So She Thought: A trip to Camelot

One of my favorite movie lines of all time was said in the film, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." It comes right after a Buzby Berkley-type musical extravaganza extols the virtues of Camelot to the Knights of the Round Table, who have traveled to its gates from afar in order to visit it.

In the film, King Arthur (played by Graham Chapman), thoughtfully scratches his beard and says, "On second thought, let's not go there. It is a silly place."

The words "it is a silly place" have been echoing in my mind a lot over the last several days because we've spent the last few days in the heart of another silly sort of Camelot -- Southern California.

We stayed in beautiful San Juan Capistrano, a magical place if ever there was one. The climate is kind enough that the flowers bloom year-round, the sun shines gently through the tall trees and the ocean breezes refresh everything each morning and evening. It is Camelot indeed.

It's a place where it's easy to arrive and then ponder never coming home. Most of the resident population probably did just that at some point, leaving bland hometowns all over the country for the sweet morning air and year-round springtime of California's South Coast.

Yet Southern California is also a place which seems blissfully unaware of what's going on in the rest of the state.

Take automobile issues. When we made the four-hour drive down to San Juan Capistrano, for example, we were able to take advantage of the "diamond lanes," which are carpool lanes set up for cars with two or more occupants. We spent at least half the drive whizzing past the other three lanes, which were clogged, standstill, with bumper-to-bumper traffic. The reason? In each of those cars, there was only one occupant -- the driver.

In fact, more times than not, we had the carpool lane entirely to ourselves, except for some families obviously on their way to Disneyland and a few renegade souls who were willing to break the law and risk getting a ticket in order to solo speed through the Diamond Lane.

And the idea that it's a do-able thing to sit in an hour or more of gridlocked traffic every day of your life while thousands of other commuters head to the same places seems, well, silly. Why not go together?

It made me wonder if our state's high emissions standards (and resulting high gas prices) are in place so that Southern California's 20 million residents can have both good air quality as well as the option to drive solo every day, if they choose to.

Even the area news programs had a silly side to them. The one time when I sat down to watch the news in our hotel room, the local sports announcer had composed a snarky rap song aimed at the weatherman, and performed it during the news hour as the anchors looked on, clapping and giving the appropriate hand signs.

This was sandwiched somewhere in between the murders and accidents which plague any large urban area. Clearly, there is a dark side to Camelot that's neither silly nor entertaining, but the area's news outlets seem determined that no one dwell on it.

And of course, no self-proclaimed entertainment capitol of the world be complete without a little "Nero fiddling while Rome burns," scandal.

While we were down there, the story broke that Mr. H. David Nahai, director of the mighty Los Angeles Department of Water and Power utility, was recently audited by his own agency and found to be using huge amounts of water to keep his Beverly Hills property watered.

I'm not even going to ask how the director of a public utility can afford a Beverly Hills mansion -- it is Camelot, after all. But officials estimated that The Chief of Water Police's personal landscape sprinkler system was running seven nights a week, rain or shine, winter and summer. His household was using an astonishing 36, 185 gallons of water per month, or around four hundred dollars worth.

Even at our hotel, we saw absolutely no evidence of any conservation programs in place. And I was, frankly, astonished to think that our area farmers are letting fields go fallow and selling their water so that Southern Californians like David Nahai can soak his lawn to the point of becoming boggy.

And while Nahai's water use borders on outrageous, and visitor/tourist conservation is not addressed, the fact remains: Southern Californians are still currently under no legal obligation to conserve. All conservation is voluntary only -- just like carpooling.

Yes, Southern California is a sort of Camelot, no question. It's beautiful, it's entertaining, yet in some ways it truly is "lala land." While all Californians are burdened with paying some of the highest gas prices in the nation, and Central Valley farmers let their fields go brown so their neighbors down south can overwater their lawns, I can't help but wonder how much longer Southern California should be allowed to remain, like Monty Python's Camelot, "a silly place."

Diane Sayre is a freelance writer living in Hanford. Her column appears weekly in the Sentinel. Readers can write to her at The Hanford Sentinel, P.O. Box 9, Hanford, CA 93232.

(June 30, 2008)