Living in Huntington Beach years ago, I had come to the conclusion that if you wanted to savor a sublime stretch of Californian coastline, you would have to share -- especially, of course, in summer. That hidden beach south of Dana Point spoken of only among surfers would surely be overrun by that same tribe at sunrise. The rocky shores north of Laguna, favored by seals, are also a popular retreat for seal watchers.
So call me jaded, but I expected to spot a red '67 Corvette in mint condition cruising Front Street and the requisite hard bods flexing their abs on the beach. Instead, I found a family of four having a picnic dinner on the sand. And that's it. We walked the long pier, and there were no cotton candy or tacky T-shirt sellers a la Santa Monica. The only store sold bait.
"Where the heck is everyone?" I asked Lenny Harris, owner of Avila Grocery, half expecting a hurricane to smack the area at any moment. He chuckled and said that it does get busier on weekends when folks from nearby San Luis Obispo wander into town. "But we're midway from L.A. to San Jose, so it's too far for city day-trippers," he added. "Plus, there's that little problem of the oil spill."
Bingo!
For close to a century, oil was piped from the fields of central California to large tanks on a bluff overlooking Avila Beach. Pipelines beneath the town then transported the fuel from a storage facility underwater to tankers waiting at the company pier. Indeed, this town of 400 people fueled most of the Pacific fleet during World War II, becoming one of the world's largest oil ports at the time.
