What happened to the SLO life?

I moved to the Central Coast 17 years ago from Manhattan Beach, when rents there seemed to more than double overnight.
The “new ambience” created by the people moving into the area made me uncomfortable. So I left.

SLO County seemed to offer something better, including more affordable rent.

At the time, however, there was slim pickin’s in the SLO job market. So I started out driving a cab in town. That lasted a couple of years.

Although I made peanuts, there was still enough money left over to enjoy life after paying $400 a month for a one-bedroom cottage in Shell Beach. I liked driving a cab, which involved meeting some of the more pungent and original local characters who were either too old, drunk, or stubborn to drive. The pace was slow; nobody in a hurry—except college kids whizzing about in compacts.

It didn’t take long, though, to see what was coming.

One of my first rides was a man who’d flown into our small airport from LAX. He wore an expensive suit with vest. He carried a briefcase and phone and talked to me excitedly about the benefits and opportunities in Orange County, where he lived and worked. A developer, he told me that in his briefcase were plans to turn SLO County into a similarly fast-paced version of Orange County. “This area—it’s the future,” he maintained. “The next bonanza.”

I told him this would be tough sledding as we headed toward the office that would receive his presentation downtown. “There’s people who’ve been around here for years, and they’re stubborn; hate people who come up here from down south with their fancy ideas and fancy lifestyles and want to expand this place.”

“Hey, face it,” he explained with the enthusiasm of a car salesman, “growth is growth, and growth cannot be stopped.

“Eventually, all desirable areas spread and grow. Look at L.A., and the Valley. Even Fresno and Bakersfield. All those one-horse towns are suburbs and shopping malls. That’s the future. The momentum can’t be stopped. Our corporation feels that in 20 years Los Osos Valley Road will connect Los Osos and San Luis Obispo with wall-to-wall tracts.”

ROAD WEARY Fresh from a road trip to L.A., Cayucos author Dell Franklin stops for a cup of coffee at one of SLO County's few remaining down-home treasures-Louisa's Place in San Luis Obispo.

When I mentioned that this area could not possibly turn into another Orange County without industry, and that SLO Town was averse to industry and L.A.-like people spoiling the down-home corniness of the area, he told me that industry was already a done deal up in Paso Robles.

Politicians and developers down south, he added, would support politicians up here who are pro-growth instead of no-growth, like all those people who moved here from L.A. and San Fran and suddenly wanted to close the gates. He predicted that it might take 20, 30, 40 years, but inevitably we’d be like the rest of California, because this is America, and people can move wherever they want and bring their lifestyles and values with them.

Who’s to prevent people from other parts of the country to move to L.A.? This is the land of opportunity and paradise, right? I told him the reason I moved up here was because L.A. was no longer paradise; growth ruined it. Instead, it was a congested, volatile, festering, environmental nightmare.

He laughed; defending the area as a place where one could find anything he wanted on a large or small scale, where here one had to settle for crumbs. He was so excited over ruining this place he over-tipped me.

***

Seventeen years later, after living here and loving it so much, I seldom travel far because nothing compares with our Central Coast paradise.

It’s not easy to assess the changes, though, because change is so gradual. I think one has to go away for a while and then return to realize the shock of what has happened here; every little burg, from Nipomo to Paso Robles, SLO to Cambria, has grown—some astronomically.

In Shell Beach, I lived on a street that led from the frontage road along Highway 101 to the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Across 101 were barren, burnished hills that turned Ireland-green after the fall and winter rains. On our street was a long row of identical one-bedroom, motel-like apartments and an array of one-story beach cottages, and a few moderately stylish homes built in the past 20 years. A few months after moving there, I knew everybody and their dogs and cats. Nights were dead silent and dark; the pace very, very slow; and, to me, stunningly so after moving up here from Manhattan Beach.

Within a year the motel-like apartments were replaced by just as many cheaply constructed two-story condos sandwiched together like New York City tenements. Former renters were replaced by invisible people who pulled cars into garages that opened automatically and swallowed them, only to disgorge them later on. Gone were block parties that involved everybody bringing their own booze and vittles to whomever’s turn it was to barbecue. Meanwhile, many of the old cottages on the street were going down, replaced by two-story boxes that engulfed yard space for extra rooms.

