I just spent an irritating and relaxing week in San Clemente, the southernmost city in COVID County and a town every bit as pseudopatriotic as its northern neighbor Surf City, aka the Florida or Texas of California, where freedom is best and most boisterously expressed by joyous mobs of maskless partiers, liberated from their consciences and dismissing warnings as fake news while happily inhaling air of dubious quality and exhaling a fine viral mist over the celebrating throng.<\/p>\n
My wife and I have been coming to this town twice a year for almost 30 years to enjoy the quiet, the beauty and small-town feeling of the stretch along the coast with its touristy main drag of Avenida Del Mar, which winds past antique stores and surf shops before landing at the San Clemente Pier.<\/p>\n
This was our first visit to The Clem since the virus hit and at check-in we were advised to stay away from Avenida Del Mar, because, well, this is Orange County and not everyone is quivering in terror in their homes fretting over something so tiny as a coronavirus. Which is pretty much what we did in our condo for the week if for no other reason than trying not to disappoint our daughter back home worrying about us catching the COVID.<\/p>\n
Jane made a trip to the local grocery store\u2014one place where people were behaving as one might behave in the midst of a pandemic\u2014and after that we lived on what we bought, supplemented by orders from Grubhub.<\/p>\n
Sound like fun? Well, it was, cloistered in our room reading a lot (David Mitchell\u2019s mystical and magical 1960s rock and roll novel \u201cUtopia Avenue\u201d and Charlie Kaufman\u2019s utterly indescribable\u2014\u201dPynchonesque\u201d is a term reviewers use for it\u2014\u201cAntkInd\u201d) watching a few movies (nothing to recommend), enjoying earlyish cocktail hours on the balcony watching pleasure craft scampering along the coast and pelicans surfing on the updraft from the faces of waves before dusk sets in, and then…bats and skunks.<\/p>\n
Adele\u2019s, a restaurant adjacent to our complex, had been there for as long as I can remember. Adele herself was, sadly on this trip, holding a liquidation sale after being closed for the usual reasons, so no more Saturday night drag shows that always packed the place a lot more than the calm weekday breakfasts.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe got what she deserved,\u201d one guest told my wife. \u201cHolding those queer parties every weekend.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the weekend, people, presumably of a more hetero bent, gathered in (sigh) maskless celebrations and barbecues in large numbers on the grounds, boom-boxing shallow-cut classic rock, forcing me to go to my AirPods and Spotify for a more carefully curated playlist.<\/p>\n
We left for home on Sunday, with the coronavirus drifting up like snow against the sides of the barbecues.<\/p>\n
The trip, in a way, was almost as dispiriting as it was relaxing, witnessing people in the county casually dismissing COVID and treating the disease as if it were a proud political statement. If \u201cGovernor Gruesome\u201d says be careful, doing the opposite must be the smartest and bravest course of action.<\/p>\n
And of course, it\u2019s not just people from Orange County. They\u2019re just the ones locally who take the most pride in recklessness. But some of the sentiment oozes across the border into Long Beach, finding a comfortable and vocal home among some people, with an especially easy target among certain moneyed conservatives who have their own unstated figure of acceptable losses in the battle to reopen businesses.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Kelly Colopy Long Beach\u2019s Director of Health & Human Services pleaded once again\u2014she\u2019s a long way past blue in the face\u2014for people to wear face coverings, maintain social distance and follow health orders.<\/p>\n
“These are not hard steps, they are easy to do,” Colopy said. “They are maybe inconvenient, but they are easy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yes, but for too many people they\u2019re too inconvenient, and they\u2019re not easy enough.<\/p>\n
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