Ticky Tacky Boxes: Environmentalism and Misanthropy in a Tourist Town

I am spending the last day of 2024 in my hometown. My mother is recovering from hip surgery at a skilled nursing facility, and I’m here to do the best I can to make things easier for her. Picking up mail, paying bills, keeping family updated, and preparing for what it may look like when mom is able to come home. Many of my readers with older parents know this drill! Thank you for your kind thoughts and prayers for my dear mama.

Carmel by-the-Sea — population 3,104 — is a famously beautiful little city. Our white-sand beaches, our shops, and our whimsical cottages are celebrated the world over. And as often happens around a holiday, a large percentage of that world very much wishes to be in Carmel. Familiar phrases come to mind as I contemplate the difficulty of moving about this village this week. We are overrun. We are choking on visitors. We are drowning in a teaming sea of gaping tourists. We moved here in 1973, when I was six, and it has always been so at the holidays, but the lie of nostalgia says it was better before.

In my boyhood, we had lots of Europeans come to see Carmel. When I brave Ocean Avenue, the main drag of town, I now hear Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, and Brazilian Portuguese along with the more familiar German and French. If nothing else, the changing demographic of our well-heeled visitors speaks to the astonishing (if uneven) diversification of global wealth.

It is my great good fortune to have been born in one famously beautiful city (Santa Barbara), raised in another (Carmel by-the-Sea) and to now live in a part of Los Angeles closely associated with the movie business. I have rarely lived anywhere not bursting with tourists.

It is churlishness and privilege to say, "Y'all need to go home. Locals only." I know very well the economies of all the places I have lived depend on visitors (as the pandemic showed us). Fortune is meant to be shared. But in holiday season, when one is an introvert and just wants to walk somewhere in quiet reflection, one does get exasperated by the "great luck" of living where everyone else longs to be.

(In college, when I worked for the City of Carmel on my summer breaks and wore a shirt identifying myself as a public servant, I was often stopped on the street and asked, "Which way to the beach?" Carmel is built on a fairly significant slope, so the temptation was to give a great grin, point east, and say, "Well, ma'am, we keep it on top of the hill.")

Mama raised me on poetry and folk music, and it was only when I was in early middle age that it hit me just how staggeringly elitist so much of it was. The poems I read and the songs I sung were about keeping beautiful places untrammeled and unvisited – except by the discerning, fortunate few. The great Robinson Jeffers, who built a home out of stones he dragged from the beach, a home that stands less than half a mile from where I sit this morning, wrote this some seventy years ago:

Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

The bold is mine.

That poem still works on me, because I’m an introvert with a misanthropic streak (as you might expect in a man my age who goes untouched.) I also know better than to make virtues out of my defects. My snobbery grates my conscience.

I was raised on the folk singer Pete Seeger too. You may remember Little Boxes:

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same

There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same

And there's doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

“Our Kind of People” – the kind who came to places like Carmel early, and read poetry and listened to the right music? What fun for us to mock the earnest, upwardly mobile strivers who just wanted somewhere nice to raise their children too! What holy work to use “protecting the environment” as an excuse to pull up the proverbial drawbridge and ensure that others could not live where we live and see what we see.

I also grew up listening to John Denver, who loved my hometown — and who died three miles from here when his experimental little plane crashed into the Pacific on a gorgeous autumn afternoon in 1997. His Rocky Mountain High was the song that first taught me that the pedal steel guitar is God’s most perfect instrument. And yet, the lyrics of the fifth verse give me pause:

Now his life is full of wonder but his heart still knows some fear
Of a simple thing he cannot comprehend
While they try to tear the mountains down to bring in a couple more
More people, more scars upon the land

It's a song, you’ll remember, about a troubled young man who is reborn “in the summer of his 27^th year,” finding peace and serenity in the solitude of the Rockies. And what scares him most is that other people want what he has. Pull up the drawbridge, dig deep the moat, erect the wall.

I am raising kids in Los Angeles, and the Eagles were the quintessential L.A. rock band. (None of their original members were born in California, which actually intensifies the quintessentialness.) The Eagles’ greatest album is surely 1976’s ‘Hotel California,” and the final track on that record is their eight-minute magnum opus, The Last Resort.

She came from Providence
One in Rhode Island
Where the old-world shadows hang
Heavy in the air
She packed her hopes and dreams
Like a refugee
Just as her father came across the sea

She heard about a place
People were smilin'
They spoke about the red man's way
And how they loved the land

And they called it paradise
I don't know why
Somebody laid the mountains low
While the town got high

Some rich men came and raped the land
Nobody caught 'em
Put up a bunch of ugly boxes
And Jesus people bought 'em

Boxes again.

East Texas-born Don Henley wrote the song. He was - perhaps - smart enough to catch his own snobbery. The first generation who packed their hopes and dreams and came as refugees? They were virtuous, curious, hopeful pioneers. The ones who came after, and bought those “ugly boxes?” They ruined everything. If only we could have kept it pure for a few…

UGH.

Those of you who wish to draw parallels between the anti-growth environmentalism of the left and the anti-immigration xenophobia of the far right are welcome to do so. The left may worry about the fragility of nature and the ecosystem while the right may worry more about cultural cohesion, but the hymn they sing has the same text. You must stop coming here. We are full.

As a misanthropic curmudgeon born and raised in astonishingly beautiful places, I know what it is to feel overrun and overwhelmed. As someone who was taught to relentlessly question his priors and look for his blind spots, I see all too well how my aesthetic sensibilities, my class upbringing, and my environmentalism work together to make me contemptuous of my fellow human beings.

Carmel is full. The roads are so clogged with traffic that I have been walking between our house in Carmel and mama’s rehab in Monterey – a seven-mile roundtrip. (The number of people who live here all their lives and don’t walk Carmel Hill? Astonishing. I repent of my temptation to feel smug about doing it so often.) And yet. As much as I hate seeing beauty despoiled, I hate even more the part of me that despises the despoilers.

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Here's where I include my plea to support my writing. When I made subscriptions a requirement for people to read my work, people subscribed. When I announced that my writing would be free to all, but I’d welcome support, a grand total of seven people contributed. There’s a lesson here: people generally won’t pay for what they can get for free, which is completely reasonable. Alas, my inability to set a price for my own work – and my refusal to gatekeep, in keeping with the theme of today’s Substack, works against me. My brain simply won’t let me put up a paywall. That sounds more like obstinacy than trauma, but I assure you, it is the latter.

In any event, I am very grateful to anyone willing to Buy Me a Coffee.

One of my resolutions for 2025? Be more confident in my capacities and negotiate a fair price for what I offer as a writer. It’s a tall order. Wish me luck – and know that I wish you, my reader, good luck as well in the year to come.