I moved to Cayucos when increasing traffic led to my wily old cat being run down before my eyes by somebody going 50 mph; I was pulled off of the driver by my beloved neighbor, Phil, whose habit was to do repair work for all of us, free, without being asked. By this time, anyway, those hills across 101 were covered wall-to-wall by featureless and identical condos that stood out like a mass of toadstools sprouted overnight.

Maybe the developer from O.C. was right; Atascadero and Paso Robles soon had box stores and a Wal-Mart.

These days, traffic between San Luis Obispo and Paso is comparable to what we once experienced only in July and August, but different—a maniacal frenzy of harried, rude, whizzing locals caught up in some sort of maelstrom, anxious to get home more quickly and to pass other drivers at any cost. Cruise the slow lane some weekday afternoon and observe the passing lane, where people’s profiles are wrought with bulging jugulars, their mouths taut with stress and cell phone babble.

The Cuesta Grade has been widened to accommodate the influx of those living in featureless and juxtaposed housing tracts growing like crabgrass out of former truck stops like Paso (and now Nipomo and Templeton—the next targets slated for the expansion boom). Perhaps, as the developer predicted, there will soon be millions of people here, accompanied by gridlock, foul air, flaring tempers, teeth-gnashing tension, and more road rage; and with it the pervasive rudeness and impatience carried like the virulent plague of our age. Eventually those feeling squeezed and claustrophobic by crowds and vanishing space, and without cash for affordable housing anywhere (not inland, and certainly not in the string of beach towns turned into rich men’s enclaves), will flee the state, having run out of paradises.

***

I drove out to San Miguel the other day, a place so quiet and sleepy it seemed the last outpost. In the Elkhorn Bar I met some people who did not seem to fit anywhere in this new county and possibly only in a John Steinbeck novel. They were moaning about somebody who was going to build over 1,000 homes, which would more than double the population of a town so slow and franchiseless it must resemble San Luis Obispo 50 or 60 years ago, when flight to this county from the big cities was unimaginable.

I once felt that way about Manhattan Beach, which in the 1970s was still a stomping ground for all lifestyles, financial strata, and social levels; a place where doctors, lawyers, and movie-industry people mixed with plumbers and house painters—a point of pride for us all. I resided in a large studio apartment for nine years and paid $110 a month, a stone’s throw from the ocean, where I surfed daily. When I left in 1986, I could no longer afford my own place and shared a two-bedroom dump blocks from the beach for $750 a month (a bargain). About six months ago I went by my old studio and it was up for rent at $1,900 a month.

Not long ago I was walking my dog around the sports complex/park in Morro Bay. Returning to my car, a cop pulled up and informed me that I had been reported—no dogs in the park. Well, there were dogs in the park, but they were with Latino nannies of blue-eyed toddlers and young mothers who looked like they worked out in gyms 24 hours a day and ate birdseed and chewed nails.

The cop wanted to ticket me—$161—for allowing my dog in the park. I had once worked in a bar in Morro Bay where there were usually six or seven dogs—well-behaved dogs who received treats and pets from customers and passersby—sunning themselves on the sidewalk by the door as they waited for their masters to come out. Now, no dog can be tied up on a sidewalk or it’s $161. I explained to the cop that I’d been gone 17 years and was unaware of the new codes, restrictions, and laws plastered every 10 yards. I was clad in basketball togs in preparation to play with some old pals in the park, and my 20-year-old compact did not blend well beside enormous gleaming SUVs and sports cars, the owners of which, massing at the kiddy play area, stared at the scene with cringing distaste. Though I am not homeless, I felt like an intruder on the verge of being arrested for my thoughts alone, especially when another squad car pulled up and a cop got out—backup.

I told them I was very, very sorry I allowed my dog in the park and would never do it again. The cops glanced at each other and then the second one went to his car to run a scan, perhaps hoping to nail me and my dog for outstanding warrants, or maybe a murder charge. In the end, when they discovered I was clean, they let me off the hook after a stern lecture and warning.

