Lands End

Embers and Ash

Shawn Hubler — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:00:00 GMT

When our kids were young, we’d go down to the beach on weekends and build a bonfire as the sun set. Huntington Beach, Aliso Beach, Big Corona—any beach with a fire pit would beckon, even if the wood and blankets and sandy bottles of ketchup always turned the excursion into a schlep.

To us, it was worth it. The sky would go black, the night would go cold, and the flames would rise orange as the surf pounded the sand. Around us, other fires would draw their own tribes—flirting teenagers, singing church groups, beer-swigging surfers, families celebrating quinceañeras. We’d look up at the nearby houses and wonder how the people inside could resist joining. When our kids outgrew those beach nights, it was a little sad.

It has remained a little sad as Orange County has, bit by bit, stamped out its fire rings. Only 29 of California’s 450 beaches still permit them, and most of those remaining are in San Diego County or here. But Huntington Beach removed half of the rings on its city beaches in 2010 after a toddler suffered accidental burns there. And Newport Beach voted last year to get rid of the rings at Balboa Pier and Big Corona State Beach, citing the liability and wood smoke pollution. A California Coastal Commission ruling on the Newport Beach ban is expected this month.

The anti-ring arguments certainly have merit. Second-hand smoke is no fun. No taxpayer relishes anteing up for a liability payout. No one wants children—or anyone of any age—to be burned.

But lurking in the background is a less-spoken impulse among beach dwellers to keep outsiders away from what too many regard as their personal back yard. Never mind that state law mandates that recreational opportunities and public access be maximized at the beaches. Just read some of the letters to Newport Beach officials, complaining about the “gangs, crime [and] drugs” allegedly brought in by the riff-raff, or the supposed traffic at Big Corona from fire jumpers celebrating the Iranian New Year.

You get the sense that this isn’t just about lawsuits and asthma. Underneath, there’s an inescapable fact of beach life: People spend millions to live at the beach, thinking the community will be charming, and then are shocked—shocked!—to learn that they’re effectively living next to a public park.

The other day, a friend in Pacific Palisades told me a story. There used to be a big Fourth of July fireworks show at the Santa Monica Pier. Crowds came from miles around—teenagers, church groups, surfers, families. For many years, the gathering was festive. Then real estate prices in Santa Monica began to skyrocket, and the new locals began to grouse about the festival’s impact on property values and the municipal budget. Eventually, something bad happened—a gang shooting—and the locals got what they wanted. “The City of Santa Monica hasn’t had Fourth of July fireworks for more than 20 years,” my friend said. “And the community is the worse for it.”

It won’t be a surprise if Newport Beach does away with its fire pits. People who spend millions on beach homes tend to get what they want. But they should be careful what they wish for. Things can get lonely when the rest of the tribe leaves, and the night can grow cold after the fire goes out.

Illustration by Brett Affrunti

This article originally appeared in the March 2013 issue.

Wild Things

Shawn Hubler — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:00:00 GMT

My friend Nancy lives in a canyon, in a house that backs onto wild, wild wilderness. Coyotes roam there, and rattlers, and black widow spiders; she worries about West Nile virus and brush fires. At night, when she parks her Prius, she props open the hood so rodents seeking a cozy, enclosed space don’t nest underneath and gnaw the wires of the hybrid engine. It’s a pain, she admits, but what can you do? Get a restraining order? No, this is the price you pay for touching the beautiful face of nature: the realization that the wilderness wants what it wants.

My neighbor Linda has a Mexican fan palm. It is by far the tallest, skinniest, ugliest thing on the block. Also the messiest. The city may trim its trees, but hers aren’t so assiduously tended. So each time the Santa Anas blow, giant dead fronds whirl through the air in every direction. No year is complete without some parked car getting buried in brittle palm branches. What it’s doing in her yard is unclear—she didn’t plant it. It just showed up and began growing. It provides next to no shade and adds next to no value, and one of these days it’ll probably topple and knock a hole in her tile roof. But no amount of pesticide or neglect seems to kill it, and odds are if she chopped it down it would only grow back. So everyone on the block just keeps a broom handy and covers their cars when the winds come. What can we do? The thing wants what it wants.

Southern California is famous as an environmental war zone, a place where man and nature clash in sweeping and often dramatic terms. Earthquakes, brush fires, mudslides, rising sea levels—the elements here give people a lot to contend with. And vice versa: air pollution, water pollution, development.

