finished. She did, but after adding three doves--including the Dove of Peace.

The best restaurant in the South Coast area is in San Juan Capistrano. It's called El Adobe, and Dick and Pat had dinner there. The chair Nixon sat in now bears a brass plaque: The President's Chair, Richard Nixon, Mar. 22, 1969. While they were eating, a rancher drove up to the door with some friends in a jeep and was told if he wanted to see the President, Mr. Nixon would be out shortly. "See Nixon?" he said. "Hell, I want to eat." The meal served to Nixon that day is featured on the El Adobe menu as "The President's Choice." The President's choice is not, as you might suspect, cottage cheese with catsup, but chiles rellenos, tacos, enchiladas, etc.--the old number-seven combination at Pepito's.

• • •

The sun is on the rim and I turn back toward the pier, where a beer and an "abalone sandwitch" await me, served by a sweet little sand witch from the high school. Sometimes in winter, taking a two-mile run on the beach, you are the only one there. As you walk back, the only imprints on the tidal sand are your tennis-shoe marks, the record of your recent run, coming at you, apparently without end, and seeming to admonish you: "This way! This way!"

Ahead of me, fighting into the now strong wind, is a gray sea gull. Its altitude is about 50 feet, air speed nearly zero, and it has in its beak an object, about clam size--a pretty good pay load for a gull. Periodically, it loses air speed and has to jettison the object. It then dives and, without a hitch in its swing, touches down on the sand, beaks the object and takes off. After it goes, say, 75 feet farther, the whole sequence is repeated. This goes on three or four times. It looks like the stubborn little devil is going to take his Sisyphean load all the way home that way. On the fourth or fifth try, the gull climbs quite a bit higher, perhaps 75 feet, drops the thing again and--I do not lie--dives and catches it in mid-air just above the sand. Then it climbs back up, this time way up to 100 feet, drops it again, circles around and either can't spot the damn thing or says, aw, the hell with it--because it goes on without its prize.

The sun is partly on a downer now and the beauty is lyrical. It is the time when poets, conservationists and other devotees of pictorial "climax scenes" like this must be careful, lest they say something they will be sorry for in the morning. My only thought--why can't the people who inhabit this piece of geography be as beautiful in spirit as it is?--has already been said. "Though every prospect pleases / And only man is vile."

All the clouds are cumuloft

Walking in space

Oh, my God, your skin is soft,

I love your face.

How dare they try

To end this beauty ...?

Farther on I come upon an old, frowzy, dun-colored seal, sprawled on the sand, eyes rheumy--in, no doubt, from Seal Rock, which lies about a mile out. Two little girls, around 13 or 14, are sitting next to this lugubrious aquatic mammal. "This is our seal," one says. I sit down next to them. The poor old tattered thing raises its head with a great effort and makes a feeble lunge toward us. The girls panic and jump back. I say, "That seal is dying. They never come up on the beach like that unless they're going to die." The girls looked bemused, as if they had never heard of such a thing.

• • •

Back at my pad, I stand on the sun porch and can hear the lifeguard loudspeaker. They are shutting down for the day. Sound travels upward and it drifts up with awful fidelity--I sometimes wish my stereo set were as faithful. In summer my day as punctuated with the authoritarian drone of this lifeguard P. A. "Attention, the boy riding the bike on the beach: Get off your bike and remain off it until you leave the beach." "Will the surfer with the blue trunks and the yellow board return to the beach--you're through for the day." This latter judgment and sentence means that a surfer has drifted into the area reserved for swimmers once too often. The surfers are a real committed lot. Their idea of striking a blow for freedom is to change their trunks, borrow a different-color board and get back into the surf. It's their Endless Summer equivalent of a Weatherman going underground.

The sun is down now but throwing an electric-orange aftersplash against the clouds. It's a total stun situation. The sea is steel blue and rises up to the eye with that "sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea" that Conrad noted. Silhouetted against this, a few hundred yards from me, is the outline of a large one-story tile-roofed building, the Casa Romantica rest home. It's Ole's old place! Casa Romantica by the Sea. And now old folks go there to die.

• • •

A few months ago, the whine of portable saws awakened me and I could see they were cutting trees down at Ole's place. A day or so later, a bulldozer attacked Ole's guesthouse, which used to be called Mrs. Hanson's Dollhouse. It went down in 15 minutes. A builder named Wulfeck is going to throw up 105 apartment units, each with an ocean view. Before razing Mrs. Hanson's Dollhouse, they removed the handmade red-clay tiles from the roof, which will be used in a barbecue area in the new apartment complex. The builder said that the dollhouse was in amazingly good internal condition.

"We didn't even see one termite," he said.