Street Life

I guess the existential question posed by Santa Cruz becomes: what is the difference between myself and a homeless bum?

In the picture above the bum has a fully kitted out Mercedes van with the new Starlink satellite uplink and so forth.  The RV below is not the worst you’ll see on the streets of Santa Cruz but is it a dwelling and not a traveler? I like to think of myself as a nomad, a traveler, a wanderer, but am I just a bum too? A person who chooses to be houseless on the margins of society? I suppose so. 

For people like us who live in a van by choice, as a way to stay on the road and go to the edge, we find ourselves in the middle of two worlds in this strange town. There are no rules here. Or better there is no enforcement of any rules as far as I can see.  

Delaware Street on the far west side (north end) of town is notorious as a camper’s haven for the residentially challenged. Never mind overnight parking is not permitted. 

This is an industrial zone a little inland from the waves at West Cliff Drive and it is also home to a Marine Biology lab, an expansion from the University of California campus up the hill. So people work here and jog here just as they might anywhere. Right through the homesites of the vehicle dwellers. 

They say there is a dumpster for trash somewhere here but I could see no porta potties  so that issue is up for speculation. Rusty and I walked the woods a little and came across lavatorial evidence which begs the question: what is going on?

The West side is by no means the most messed up part of the city as downtown is the epicenter of houseless living as you  might expect.  And it is shocking to a former Key West dispatcher who would regularly take three am calls from irate citizens complaining about people parking in residential spots without proper permits.  Around here is there any law and order?

Bear in mind the winter climate on the Central Coast is cold and very wet and freezing temperatures are not unknown.  This area is called the Benchlands and it is a part of the river bed that runs through town. Layne and I used to picnic here in those halcyon days when we were planning our wedding and she worked as a public defender in the courthouse.

And you may be surprised to learn this refugee camp with no running water, showers or facilities beyond trash and porta potties (and needle disposal) is located right behind the courthouse. 

People living in their cars are entirely visible to anyone working, or being sentenced, in the courtrooms of Santa Cruz County. 

I may be just old fashioned but I find this situation bizarre beyond my comprehension.  I have asked each of the numerous locals we have broken bread with if they have an opinion. They just shrug their shoulders and say that’s the way it is. That there is no better solution than anarchy beggars belief. 

There are no rules that are enforced, there are no cops on patrol unless they are zipping through downtown in their heavily tinted patrol cars. And I do understand Santa Cruz County has a serious gang problem  but still there is no quality of life in a town where you are literally tripping over homeless bundles on the sidewalks.

Quite aside from the indecent inhumanity of the situation even lunatics, never mind the working poor deserve some attention in a town bending under the weight of murders and other random violence.

As Rusty and I walked back to GANNET2 in the courthouse public parking lot I saw my first three cops on foot, two deputies and a courthouse security officer. They were clustered around a full size box truck, perhaps thirty feet long, parked in a car space in the lot. 

I heard the sergeant calling in the tag on this giant intruder and then the driver came back, a portly middle aged white guy protesting loudly he couldn’t find anywhere to park. “Unbelievable!” I heard one of the deputies protest in exasperation. 

Less than a hundred yards away were the structures of the unsupervised abandoned homeless and hopeless, lunatics, impoverished, veterans, hobos and addicts. The truck backed up and drove off. Law enforcement dispersed. I shook my head and gave Rusty some water. 

Then there are the parked vans all over town, alongside the cars and RVs and we see them day and night. No overnight parking is a city ordinance but who cares?

So are we bums? I don’t think so, not least because we expect to be on our way to Seattle on Thursday, and not a minute too soon. The irony of this town living through sky high rents while living in a tidal wave of street life is plain weird.  I’m not convinced the two are directly related as life on the street seems to be a community not a rent refuge. I’m certain some car dwellers have slipped off the rent ladder in the face of high prices but the street people who aren’t insane and there are lots of those mumbling as they stagger around hopelessly, are hobos of professional standing. We could easily l8ve here on the streets rent free if we wanted to.

I’ve found lots of porta potties for easy dumping, trash cans for trash, showers at the senior center and even free food if you want! I tell you it’s crazy here and maybe that’s the draw. The word gets out and like attracts like. I don’t know if it’s tolerance or what but I cannot imagine living in this town with the real estate prices as they are and tripping over the realities of daily sidewalk life in a town with zero police presence. Layne’s friend Stacey, a lawyer,  lives in a fenced apartment complex and she has found bums sleeping in the toilets in the pool house. She once nearly brained a sleeper in the dumpster dropping a bag of trash on him. She can’t receive packages as they will be stolen. On and on. Barbara a retired lawyer routinely gets her car broken into on the street as she lives a few blocks from the jail.  It’s intolerable and everyone just shrugs. I have no answers other than to point at KOTS on Stock Island where you can stay for free, have a locker and a shower and get help to get back on your feet. What they do here I have no idea but it’s not working. Good luck and no we won’t be living on the streets here. It isn’t free enough for me.