Our tendency is to lecture one another on our responsibility, given the situation. Ours is a land of a thousand “shoulds.” Use less water. Avoid building on fault lines or too close to the ocean.

Of course, we don’t listen, because we don’t like to be lectured. We want comfort and convenience, we want security and plenty, we want SUVs and central air and cats in coyote country. We want homes so close to nature that we can pretend to own it. We want to imagine that we won’t learn the hard way that we aren’t the only ones who want things—that the mountainsides want to fall, that the chaparral wants to burn, that the rising Pacific wants Huntington Beach and Balboa Island the way Superstorm Sandy wanted New Jersey.

But what else can we do? It’s human nature. No less than the tree rats and the Mexican fan palm, we are wild things. And as God is our witness, we, too, want what we want. It feels like a stalemate, doesn’t it? Still, it’s hard to imagine ours is the only struggle that the natural laws have refereed since the world began.

The other day, I was at the beach, walking as close as I could to the edge of the surf without getting my feet wet. It was hard—the beach always shrinks in the winter. As the waves chewed up the sand that had been so abundant last summer, it seemed to whisper: “Everything’s a negotiation.”

Even at the ends of the Earth, even now, mighty forces are cutting deals. With each step, the shoreline moves, now wetter, now drier, now more for one side, now more for the other. It feels peaceful, but it’s a wild, wild place and it wants what it wants forever. And now it wants a little more water. And now it wants a little more land.

Illustration by Brett Affrunti

This article originally appeared in the February 2013 issue.

Nixon at 100

Shawn Hubler — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:00:00 GMT

I used to live in Nixon Country. The first house we owned was in Whittier, where the late president grew up. My husband grew up there, too, in the hills straddling Los Angeles and Orange counties. His Republican parents dragged him at age 9 to a Nixon rally at Whittier College; it was 1960, and they made him wear a little straw boater. The whole town, he recalls, turned out.

I think of that place and time whenever someone mentions Richard M. Nixon, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this month. He was long gone from the White House by the late ’80s when we moved to the ranch house down the road from my in-laws’, but his ghost was everywhere, from the historical plaques around town to our kids’ classmates’ surnames.

And the ground was still thick with his defenders—the conservative men, the stay-at-home women, the grandmothers in the Nancy Reagan-red suits with the gold button earrings, the kids who would tell your kids up front that they couldn’t play at your house unless you believed in Jesus. You could tell the Nixon haters, too, with their yuppie cars and their NPR and their granular knowledge of all things Dylan. In fact, Nixon Country in those days reflected the divide in my husband’s family: those for whom Watergate would be unforgivable forever, and those who would never forgive the lack of forgiveness for their favorite son.

Shortly after we moved in, the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum went up at his birthplace in nearby Yorba Linda. Like many who live near landmarks, we never got around to visiting. But I was back in the area recently and curiosity seized me. Seven presidents, four wars, and countless “-gates” had come and gone since Nixon. I wondered if, after all this time, I would discover some middle ground in those stately rooms and rosy gardens. But the place, privately run by Nixon backers for some 15 years before Congress brought it into the presidential library system, was as bifurcated as its namesake.

One set of exhibits was all baby pictures and campaign buttons; another, newer set echoed with Nixon’s taped voice, plotting in the White House like a paranoid creep. Here, he was a hardworking lawyer, husband, diplomat, environmentalist, and healthcare reformer; there, he was a ravaged close-up, mourning “so many bad judgments.”

I left confounded. Driving around, I tried to imagine the man who was “not a crook” as a venerable centenarian. On talk radio, the fightin’ words were Nixon redux—same “patriots” vs. “commies,” same Jesus vs. Dylan. But the farther I drove, the less clearly I saw him. Ranch houses and strip malls had displaced the lemon groves of his childhood. Campaign signs touted candidates named Chen and Hernandez. Outside his old Whittier law office, passersby supported Barack Obama; in Fullerton, where Nixon started high school, freshmen with history books hardly knew him. In Yorba Linda, a bumper sticker on a pickup urged, “Save the Seals—Club a Liberal,” seemingly unaware that the town’s most famous conservative had signed the Endangered Species Act.