I mention all this because in Morro Bay and Cayucos and in state parks they are cracking down on dogs, and the other day, when a lady friend asked a ranger where she could run her dog, he snarled and said: “Mexico! Now get the hell out of here before I throw you both in jail!”

***

I go to L.A. every two weeks to visit my ailing 86-year-old mother. The air down there is oppressive and seems to lay upon you like a hot wet stinging carpet and enters one’s body through osmosis; attacking lungs and nervous systems, leaving you gasping, irritable, and drained. For hundreds of square miles there is literally no open space, just homes, malls, packed streets and freeways, hordes of people, and an incessant cacophony of honks, screams, sirens, and general discordance. There is no escaping this trap. Wherever you go, at almost any hour, there is traffic that is fast and helter-skelter and downright life-threatening, if you are lulled into a comfort zone from driving in SLO County. I am near deranged after 48 hours and can’t wait to get back here, and my mood upon reaching home is both relief and celebration.

On my way home I don’t mind the increased traffic from Santa Maria to SLO Town, nor the toadstool proliferation of expensive homes popping up everywhere along 101. There are still wide-open spaces, especially in the canyons. And when you drive through our towns, or go into shops, or just walk the streets, people seem determined to go out of their way to preserve normal, genteel courtesies and considerations, “You go first”) that are trademarks; a collective spirit to fight the good fight, as if sensing what could one day occur.

And it is. We’re talking about the rapidly expedient extermination of the mom-and-pop businesses, a prime example in SLO being the old lunch counter diners like Scrubby and Lloyd’s, a little hut so intimate and old-timey that locals from generations braved the greasy burgers and cramped, drab environs that lacked totally the vacuous corporate smiles, the canned, forced-perky salutations; where customers picked on owners and owners picked on customers, and employees picked on everybody; where the good old boys puffed their cigars and hand-rolled cigs and serenaded the offspring of friends and relatives with stories of the days when SLO Town was a railroad hub for G.I.s during World War II; or when a local ex-cabbie ended up as a personal chauffeur to William Randolph Hearst.

When I moved here there was one coffeehouse—the Bohemian Linnaea’s, which was possibly off limits to squares. Now, we’ve got long lines at Starbucks, and, across the plaza at the Downtown Centre, not 20 feet away, another Starbucks in a Barnes & Noble (two bookstores on Higuera have folded over the years) to go along with at least half a dozen coffeehouses, where fancy rolls and pastries have replaced those greasy burgers and rot-gut coffee at Scrubby & Lloyd’s.

As an ex-cabbie, I can state that, 14 years later, traffic in SLO Town is brutal. Going up Chorro can logjam at the intersection of Broad and South clear back to the railroad station area. New housing tracts go up on the outskirts, accompanied by the requisite shopping centers and requisite corporate franchises, where evangelistic smiles replace intimacy.

Foster Freeze hangs on, as does Louisa’s Place on Higuera. In almost every town on the Central Coast there remains a lonely remnant of the good old days—The Elkhorn; Ralph & Duane’s; the Sea Shanty; Bull’s; Bello’s sporting goods; Leon’s and The Phoenix bookstores; the Fremont theater; the Landmark in Pismo, along with Brad’s and the bowling alley; Wilson’s Lanes in Paso and the 2nd Street Saloon; Sylvester’s burger joint; Kitty’s Kitchen in Morro Bay; the Redwood Café and Camozzi’s in Cambria; Jocko’s in Nipomo …

It will be some time before the hungry hordes catch up and ruin this place, which isn’t quite like it was when I drove a cab and transported the “6 a.m. professional drinking club of retired varmints and philosophers” to and from McCarthy’s pub in SLO Town, and referred to local drivers as “retards in seat belts.” It will be some time before we’re like L.A., or even Santa Barbara—the rich safe in their beach enclaves; the middle class mesmerized in their suburbs; the poor struggling in their slums. So savor SLO County while you still can, just as you would the sunset of your own years. ³

Dell Franklin lives in a quiet neighborhood in Cayucos where paradise is still pretty easy to find.