One Man’s Coastal Love Story

It’s better enjoyed from a distance...


Just in case you haven’t heard, I LOVE the beach.

Anybody that knows me knows this. If you doubt this assertion, ask my mother.

When my parents took me to the beach as a baby, I cried when it was time to go home. As a young child I always looked like a non-Caucasian adoptee child compared to my sister and parents because I was literally dark brown with my suntan.

I'm proud to report that there's no skin cancer so far…

My family bought a motor home in 1972 and we spent one week each summer and multiple long weekends every year in the 1970’s on the formerly deserted beaches of Gulf Shores, Alabama and Destin, Florida. At first we tried the ocean front campsites where the high tide often came up under the picnic table at night, but later we learned to enjoy the beach from a distance in one of the cheaper campsites situated in the shade of the small live oak trees in the sand dunes. The location was much more practical and the shade was welcome in the heat of the day.

Although Gulf Shores and Destin have been overrun with development through the years, I will always cherish the memories of wandering through acres and acres of 30’ high, sugar white sand dunes virtually alone in April and October.

It has always been my overriding lifetime goal to live at the beach, and I had the pleasure of seeing that dream come true the day after the 9/11 tragedy when I moved into a rental house on Mexico Beach, Florida. At that same time I purchased a building lot 2000 feet away from the Gulf of Mexico. I had three sets of "dune lines"' between me and the water and I couldn't quite see the ocean from my lot, but you could smell it and I knew that it was there. My intent was to design and construct a new home—thee ultimate monument to myself and my success.

I got as far as finishing the design on my computer while I enjoyed daily walks on the beach and became involved socially and politically in the community, but reality set in when I tied to get a Bay County building permit.

What a pain in the rear.

The City of Mexico Beach gladly took my cash and approved my drawings, but the Bay County officials were paralyzed with indecision because the State of Florida, in their infinite wisdom, was in the process of producing a new building code and the bad news was…

THEY WERE LATE.

You had to submit FIVE complete copies of your drawings (I had twenty sheets of drawings) and give them something like $125 (certified check, no cash), then go home, shut up, and WAIT until the wheels of government got through whirling, clanging, and banging.

To make a long story short, they lost my drawings and application so I had to resubmit a few weeks later, then they finally turned me down because I wanted to build an all-concrete house. Inside walls, outside walls, the only thing that wouldn’t be concrete was the steel roof trusses and aluminum panel roof.

But Noooooo, they (the building officials) were afraid because I wasn’t a registered structural engineer. I’m a mechanical engineer and in their estimation I can build commercial refrigeration equipment or zillion pound steam boiler plants (which I have built), but “I don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout pouring no cement, massa…”

Did I mention that the process was a pain in the ass? Oh yes, I guess that I did.

I’d probably still be awaiting that permit today if I had pursued it. The stupid thing was that I could BUY a pre-designed set of plans for $350 showing a piece-of-shit wood framed ranch house and the county would have happily taken my money and given me my permit, thereby setting me up for disaster when the first decent tropical storm came along. They just weren't used to someone wanting to build a well designed house constructed to actually survive the conditions they were saying existed on the coast. What idiots.

By the way, Florida finally got their new building standard with its 150 mph wind code approved in mid 2002, almost NINE MONTHS late.

I’ve since sold my building lot for a tidy profit and relocated to St. Simons Island on the Georgia coast. The beach isn’t nearly as pretty and nice to walk on, but Georgia’s coastal areas have a unique geographic orientation that greatly limits yearly assaults by tropical weather. I don’t mean to say that we’re immune to hurricanes, but we haven’t had a big storm since the 1960’s and it was the late 1800’s since one struck before that. We actually have a big section of salt marsh and Sea Island (a separate island) between our condo and the beach, but we can smell the ocean from here and its a half hour bike ride or a ten minute car drive to the beach if you feel the urge.

The bad news is: statistically we’re due for a storm.

As a result, I’ve decided that RENTING rather than OWNING, NEAR the beach, not ON the beach, is the safest way to go.

As I said in my opening, the Ocean is something best enjoyed from a distance. You can visit the beach on vacation like I did for years and dream of walking out your back door into the surf each morning, but believe me, it isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Living on the ocean front is hard work and expensive, and it’s going to get even more expensive in the future.

Things can’t keep going like they are.

I believe that if you can’t afford to pay CASH for your house, and pay CASH to rebuild it when it gets blown down or washed away, you shouldn’t have a house on the beach in the first place. The Federal Flood insurance program and the coercion of state mandated provision of wind/hail insurance from the insurance companies is simply amounts to welfare for rich people.

I say that ocean-front property values are artificially inflated by this process. If you KNEW that YOU were going to have to PAY to rebuild your water front palace or bungalow, most people would still be living in Topeka or Nashville and limit their beach adventures to two weeks a year.

Thus the disaster and suffering like that we saw with Hurricane Katrina and are about to see with Rita could be somewhat limited. I believe that the coastal population explosions we have witnessed over the past thirty years would have been cut in half if the owners of the property had not been seduced by a false sense of security caused by the downturn in the hurricane cycle and ready availability of construction financing and insurance.

Oh well, that's all just water over the levee...

With the onslaught of Rita, at least the media has something to freak out about for the next thirty days and everyone has topics to discuss over coffee or around the water cooler at work.

I guess that I’ll go take a peek at FOX News now and catch up on the latest level of hysteria.