I wondered what Nixon would make of this landscape. Only 41 percent of Orange County is Republican now. Maybe he’d be fine—he was a native Californian, after all, and Californians know, more than most, that landscapes change, that forgetfulness sometimes is the price of forgiveness, that, as the last election showed, fightin’ words don’t always mean the fight still matters. We used to live in Nixon Country, a country that isn’t Nixon’s anymore.

Illustration by Brett Affrunti

This article originally appeared in the January 2013 issue.

Fledglings

Shawn Hubler — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

It’s beginning to look less and less like Christmas, and not just because of climate change. The oldest and her new husband recently announced they were spending the holiday with his family in England. Then the middle child reported she’d be hunkering down at college to work on her thesis. Then the youngest said she was spending her part-time job money on a ticket to visit our summer exchange student—in Spain.

We reacted with a level of grace befitting the season:

“Wait, what?! You’re leaving us home alone?”

Denial gave way to whining. (“But who’ll play the piano for our Christmas Eve sing-along of Beatles music?”) Then bargaining. (“Let’s all go! Work from Europe! What’s halfway between London and Madrid? How about the Bay of Biscay?”) Then naked self-pity. (“Fine. So it’ll be just us, then. And the pets, who don’t even know the words to ‘Hey Jude.’ ”)

OK, so holidays are a bit off anyway here at the ocean. Santa runs around in a convertible, the local Chabad erects surfboard menorahs on the beach. Second homes that were vacant all year suddenly come alive outside with lights and wreaths, and inside with trophy wives showing the caterer where to put the turkey with the gluten-free stuffing. Still, some years are more unconventional than others. This Christmas, for instance, we officially become one of those “their-children-are-grown-now” families.

It was bound to happen. Kids are supposed to grow up and away. One year you can’t get them out of your bed long enough to sneak out and fill their Christmas stockings, and the next they won’t join you in the most basic after-dinner belching contest. All they want to do is tell you how much better things would be if you would just go raw or stop dressing like that or invest in a microbrewery or listen to some music that’s not from the ’60s.

And what can you do except adapt as your role shifts from adored minor deity to something like overpaid consultant? Eventually, you wake up on Christmas morning and you’re some dear old thing in the corner that’s just the teeniest bit disgusting, like a gassy golden retriever or what’s left of their blankie. Then the world turns and life calls down yet another round of transitions, and it’s time for another phase.

Still, it’s an adjustment. You unpack the holiday decorations, and here’s that little clay ornament one of them made you in second grade. And the stuffed velvet elf they used to write little notes to. And that raggedy silk bird their first cat tried to eat.

And deeper down are the relics of your own life before children—those artisan candle holders from your first apartment, the Venetian glass balls you splurged on the year you backpacked in Italy. The tree-topper star you inherited from your parents, who felt like such bit players in your own adult transition that you can’t even remember their reaction when you first bailed on one of their holidays.

All you know is that it happened, and they coped, no matter how far the change flung you as the planet spun out in its elliptical orbit and then, in a Christmas miracle, turned toward home again. Let it be, as they say in that beloved ’60s Christmas Eve carol. None of us are fixed points. We’ll be down by the water, which connects all shores, from the melting north pole, to Europe, to California. The Yuletide goes out, the Yuletide comes in.

Illustration by Brett Affrunti

This article originally appeared in the December 2012 issue.

Little Indignities

Shawn Hubler — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 19:00:00 GMT

Our neighbors have been going to San Francisco a lot lately. Just visiting, they insist. Now that their two children are launched, they’ve leased a second home there. Not to whine, but we miss them. We like their kids. We like their dog. We like listening to their cocktail glasses clink when they have parties. Without them, the block lacks a certain joie de vivre, a certain neighborly something. So over a glass of wine, I asked whether they were ditching us.

Of course not, they told us. For one thing, their children would never tolerate the sale of the family home. They were just branching out now that their nest is mostly empty. They were making the best of some Bay Area business commitments. Then it came out: They love our neighborhood, but as a gay couple, they’re weary of the random intolerance in Orange County. And the more times change, the less patient they are.

When Americans think about intolerance, Southern California is rarely the first place that comes to mind. We’re the land of the laid-back, the melting pot in the sunshine. But here as everywhere, mutual acceptance is a work in progress. “It’s not just the big things,” the neighbors said. “It’s the little things.”