Not our van, just one very much like ours! We are not alone. 

 

Surf City, USA

I expect you have heard The Beach Boys sing inspiringly of surfing and perhaps you even know that Huntingdon Beach is the capital of surfing and Jan and Dean created Surf City in 1963, the start of surfing as popular culture. And so on and so forth, the myths, the need to own the stories, the arguments and the claims and the nonsense.

Huntingdon Beach in Southern California claims to be Surf City and in the sense that surf movies show a warmer climate and more skimpy beach bunnies that may be true, but Santa Cruz is the place where Hawaiians first brought their boards and rode them on mainland waves. Unfortunately Santa Cruz, as photogenic as it is, suffers from cold; cold air and even colder water. The truth rarely coincides with the myth.

Unsightly kelp floating in the water, misty ocean air hanging low over the coast and beach bunnies actually surfing while dressed in cold clammy neoprene do not Hollywood fantasies make.

So if you want the real Surf City, not the faked up, over sexed one with lesser waves and lesser surfing you should not head to Huntingdon Beach. Let me say right now I never had any interest in learning to surf.  I wore neoprene to scuba dive and it was disgusting. Jack O’Neil invented the wet suit because the waters here will give you hypothermia but that is not my kind of swimming.

Steamer Lane was relatively subdued yesterday but I had the day off so Rusty and I wandered out to enjoy photographing the marine inversion foggy air and the surfers and the people watching the action around the Mark Abbott Lighthouse, a structure housing the surf museum built by his parents in his memory. Surfing kills lest we forget. The only Beach Boy who actually did surf ended up drowning at a young age. And he is not alone.

People take to the water with the swagger of the idolized but the fact surfing is dangerous I find quite surprising.  I recently read a book recommended to me by a traveler I met in Mexico and if you want to find out about surfing, especially if you think it is of no interest to you, I highly recommend this memoir.

It’s available electronically and it charts the author’s life as a youngster in Hawaii to surfing around the world to old age in Northern California. Most of the book will sustain your interest with the odd patch of excess surf (!), and you will learn more than you ever thought necessary about the surfing life! I should have liked to recommend it to this little guy strutting while under observation:

Rusty was far more interested in the ice plants than the surfers or the seagulls. I wandered and stared over the railing pointing my 120mm telephoto at whatever took my interest. I was wearing my vest only and it was not too cold. Perhaps I’m getting used to Surf City’s weird moods. Maybe I should take up geriatric surfing? I think not.

Surfing is not just the preserve of the young and feckless lest you be fooled into the thinking this isn’t a sport for real people. Anyone you meet in Santa Cruz may lay claim to be surfers. Lawyers get up at dawn and catch a few waves before court. Titans of industry too find themselves leveled by the wave culture,  barristas and van lifers all mix it up on the water.

Much of this surfing stuff I find as interesting as watching paint dry, sitting on a plank waiting for god knows what. There again I say the same about watching dolphins swim and surface to breathe. I have a low tolerance for sitting around waiting for something to happen. It turns out surfers feel the same way about each other and the stories of wave rivalry are legion.  Surfers are very insecure and hate intruders, scorn new comers and mock the less able. Frankly I’d have been mad to try surfing in the 80s as the native board  riders were arrogant shits.  I hope that’s changed but in case it hasn’t I’ll stay well away on the margins.  They won’t miss me or you.  

I remember years ago someone interviewed the then Mayor of Santa Cruz Mardi Wormhoudt and asked about her son the surfer. She defended him memorably pointing out the health benefits of the outdoor life not sitting on the couch not taking drugs and instead catching a few waves before school. I have held onto that image half a century later (she is long since dead) and it’s the picture I like to hold in my mind about surfing.  Wormhoudt herself was the city’s valiant leader in the catastrophic days of the Loma Prieta earthquake that leveled a third of downtown in a couple of minutes in the summer of 1989. Layne ran barefoot from her law office to safety on the street. I was in Florida watching a space launch at Cape Canaveral and glad to be there.

A footnote: Layne and I are to be interviewed on my old radio station KSCO.com at 10 am Pacific time Saturday morning to discuss retirement in the van. I doubt a reader of this page will learn anything new that I haven’t written about here but my former boss who will be interviewing me is an unpredictable character so who knows where we shall end up.