Upper Newport Bay 2

Posted on August 25, 2003 in Encounters Photos The Orange

The vegetable at the lower right is called a coyote gourd. It’s the size of a baseball, inedible, and as packed with brains as the surfer dude I saw ignoring the posted signs against sending anything into the polluted water.

He was a youngish blonde hulk, slack-jawed, vaguely anthropoid who kept throwing a floating barbell into the water for his Irish Setter to fetch. I was sitting on a very short escarpment, attempting to catch a shot of the fish jumping from the water. Every time his dog splashed into the water I looked because, of course, the surfer dude threw the barbell right in one of the prime spots for hopping fish. When he finished, he walked up the hill towards one of the colonial mansions overlooking the bay. I accused him, silently, of being one of those Newport Beach ingrates who thought that because he owned or lived on the adjoining property he could treat the common trust as his own.

There is no greater plague on the moral life of the nation, I think, than the idea that money grants entitlement.

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