For instance: Suppose you volunteered at Habitat for Humanity to help build houses, as they did during the Proposition 8 furor, only to overhear the guy next to you complain that Orange County needed to “get rid of the faggots.” Suppose your husband were injured and your emergency room intake worker, like theirs, refused to believe you were his legal next of kin. Suppose you joined a big church, as one of them did briefly, only to learn that some fellow congregants had a passion: buying property from people like you, and reselling to people who are more like them.

Suppose you and your spouse couldn’t feel right holding hands in public, because someone might be offended. My neighbors have been married since 2008; they’re among the 18,000 or so same-sex couples who wed after the state Supreme Court permitted such unions and before the passage of Proposition 8, which halted them, pending court appeals. The law was on their side at “I do,” but no matter. They still never know if people here will pat them on the back, or picket their “lifestyle.”

“When we tell people here we’re married, they go, ‘Oh! How cool!’ ” my neighbor said. “But there’s that look in their eyes, like, ‘Actually, it’s not cool.’ And the truth is, it’s not ‘cool.’ It’s not something we did for kicks. It’s our marriage, damn it. It’s our family.”

Understanding can be elusive in a place as diverse as Orange County. Change makes people anxious. We don’t know what we don’t know; words come out in ways we don’t intend. But the fact that most of us just want to live and let live gets eclipsed by—I’ll just say it—our reputation for narrow-mindedness.

The Klansmen may have left Anaheim, and skinheads may no longer terrorize Laguna Beach bars, but sometimes it seems we didn’t all get the memo. Orange County documented 64 hate crimes last year. The local newspaper has so many bigoted online comments that the alternative weekly, for laughs, turned them into a running feature. We have good schools, diverse workplaces, and global connections; we also have immigrant-bashers, school bullying of gay kids, and mosques in which we spy on suburban Muslims.

It’s sad, and it costs us. We’re not only losing good people, but part of our better nature—that joie de vivre, that certain something. The world is small; no one should have to leave town just to hold hands with their husband. And nice places miss out when they can’t let go of intolerance.

Illustration by Brett Affrunti

This article originally appeared in the November 2012 issue.

The No-Rant Zone

Shawn Hubler — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 22:00:00 GMT

I used to make it a rule not to talk politics with neighbors, and not just because your side is a bunch of wingnuts and my side is right.

Just kidding. (Not really.)

It’s just that, as Pat Jackson-Colando noted in last month’s “My Orange County” essay, everyone just parrots the rants of mean pundits. It has consequences. We once lived next to a couple who liked us so much that they called us “the practically perfect neighbors.” Then one night over cocktails, somebody—not naming any names—started ranting about a certain past occupant of the White House, and suddenly the martini pitcher wasn’t all that was frosty.

Who knew they were the only ones on the block whose pundits actually liked the guys in the White House? After that, it was shocking how distant and polite we all became with one another. It was a miserable loss; policy aside, we’d loved those neighbors. So when we moved to O.C., we agreed: no partisanship, no kidding, no matter what.

How hard could it be to keep such a simple commandment? When the neighborhood came out to greet us, it was hard to imagine politics even coming up. Everyone seemed to have everything in common: Our children were all great. Our pets were all friendly. We drove the same cars and employed the same gardener and served the same nice wine to one another in the same nice wineglasses. Our block was—we scarcely dared think it—practically perfect. Then came the 2008 election, and out came the bumper stickers and campaign signs.

Who knew? The baby boomers across the street were backing a whole different ticket than we were. So was the lesbian couple across the alley, and the pickup-driving kid on the corner. The mother of four in the new house had joined a church full of gay-marriage opponents, to the wounded astonishment of the gay couple two doors down, who immediately festooned their front yard with “No on Prop. 8” placards. (“We’d thought she was so nice!” they kept murmuring, over and over.)

Suddenly, every encounter felt like an invitation to miserable, polite distance. Then the couple across the street suggested we all watch the debates at their house. Just two rules: Your stance had to be your own—no parroting some ranter—and no one could forget that we were all friends first. Even if some friends were wingnuts. Kidding! (Not really!)

We resisted, but they were offering free chips and guacamole. So when the candidates faced off, we gathered from all points on the political spectrum. Everyone was civil, though one woman did applaud her candidate’s every utterance and somebody—not naming any names—did regrettably shoot her the stink-eye.

And the opinions were, for a change, based on personal experience, not polemic: The conservatives told how the Bush tax cuts had underwritten their small business. The liberals told how health-care costs were crippling their families. The gay couple explained what marriage equality meant to their children. The kid on the corner explained what he saw in Ron Paul.

