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....