By Howard Hills
Laguna Beach High School alumna Denise Di Novi’s love letter to our town was brilliant (“That’s so Laguna” Indy, Sept. 24). Denise expresses eloquently what those of us who can have no other hometown feel deep down inside.
For me it comes from napping on Divers Cove the first four summers of my life. Waking to strains of local artist Ed Sims standing on Heisler Point playing bagpipes, as horizontal golden sunlight bathed the cliffs in gold. By the time I was eight, we were raft surfing from Crescent Bay to Main Beach, and hanging out on the old Boardwalk when it was a “lively” scene.
I am working in D.C. right now, in service to my country, at its invitation, a call to duty I couldn’t refuse. Under state law you don’t lose your residence while relocated serving the nation.
We love Washington, our second home, and Charlotte, our third home, but every day I think about breathing in that positively charged air as my feet fly down the stairs to Brooks Street, Fisherman’s Cove or Victoria Beach. By the time my feet hit the sand it’s like the movie “Big” in reverse, I am eight years old again, playing in the waves without a care, totally in the now.
I miss being eight again, down at the beach, even at 70! We miss afternoon naps at the little cove between Shaw’s and Crescent, or the old cement pool under the Victoria “castle” at low tide. Waking on hot crusty sand in October during the last gasp of summer. No footprints but those that brought me and my wife to that spot on a deserted cove, that’s so Laguna.
I think there would be less acrimony in town if people still spent long days at the beach, seeing each other on that sublime sandy buffer between the quotidian world of social norms on land, and the wildness we encounter together playing at the edge of the deep blue sea.
I tried to come home, run for school board in 2020, help strike a better balance in how we change and stay the same, truer to our heritage and always changing personality as a town. But I ended up with the surfer’s curse, life-threatening skin cancer, saved by an immigrant from India who brought his genius to Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Mecca of great medicine in Baltimore.
Life is what happens not what you plan, turned out my work in D.C. was not done. And so I can’t resist another movie allusion. Being on a U.S. State Department-led treaty negotiation team trying to keep the Pacific Islands my wife is from out of the path of war in a tense region, I also feel like George Bailey in reverse.
George wanted to go make the word a better place, but he got “stuck” in affairs of his “measly little” hometown. My passion is for the local affairs in our wonderful small town, but I’m stuck in D.C. using my experience to help make the world a little safer at a time of tense superpower competition.
What gives me peace before I fall asleep is knowing since 1922 my family has lived in 13 homes in Laguna, I’ve left and returned five times, and when I awake from my dream I’ll be back home, in Bedford Falls, not Pottersville.
Howard is a third-generation Laguna native active in local civic affairs since 1967.
Mr. Hills, thank you for your continued interest and love of your Laguna Beach hometown. Generations of Lagunian’s hear and echo your sentiments. While our town power and control problems are small in comparison to the level of world situations you deal with in your work, when you offer your worldly insight, you inspire us to remember how important it is to care enough about our environment to speak-up for what we hold dear. Thank you.