We called it “The Caucus.” It was utterly awkward, yet strangely patriotic. For once, the election seemed to belong, not to ranters, but to us. Yes, trash talk would have been more fun, but listening reminded us that we were in this together. Maybe we even influenced each other. Who knows?

So now the 2012 election is upon us. Any day, someone will holler, “Caucus!” and we’ll gather for more guacamole and debate. Not that much we discussed four years ago actually has been settled, but we’ve learned something the ranters have yet to discover: There’s just one commandment to talking politics—love thy neighbor. Even wingnuts can do it.

OK, now I’m kidding. But I’m right.

Illustration by Brett Affrunti

This article originally appeared in the October 2012 issue.

Mrs. Dunlap

Shawn Hubler — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Six years ago, in early September, our teenager brought home a reading list like something out of graduate school.

“Omigod, my English teacher is a-maaazing,” she declared. There was a pause while I checked my hearing. Understand that our daughter was not, shall we say, president of the peppy overachiever club of Laguna Beach High School. There was a lot of dressing in black, a lot of hanging out at the beach, a lot of incense.

“Details!” I cried. I had a knack for inciting epic annoyance.

“Um, yeah. Maybe later.” She fled to her room.

When I met the teacher, the mystery deepened. Mrs. Dunlap was great, but she also was supposedly the nemesis of every college-bound sophomore and senior—and a far cry from our child’s usual idea of a star. She was precise and soft-spoken; she moved like a dancer. Her suit was immaculate, a perfect silk scarf at its collar. It was back-to-school night. A quote from Pascal decked the wall. Notes on Homer covered her whiteboard. She brandished Strunk and White, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. “This is a challenging class,” she told us. Translation: Don’t even think about grade inflation.

The parents exchanged worried glances. Then as now, scores and rankings were serious issues. Then as now, unprecedented numbers of children were competing for college. Our teenager had done well before, but lately she was scarcely crossing her t’s, let alone wading for fun through grammar manifestos and doorstop-sized novels. When we got home, I barged into her room and demanded that she let me proofread her first English paper. Epically annoyed, she kicked me out.

What goes on between kid and teacher, I wondered as the school days went by. Night after night, our daughter toiled over her English, her head bowed, her little nose ring glinting. Hours of reading. Imagery, symbolism, grammar. Drafts and drafts of papers and papers. Never had I seen a beach kid work so hard to please an authority figure. Mrs. Dunlap had said “challenging” and she had meant it. No shortcuts. No extra credit. There was no way my child would survive this class and get into college.

I chatted up the teacher, scheduled meetings. She greeted me with that helpful smile and impeccable wardrobe. Then she continued to nail our daughter for every needless word and unsupported conclusion. Nothing I did could interfere with what was going on in that classroom. The semesters ground by, mid-terms, finals. When the year-end grades came in, our eyes flew straight to English: The A did not materialize.

Our daughter did not come away empty-handed, however. Two years later, she and her classmates graduated with extraordinary writing skills. They understood literature with a depth that will serve them for a lifetime, and Mrs. Dunlap wrote most of them college letters of recommendation. Some went into philosophy, medicine, international relations. Our daughter became an English major. Her training has earned her summer jobs at magazines and publishing houses. Unlike her mother, she is precise and soft-spoken. When she assesses something, she doesn’t exaggerate or understate it. She doesn’t trust shortcuts and extra credit. You should hear her on Dickens and Dostoevsky. Her work clothes are immaculate.

What alchemy transpired between that elegant teacher and that room full of beach kids? It still seems a miracle and a mystery. And maybe a moral, as this school year begins without the now-retired mentor who so inspired our daughter: There is school, with its scores and rankings and ever more serious issues—and then there’s an education. Parents sometimes forget the difference. But Mrs. Dunlap will know what I mean.

Illustration by Brett Affrunti

This article originally appeared in the September 2012 issue.

Secret Lives

Shawn Hubler — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Here at the beach, we rise early, even in summer. Pay no attention to those tourist paintings of hammocks and unmade beds. Dawn breaks to the noise of dogs being walked and lawns being watered, streets being swept and trash being recycled.

At Coast Highway stoplights, ranchero music drifts from gardeners’ pickups. Cafés open. Lifeguards suit up. Maids and busboys bustle into hotel service entrances. In dark bedrooms, adolescents hide under the pillows as their alarms ring. Once, their forefathers had “fun, fun, fun” in their T-birds and slept until noon. That was then.

