Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times
Clockwise from top left: beach and boats in Newport Beach, Balboa Fun Zone, Sound Spectrum, Crab Cooker. Center: sunset in Laguna Beach.
"Hey, here's your wheatgrass."
I was waiting next to a window where customers pick up their orders under the shade of a ficus tree at the Stand, a vegan outpost whose red barn on Thalia Street has been part of the landscape in Laguna Beach since 1975.
The Stand specializes in the kind of food that you might have encountered in this California coastal town back in its bohemian heyday, long before anyone thought of putting up big nearby hotels like the Montage and the Ritz-Carlton. Earthy and untrendy, it's food that expresses a regional culinary dialect as specifically and confidently as chowder does in Boston or barbecue does in Memphis. Through that window come avocado sandwiches and carrot juice and burritos stuffed with brown rice and "Oriental vegetables." There are clover sprouts, alfalfa sprouts, bean sprouts and sunflower sprouts. There is such a bounty of chlorophyll, in fact, that the vaguely meadowlike fragrance of "health food" hits you from a few yards away.
"Smells good," I heard a passer-by say. "Smells like a lawn."
I'm no vegetarian, but that grassy funk did smell good to me, and that's largely because I didn't expect to find it.
For a few days this summer, I drifted around a sliver of Orange County where I used to spend a lot of time, roughly from the tail end of the 1970s to the start of the 1990s: the band of salt-sprayed land that curves along the wide beaches and boat-packed harbors of Newport Beach in the north, down through some 2,400 undulant acres of Crystal Cove State Park, and into Laguna Beach, the artists' colony whose relationship to conservative Orange County might be compared to the relationship between Austin and the state of Texas.
I grew up in pretty conservative circles myself. So summering in Laguna Beach as a kid, wandering around the town's bookstores and record shops, devoting entire days to the beautifully pointless Zen practice of riding and staring at waves — and then briefly making a home there, both before and after college — suggested the possibility of an antidote. In my mind, this part of California represented the essence of what California itself has historically represented for the whole country: a place of liberation, of leisure, of breaking free from what's expected.
At least that's the old story. I wasn't sure whether it would still hold up. Big money and luxury development have transformed Laguna Beach over the last couple of decades. A town that used to be associated with Timothy Leary's acid trips is now defined by eight-figure real estate deals and the vapid gleam of pop culture. I longed to find a few pockets of Laguna and Newport that hadn't had any work done — the Ferris wheels, the roadside spots where a surfer might score a hot-salsa-laced breakfast burrito after a foggy morning on the board, the tide pools along the shoreline at Crystal Cove.
And just as the park rangers have tried to protect those tide pools, I hoped that the legions of visitors and new arrivals had kept their pushy, probing digits away from the freakier urchins and anemones. It's only human, I suppose, to see our youthful haunts as fragile ecosystems, constantly under the threat of extinction.
IF you arrive from the east, which you should, the drive into Laguna Beach can feel like getting lost in the tumbleweed twang of a cowboy ballad — especially if you take Route 133, the Laguna Canyon Road, which winds through towering expanses of sepia-toned wilderness before tapering out close to the Pacific.
Part of the dramatic impact of Laguna is the way that it delivers what feels like a signal flare from Brian Wilson's subconscious as soon as you hit town. In one moment you could be in Arizona, surrounded by rocky cliffs and dry scrub. The next moment you're in a village (it's hard to dodge the word "charming" in describing it) and then, a few blocks later, there is the gleam coming off the water at Main Beach. The road stops right at the ocean.
JEFF GORDINIER is a reporter for The New York Times.
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