July 4 beach trash, including seating, is hoisted into a nearly full garbage container.

Wake up commissioners!

I am writing the day after the Fourth of July. Last night for the second or third night in a row there was no sleep to be had until well after midnight, if even then. The War Zone taking place on the beaches and neighborhoods of Ocean Park, Surfside and Oysterville were a horror that no human, animal or environment should ever be required to experience again.

People who do not live here, who do not love here, who do not support our home place or community, desecrated our beach and our lives for days running. What can we possibly do to ensure that this ghastly scene of destruction, financial waste, and disregard for the beach, the community safety and peace never happens again?

On the evening of the Fourth, while cowering with my dog well into the night, I wished that I could have dragged our commissioners — especially those from across the bay — to the Ocean Park beach approach and tied them to chairs so that they would have to experience, first hand and for four or five long hours, what we locals were experiencing. I wanted them to see, hear, and smell what fireworks and this fireworks crowd does to our homes: the noise, the smoke, the bombings, the crazy parking and encroachments on private property, and the disrespect. We were a community under siege.

Pull Quote

I propose a new marketing slogan: Long Beach — the most disrespected beach in the world.

Then I also wanted to get every person who believes that fireworks must be continued out of bed in the early hours of July 5th — with headlamps if needed — to begin cleaning up the vast piles of debris, the fire pits, the micro plastics, beer cans, cardboard remnants, burning logs, wood pallets, food packaging, broken bottles — all the lethal detritus that without intervention would soon be pulled out by the tide into our blue ocean to poison our fish, kill our sea birds, and endanger the creatures of the sea; notwithstanding what will be left on the beach for weeks to come.

Befouling our beach

The desecration of our beach — witnessed the morning after — was shocking: there was furniture, there were fires still burning, open pits with firework remnants so hot that pickers bags caught on fire. One person in the clean-up crew said, “There were so many great people on the beach cleaning up. But it was awful. I was close to tears. I worked three straight hours just trying to put the fires out. I’m hoping it’s not all going to just get washed out so I can go back again tomorrow.”

I wanted every person with fireworks who arrived, shot off their goods, and walked away (or staggered away) back to their cars or hotels rooms or campsites or RVs to be required to put their money on the table for clean-up, to reimburse us for psychological distress, to pay for the misery of our wild creature neighbors, of canine owners and veterans for all the suffering caused by this weekend.

But would money alone stop this insanity? That appears to be what this is all about, isn’t it? — “filthy lucre.” Some business people, and hangers-on, seem to think they need to support this out-of-control holiday in order to put a few more dollars in their pockets. Meanwhile our local and county officials, swayed by this misguidedness, are too timid to do the right thing. Can we attribute this to their poor judgment, do they not care, or is it simple ignorance of the extent of the problem? Have you actually witnessed what our beach looks like on the morning after?

Granted, some people do pick up after themselves — but this is far and away a minority of revelers. On Bay Avenue the morning after, I heard other remarks from clean-up volunteers: “My husband got the 100-foot hose out last night just in case.” “I don’t want to have to do this again next year.” “Aren’t those bombs illegal?” “They were landing on our roof.” “The fireworks people were in your face this year… like we didn’t say no to them, so they’re saying ‘Take that!’” When State Parks Ranger Caitlin Ellerbe was asked, “Can’t you shut down the fireworks?” she said, “That’s a bigger question than we have the ability to answer.” Really? I think many of us could answer that for you!

How long can our local officials continue to bury their heads in the sand? How bad must things get before they’re able to stand up for what we all know is the correct action? How big an emergency must we have before our local fire chiefs and our police admit, “we can’t keep our communities safe,” instead of just crossing their fingers and hoping for the best. Would a grass fire that destroys some high-end beach homes convince folks? Or another homicide like the still unsolved murder of July 4, 2015? How much more dishonoring of our beach environment must we witness before we can come to our senses and just say no?

I believe we’re the only community on the West Coast willing to whore the natural beauty of its beaches for a few pieces of silver. Yes, I propose a new marketing slogan: Long Beach — the most disrespected beach in the world.

Take a stand

I love our community. I love our land and people. I know we have our problems, idiosyncrasies, blind spots — but it’s time to take a stand for our beach. It’s time to come together to stop this madness. Surely we can create a better, more family-friendly, more creature-friendly, more local-resident-friendly way to celebrate the founding of our nation. Surely we have enough imagination, creativity, vision, and savvy intelligence to craft a weekend that highlights the best of where we live — the food, the fun, the art, the magic, the music, the meditative and peaceful corners of the natural world that abound here — instead of polluting our home.

Can we agree on a solution? Or do we need to continue the controversy for another 10 years? Those of us who live on Pacific County’s oceanside need a break — we’ve born the weight of this insanity for too long. And restricted fireworks in the municipalities of Ilwaco and, next year, Long Beach will probably push more fireworks to the north end. Do we need to sue our commissioners or the state departments of Fish and Wildlife, Ecology, or Parks and Rec for violating the Washington State Shoreline Management Act? (Sharp-shooting pro bono environmental lawyer, please give us a call.) This annual scene of Bacchanalian destruction should not, cannot happen again.

Enough is enough.