Now beach kids cling to their summer shifts at surf shops and frozen yogurt counters. Even the ones without jobs hustle to club sports and summer classes. One South County SAT boot camp goes six days a week, six hours a day, plus three hours of homework from June through August. Sells out every year.

Outside beach cottages, breadwinners emerge, dressed for the office. There goes Cathy from across the street, go-cup in hand. There goes Steve the road warrior, bound for the airport. There goes Mary to her job at the county, and Rose to the hospital.

Indoors, telecommuters open their laptops and moms launch the daily hunt for backpacks and renegade flip-flops. Julie pulls out of the garage in a Suburban full of kiddie carpoolers; Cheryl’s Escalade disgorges a water polo team.

In short, we work. This is the dirty little secret of seaside living. Everyone around us may be on vacation, but that doesn’t mean we get a holiday. People move here imagining that life is just one long afternoon under a beach umbrella. They stop for lunch and look out onto our sidewalks and think, “Don’t people here need to earn a living?”

Yes, we do. Those window-shoppers? Other tourists.

With the exception of our first landlord, a guy nicknamed “Half-Day Ray” who inherited his grandmother’s beach house and visited it until his skin looked like cowhide, no one we know here actually ever has time to just hang out by the water. Even Half-Day had a day job, his name notwithstanding. Our first summer at the beach, we scarcely stopped working long enough to earn a sunburn. I put on a bathing suit exactly twice.

We work, because just being here is so much more expensive than it is inland—and because beach communities have a reputation to live up to. People here can’t just earn a living; we must earn a living while seeming leisurely.

If our toil is too obvious, out-of-towners won’t imagine themselves unwinding here in cute second homes. Day-trippers won’t want souvenirs of the time they’ve spent watching us not-seem-to-work while they’re not working. There’s a demand, not for us, exactly, but for a certain commodified version of us, and we damage our brand if our summer utopia looks too much like a day at the office. No one wants to relax on the sand while people exchange business cards on the next towel. No one wants to know that, in our mellow-seeming way, we, too, walk through the valley of the shadow of the 60-hour workweek.

So we work and we hide it, like seabirds on the water—calm on the surface and paddling furiously beneath. Our work clothes look like resort wear. Our greetings sound like surf reports. Our small talk is about the trip we allegedly just took and the trip we’re allegedly planning.

And if, somehow, the conversation goes job-related, we change the subject—not because we can’t relate, but because it’s our job to make summer living look easy. Your day off is our livelihood, here at the beach.

Illustration by Brett Affrunti

This article originally appeared in the August 2012 issue.

Independence Day

Shawn Hubler — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:46:00 GMT

One advantage of coastal Orange County is the extra fireworks on the Fourth of July. Every community has a display, each shot out toward the ocean, so from the right perch you can see four or more celebrations in the distance, the rockets’ red glare repeating all along the shoreline.

Our first year in Laguna Beach, we watched from an upstairs window. Most of the neighborhood had turned off the lights and wandered down to the water, and the night seemed particularly dark. There were at least three displays within the city limits: two in the gated communities and a third, the public show, for the riffraff. The fireworks sparkled like red, white, and blue gems strewn on black velvet—Main Beach’s in the foreground, Emerald Bay’s to the north behind it, Three Arch Bay’s and beyond to the south.

We were so mesmerized that we forgot one of the disadvantages of coastal Orange County: Our upstairs window looks directly onto our neighbor’s flat roof. As our eyes adjusted, we realized we weren’t the only ones home alone with the extravaganza. The guy next door was about 10 feet away, on the other side of the glass, perched with his back to us in a lawn chair. With every explosion, we could see his silhouette.

How to put this? That guy is not our most sociable neighbor. He guards his space. He doesn’t make small talk or ask us to water his plants. When tourists park outside his front step, he doesn’t just grouse like the rest of us; he puts notes on their windshields. He’s gone much of the time, but when he’s around, he’s beset by intrusions—this neighbor’s tree sheds, that one’s dog barks. The rest of the block had warned us: He doesn’t like company, and he doesn’t like trespassers. Don’t tread on him. Really.

And now here he was, probably imagining that he was alone at last on his rooftop. And here we were, his fellow Americans, this close to trespassing on his pursuit of happiness.

