Account of Life in Malibu Paints Vivid Picture of the Past

• Author’s Discussion of Issues Ranging from Wildfire to Coastal Conservation Remains Relevant

BY SUZANNE GULDIMANN

Nineteenth century American explorer William Clark wrote the words “Ocian in view. O, the joy!” in his journal to commemorate his first sight of the Pacific Ocean. Malibu resident and author Lawrence Clark Powell chose that quote for a small volume of musings on life in Malibu, first published in 1958.
Powell reflected that Clark was “a better explorer than speller” but that he shared the same sense of elation at the sight of the sea. “Ocean in view as I write, our watery front-yard disturbed by the westerly which has been blowing since yesterday, when it swept away the overcast. Close in the water is sandy, then the calm kelp bed, and beyond lies the dark sea with windhorses running wild on its surface,” Powell wrote.
Lawrence Clark Powell, born in 1906, grew up in Southern California and was part of the vibrant Los Angeles literary scene in the 1930s. Powell was University Librarian at UCLA in 1955—where he is credited with increasing the university’s holdings from 280,000 volumes to nearly 3 million—when he and wife Kay Shoemaker moved to Malibu. “It was a kind of magnetic homecoming, our move to Malibu,” Powell wrote, adding that “long background of reading and seeing that motivated the move...plus something else, instinctive, mysterious and right.”
Powell had read descriptions of Malibu in Frederick Rindge’s “Happy Days in Southern California,” and in the poetry of Madeleine Ruthven, but he had also driven Pacific Coast Highway on the day in 1928 that it opened to the public for the first time.
“I drove over it in a topless Hupmobile roadster from Santa Monica to Oxnard...and even then the beaches were withheld by barbed wire fence. I can still recall the sense of discovery I had during that first day in Malibu.”
Ironically, it was the 1950s version of climate change that finally drove the Powells to migrate from West Los Angeles. “The weather seemed to worsen (all changes in weather are blamed on The Bomb, aren’t they?)” Powell wrote. “There was smog all day and its stagnant after-mist by night.”
The Powells exchanged the smog for a panoramic and unspoiled view of the ocean and mountains at the upper end of Broad Beach. “All the hours are lovely in their lights and colors, wind and calm; and if one isn’t gardening or gleaning wood on the beach, swimming or walking, he is content to sit and watch the passage of time over the earth.”
Powell described the abalone that were abundant in the Fifties—“Later at supper we went to the beach to get our supper off the rocks. Prying abalone from the reef is only half the labor required: the other end of the mollusk is almost as firmly fastened to the shell...Freshly caught and sauteed in butter they are delicious and their shells remain, beautiful forever.”
Powell also recounts pleasures like discovering hidden springs in the mountains and ancient oaks; gathering mussels, wild mushrooms, shells and driftwood, and watching the sky, sea and stars.
Not everything was idyllic. Fire and drought were problems then as well as now. “On the coast, seasons merge almost imperceptibly into each other,” Powell wrote. “When the rainy season is regular, then it is easier to know the time of year. When drought comes, how is one to know summer and fall from winter and spring?”
Powell provides a terrifying firsthand account of the 1956 Newton-Hume-Sherwood Fire. The fire, which started in Newton Canyon during 70-90 mph Santa Ana winds on Christmas Day, raged for nearly days, charring 40,000 acres.
The Powells and their neighbors, with the help of two Edison line crew workers, fought to save their homes from the firestorm, armed with shovels and garden hoses. They were fortunate, but many were not. More than 250 homes and structures were destroyed.
Powell’s home was destroyed 20 years later, in the 1978 Kanan Fire. He died in 2001 in Arizona and never returned to Malibu, but his Malibu writings remain a vivid portrait of a place that is both familiar and remote as a vanished Elysium.
“The Chumash were a gentle people, living on shellfish, roots, and acorn meal,” Powell wrote. “We who are carnivorous leave a different residue. Sometimes I wonder who will follow us here, and what they will make of our artifacts—books and discs and Scriptos, and less tangible, though perhaps more lasting, our love for this marine mountain-scape called Malibu.”
“Ocian in View” by Lawrence Clark Powell is currently out of print, but readily available second-hand.