new year's, mexico

I'm lounging on a faux white leather cushioned beach bed in Cabo San Lucas - the craggy rock & sand encased tip of the Baja peninsula that sits at the convergence of the Pacific Ocean & the Sea of Cortez. At 7 am there is actually a sense of calm nurturing the shore. Creamiscle and peach-stucco opulent hotels sit like pedicured toenails on the dried foothills. The growing warmth gives me a sense of security and I feel, for a moment, a comfort in the familiar smells of salt and seaweed.

But then the pollution seeps in. Barrels of trash in the lunch-box shape of Norwegian and Carnival cruise ships. Plastic flotsam in the form of jet skis. The noise of dull, mechanical, gurgling fishing boat engines. The self-consumed, self-adoring, gluttonous groanings of the rich.

A certain producer and his entourage of 22 guests shuffle in from the Me-Cabo veranda and lay claim to a stretch of roped off beach in front of me. Does throwing an 8 x 3 hotel-issued beach towel in the sand constitute property rights? I can't help but think their sense of entitlement to these cotton boundaries symbolizes a greater tendency we have towards seeking ownership.
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The notion of beauty interrupted by obnoxious Americans (of the US variety) isn't a foreign concept to me. Having lived on Cape Cod until I was 18, I've seen my share of reprehensible elitism, much of which centered on ownership of beaches.

The Cape is essentially a barrier beach system - constantly fluctuating in shape based on tides depositing, and storms eroding, the coastline. Despite the ever-morphing natural boundaries of the seashore, many wealthy beachfront landowners have laid claim to the sand and water adjacent to their homes.

I’ve always thought of the ocean and its beaches as property of the public – a space for common use and common responsibility (e.g. protection from preventable environmental threats such as pollution). But in Massachusetts, courts have ruled that those with coastal property have title to the land down to the "wet sand area" – that is - land that sits between the low and high tide marks. Unlike most states that own the inter-tidal zone land and ocean “in trust for (their) citizens”, Massachusetts has a common law interpretation of a statute, passed in the 1640s, allowing for “private ownership of ocean flats”. [McMahon, Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review, 2004].

It's astonishing to me (and possibly naïve) that oceanfront property owners have been fighting the public for 370 years over the use of these beaches. Laws do exist to protect the right of the Massachusetts public, but only to a certain extent. For example, you can fish, “fowl”, navigate or swim in the inter-tidal zone waters but if your feet touch the bottom you’d technically be trespassing.

I'm not suggesting that all private beach “owners” are plotting the demise or drowning of the general public. Nor am I implying that all movie producers' wives feel they are entitled to own an already privately owned piece of sand because they spent over $3000 on their hotel room. What I am suggesting is that we begin to rethink the implications of private ownership of land that would, by common sense, seem common (or public).

Privatization of natural resources and the dream of a home with an acre of waterfront property may both feel as old as antiquity. But does value exist in transcending the boundaries (and arguments) we construct in terms of our right to title? Is it my right to bare the burden of pollution to our sound, our ocean, or the watershed from which I drink & bathe if you dump oil, gas, trash, paint, etc. on “your private” property? I’ve certainly been witness to these offenses throughout my youth. Do I now inherit the responsibility of ensuring their eradication?

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I’m back at the Me Cabo Hotel feeling hypocritical (what am I doing here in the first place?), vengeful, and wrapped up in my tendencies towards exaggeration. A young boy in an all white uniform is sweeping the sand off a wood-planked walkway on the beach. It's as if the very nature of the sand were a nuisance. The comfort and calm I was feeling earlier are replaced by a sense of fabrication and my experience seems inauthentic.

Perhaps it is our personal desire to create control and order for our individual lives that stimulates a need for ownership. Perhaps our self worth is wrapped up in our ability to have dominion over as much as we can. I don’t know. But I can’t help but wonder what I would and wouldn’t be willing to give up to the common ownership of all. Not that I own a beach or anything.