What to do? Step away from the window and miss the big finish? Rap on the pane? Holler “Yoo-hoo!” into the darkness and see whether he only looked like he was spoiling for a fight? The finales began, bombs bursting in air in a panorama of separate patterns, now a flash-bang from the civic show, now a sharp report from one of the private enclaves.

All were so grand and gorgeous and so very separate. What a metaphor: We, the neighbors, manning our personal ramparts. One nation, but not as stoked about being indivisible and equally created as one might assume. What kept us apart? What bound us? We held our breath, shadows ourselves at our darkened window. Then the neighbor rose from his lawn chair, turned, met our eyes for the merest of moments—and then looked away as if he’d seen nothing. We didn’t press our luck by smiling and waving. We just left the room.

We never asked, and the neighbor never told, whether our presence had actually registered that night by the window. But over the years, we developed an Independence Day tradition: In honor of our right to privacy, we began to ritually ignore each other. Sometimes I wonder if democracy would have happened had the Founding Fathers known how comically complicated it would get.

Now, when the sun sets on the Fourth, we and our neighbor take up our posts and wordlessly lift our eyes, each to his own star-spangled horizon. It used to feel funny, but hey, better fireworks in the sky than fireworks between neighbors. E pluribus unum. Sometimes less-than-perfect unions are the best.

Illustration by Brett Affrunti

This article originally appeared in the July 2012 issue.

Piercing the Gloom

Shawn Hubler — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:30:00 GMT

The real estate agent appears on a Monday, prowling around our picket fence. The air is June-gloomy; it muffles the clippity-clip of her high heels. Neighbors watch her from behind their curtains. The house down the block is for sale, but this new face seems to be going door to door, taking notes on a clipboard. We wonder if she might be a rogue Jehovah’s Witness when she cranes her bobbed-blond head through the arbor.

“Thinking of selling soon?” she asks.

So the moment has come. You know times are changing in Southern California when the prospectors start coming around. Real estate agents don’t knock on a lot of doors when they know they’re going to get no for an answer. But it’s a different story when that sixth sense kicks in and something signals that it might be time to send out that first tentative feeler.

Here in Orange County, where homeowners follow property values the way fishermen follow the ocean, we’ve come to know what a low tide looks like, and we’re so ready for this one to start turning. Dare we hope?

Normally we would simply step away from the window, but something about the gray day stops us. There she is, in the mist, pulling a business card from her pocket, smiling so hopefully. We have no interest whatsoever in selling. No matter. We open the gate and invite her in.

Life hasn’t been a beach here at the beach lately. Foreclosure notices pepper the canyons. “For Lease” signs flutter up and down Pacific Coast Highway. Experts may point to a rebound. Outsiders may view us with envy. But they don’t see beneath the surface, beyond the June gloom that still infuses and traumatizes this place.

They don’t see the honor students working two jobs just to afford community college, or the borrowing from Peter to pay Paul to keep up with the car payments. They don’t wonder whether we actually want this much time to go surfing. They don’t get the cold calls from the contractors who, just a few years ago, were turning away business.

And they don’t know all the ways we’ve been forced to reassess our value, all the ways we’ve struggled to see our way through to the other side of this recession. More than most places, Orange County homeowners’ hopes and fears rise and fall with property values. You are what you own—that’s how we secretly felt in boom times. So where does that leave us, as we’ve watched so much of what we own slip through our fingers? This may not be a pessimistic place by nature, but over time, fear has settled here like a marine layer that won’t burn off.

So maybe we’re vulnerable this morning. In any case, we let the prospector think we’re considering selling, maybe even this year. We just want reassurance—some sign from the other side of the fog bank, some measure of where we stand now: How bad is it out there? Has the market really hit bottom? What are prospective buyers actually offering for that house on our block? If our house goes on the market tomorrow, what can we get?

We totally lead her on. I hope she forgives us. Maybe she’s leading us on a little, too. She compliments our curb appeal, our upgrades, our location. Maybe her outlook is accurate. Maybe it isn’t. All I know is, as the gate closes, we begin to feel we have prospects, and we realize we haven’t felt that way in a long, long time. The sky is still gray, but here at the beach, you have to remind yourself: June gloom only seems to last forever. Sooner or later, the sun always breaks through.

Illustration by Brett Affrunti

This article originally appeared in the June 2012 issue.