One Saturday Afternoon, During The Campaign To Decide Whether Or Not
There Should Be A Coastal Commission, I Took A Helicopter Ride From Los
Angeles To San Diego.
One Saturday afternoon, during the campaign to decide whether or not
there should be a Coastal Commission, I took a helicopter ride from Los
Angeles to San Diego. We passed several state beaches, some crowded
and some virtually empty. They had the same facilities, and in some
cases the crowded and the empty beach were within a quarter mile of
each other. Obviously many beach-goers prefer to be crowded together.
Buying more beaches that people won't go to because they prefer to be
crowded together on one beach is a ridiculous waste of our natural
resources and our taxes.
-- Ronald Reagan
The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private house
was there but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds
of miles of coastline that runs west from Los Angeles, which is
described in the new edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
in one entry as "junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what's that other
word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo," and in another, written only
hours later as "being like several thousand square miles of American
Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth....