True Grit—Or At Least Dirt

by Jim Washburn

Costa Mesa’s war on a front yard

When I was a wee fellow living in the Hollywood Hills in the early 1960s, we had neighbors who would sunbathe topless in their yard. When we moved to La Puente, our next-door neighbor’s yard was alive with chickens and vicious biting horses. Our own front yard had three-foot-tall weeds. When gophers went after one, it was like watching nature on rewind, as the stalk was slowly pulled back under the ground.

If your home is your castle, your yard is your moat, and, as such, you should be free to chuck chicken bones or cauldrons of burning oil into it as you will.

Kevin Doane

That’s the theory, though in practice I think we’re all glad not to have that Ivanhoe shit going on in our ’hoods. Thank the fine line between personal freedom and the public good.

Where to put that line will always be in question. For example, in my town of Costa Mesa, a resident has been in the news because the city has fined him for killing his lawn. Last year, homeowner Kevin Doane stopped watering his lawn after losing his job, figuring he’d save money and also save water, heeding a CM councilwoman’s call to conserve, he said.

But the city has laws requiring that residents landscape and maintain their front yards to a standard. You cannot have a plain dirt yard, evidently. As cities reason, it’s an affront to your neighbors and their property values to not have a proper front yard. When Doane was fined $400, his story has made the major California papers and the local TV news. You can see his dirt in action on this ABC News link.

Costa Mesa has always been one of the more slob-friendly OC cities. In Irvine, by comparison, there’s scarcely a tract where the community association won’t come down on you like a lead cloud if a duck weathervane dares peek above your fence-line. Really. Leave your garage door open more than 15 minutes and you face immolation. One north county town years ago tried banning clotheslines, because letting the sun dry clothes—as it had faithfully done for several million years of human clothedness—was considered backward and unsightly. And also Mexican, as reading only slightly between the council-jabber revealed. Those driving through the town (Brea? Yorba Linda? Whenever I’m near Nixon’s grave my mind goes numb) found that it was almost exclusively immigrant neighborhoods in which the breeze frisked through festive clothesline semaphores. It’s the same neighborhoods where people paint their homes more colorfully, grow a bit of corn, and live more the way Americans did through our “greatest generation.”

Have you heard of U. Utah Phillips, who died way too soon last year? Too soon because he had plenty of living yet to do, and because most people never heard of him. He was a singer, songwriter (his “The Goodnight-Loving Trail” may be the best cowboy ballad ever writ), storyteller, and political mixer-upper from just about back to the Korean War, of which he’d partaken and found the taste bitter. Stateside, depressed and disillusioned, he took to hoboing, a harbinger of more recent wars’ vets who are homeless and lost. Humanized and radicalized by the Catholic Workers, he became one of the most present performers I’ve seen: utterly engaging, charming and challenging, with insights always a step or two ahead of what I was willing to accept at the time.

Such fame as he had was won one room at a time, in folk clubs or house-concerts, because he refused to do big productions or TV, not that they were asking. One night, Phillips observed to a mostly-white audience that people in similar audiences kept telling him they wanted to be more “back to the earth” or “in touch with the planet” but didn’t know where to start, like they were hoping he’d turn them on to some organic NPR program. “Why not look around your town?” he asked. “You see your immigrant neighbors with their vegetable gardens and medicinal herbs? Try asking them. They know all about being in touch with the planet.”

I once saw a documentary on tribal raves taking place at rustic spots around the globe, those ones where it looks as if thousands of people had spontaneously decided, “Hey, let’s really creep out anyone who’s read Childhood’s End!”

One rave was held on a semi-arid African savannah. With techno thumping in the background, the promoter explained the event’s appeal to the filmmakers, how it was “bringing the dancers back to humankind’s tribal roots,” because modern society had lost its bonding archetypes, rituals and such.

“So why not go hang with those people over there?” the interviewer asked, “the black ones in the thatch huts across the valley. They seem to have that tribal thing down pretty well.”

“What, the fucking kaffirs? Are you kidding me, mate?”

That doesn’t have much to do with Costa Mesa, aside from my having watched it on TV here. The point I started with is that Costa Mesa is looser, and more downscale, than some neighboring burghs. It’s the landlocked Epiphone to Newport Beach’s Gibson. This is where Newport comes to get their cars repaired, since auto shops are nearly verboten in NB. Or they come to see a psychic and stay because it’s cheaper to drink here, too.

Fireworks are still allowed in town, as are backyard fire pits (both outlawed in most of OC) and witch-dunking, though we try to keep that to ourselves.

You’ve got to barf pretty far outside the bag before you attract the city’s attention here. Take Sid Soffer: the late Costa Mesa legend was cited for having something like half-a-dozen decaying Cadillacs in his front yard, yet the city probably would have let that slip had he not also been a civic zealot who’d spoken his piece on every item before two city councils (CM’s and NB’s) from just about 1960 on. You know that painting of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, with the tornado in his wake? That was Sid at a council meeting.

He’d owned Sid’s Blue Beet, which in the 1950s and ’60s had brought the likes of Son House, Art Pepper and Lord Buckley to a county they almost certainly never would have stepped in otherwise. The Blue Beet was in Newport, and the friction between Sid and authority started because city fathers weren’t overfond of his bringing black performers into town. The Newport police had presaged Trent Reznor by coining the radio-call acronym NIN, which in their case meant “Niggers in Newport,” which meant the nearest squad car should locate the gentlemen in question and escort them to the city line. Hello, Costa Mesa!

This policy is rumored to have persisted well into the 1980s. Certainly, musicians I know who played on the Peninsula were routinely stopped and hassled by police until they could prove they had a bona fide gig entertaining the white folks.

You remember how back in the Bible times God would suddenly smite the bejabbers out of people with a thunderbolt when they erred? That’s sort of what Newport got when Dennis Rodman moved in. He brought so much black to town that they needed a helicopter to lift it in. When he’d put Prince on the hi-fi, the accompanying percussion was the sound of old money fleeing. Up to somewhere cold and white in Colorado or Montana, after having their SUVs serviced in Costa Mesa.

Sid Soffer and acquaintance

But back to Sid. When he refused to sway to the city’s notions of what he should do with his private property, he eventually was jailed for contempt of court. Threatened with jail a second time, he instead went fugitive, slipping out of the state to resettle in a Las Vegas trailer park for the last 12 years of his life. In Vegas, they don’t care if you have the Eiffel Tower in your front yard. Aside from sneaking over the border to renew his driver’s license every few years, Sid didn’t return to California until he came back for his wake in 2007. And he never did give in.

That, as Mattie Ross would tell you, is True Grit. Meanwhile, Mr. Doane, lawn-killer, held out for a few months, refusing the pay the city and threatening to spray paint his dirt green. Then, in the last hour of the last day before the city was to move into possible lien action, he ponied up the $400. You know how some screw-you-minded persons pay their bills in pennies? Doane started handing his payment over in quarters, but only had $30 worth, and paid the rest with bills. He said he had to pay, in order to bring his complaint before the city prosecutor, but it’s not quite the stuff of legend.

Will he be forced to plant a lawn and nurture it? Will the dirt prevail? City employees have suggested Doane’s $400 might be returned if he’d apply it toward planting drought-resistant foliage. The guy did have a point that mayor pro tem Wendy Leece had been urging citizens to save water.

Our various government agencies already do a lot of nudging and compelling—shoes off, phone off, mind off—and there will of necessity be more in the days ahead. I don’t like bureaucrats determining what goes on in my yard—I’ve a wife for that (rimshot!)—but if they must, they should get their priorities straight first. Do they want our yards traditional and neat, or radical and responsive to our out-of-whack world?

That’s the larger across-the-board question in governing now, whether it’s making our medical system work, fixing the economy or saving the world. A new paint job and some begonias isn’t going to do the trick. With the crises we face, no solution is going to be nice and easy; we’ll be lucky to get nice and rough.

The “nice” part would be knowing that all the tough sledding is headed in the right direction. What should we do now to make things better five or ten years along?

the Sodens’ yard

I love a good lawn, but when scientists are predicting increasing droughts and warming for our region, maybe Southern California’s lawn strange trip is over, and we’ll have to rethink our notion of a front yard. My neighbor friends the Sodens have used native low-water plants, old barbecues, bowling balls, recycled-tire ground cover, and other found objects (including a zinc cattle tub I’d kept in my yard for decades “just in case”) to turn their front yard into the sort of post-post-apocalyptic art landscape more typical of sun-addled desert hermits.

Maybe we’ll learn a few things from our immigrant neighbors, and use what precious water and land we have to grow useful food and medicinal plants. The stalks and seeds of the hemp plant, for example, have numerous practical uses, and perhaps someone will think of something to do with the flowering tops.

Or maybe things will trend another way, and in a few years yards will be covered with solar panels, or someone will design tiny green nano-windmills that look like grass but will shave off your toes if you step on them.

And there’s a lot to be said for a plain dirt yard. You can draw stuff in it with a stick. You can bury deceased pets in it. You can have a rave on it. But you have to look out for dirt clods. You let kids near dirt clods, and you might as well give their Xboxes away. Dirt clods are like guilt-free rocks. Throw one at a passing car, and it explodes into dust on the side panel, your crime vanishing with it. No harm done. This whole pile’s dirt clods, mister. I’ve been throwing them at cars all afternoon, and you’re the first who’s complained. Watch. First I inspect to make sure it’s a true dirt clod, not a rock with dirt. Now I fling it underhand, aiming just ahead of the car. Blam! Hit amidships, but unhurt. Here, mister, you throw one. It’ll take your mind off your troubles.

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