Malibu vs. Nobu, Pt 4

Original unedited version, last installment.

From the first mention of dam removal, a hue and cry went up: The cost! Taxpayer funds should be spent on something more important than fish! But how should we value what was lost, and what the dam destroyed? For most Malibuites, the idea of of spawning salmonids in their polluted creeks was inconceivable. The closest thing to rainbow trout was to be found at Troutdale, an aging roadside attraction deep in the mountains on Kanan-Dume Road where one could dangle bait from a bamboo pole over a concrete pond and pull out bored, overweight, kibble-fed rainbows, paying per pound if you wanted to take your catch home. (Troutdale burned down in the 1918 Woolsey Fire, which destroyed 1,600 structures and burned half the range.) The erasure of memory was nearly complete. One letter writer to The Malibu Times denied that any steelhead had ever existed there: “There is no evidence of the Malibu steelhead trout any more than there are Los Angeles River sailfish or Ballona Creek salmon.” Others, most notably, Ronald Rindge, grandson of Fred and May, denied that trout had ever been present above the dam, due to waterfalls. Any found there, he asserted, must have been planted by state agencies.

Joe’s catch aside, there is plenty of evidence that steelhead have existed in the creek, forever. Frederick Rindge bought his “farm” in no small part because they were there. He rhapsodized about “the peerless graceful sea trout,” looking “into the shaded pools, trout homes, watching the fish dart under the shelving rocks,” and eating “the sparkling rainbow trout.” A fishing resort was built on Cold Creek, five miles up the canyon, in the 19th century. More recent records include a 33-inch steelhead in Malibu Creek, and multiple steelhead taken in the ocean from the pier. Historically, trout were present in at least 10 of the streams in the Santa Monica mountains, some little more than rivulets but with alder-shaded pools between boulders big enough to shelter fish through the rainless summers. Since 2000, steelhead have been documented in Malibu, Topanga, and Arroyo Sequit creeks. The organization California Trout estimated that, before the dam, 1,000 steelhead ran in the creek every year. A number of local anglers testified in agency hearings that they and their kids had caught multiple steelhead there, for decades. One said, “those fish were mutants,” they were so strong.

After releasing the big fish, Joe and I kept walking, to the face of the dam, where a pool too deep to see the bottom of lapped against the rotting concrete. We started to fish, and every cast was hit, hard—Bam, bam, bam. As fast as we could unhook them and cast again, we pulled up resident rainbows, 10, 12, 15 inches long. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

How should we value those, lost fish? The sushi value of 1,000 steelhead per year? The tourism value if anglers were allowed to fish for them? Or, consider their value to the entire species, millions of fish throughout the North Pacific Ocean, connecting the freshwaters of North America and Asia in one, spectacularly beautiful and complex web? The genetics of these supremely adaptable fish—these mutants—might make the difference of survival in a warming climate, where more and more of their range will begin to look like Southern California. There is much that these southern steelhead know, quite literally in their bones, that we can never hope to—except by learning from them, if we can find the wisdom to save them. Richard Brautigan, in his odd 1967 novella, Trout Fishing in America, told of first learning of the existence of trout from his stepfather, an old drunk, in 1942. “He had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.”

What of other benefits of removing the dam? The value of the impounded sand alone can be guessed at by considering that the homeowners of Broad Beach are eager to be permitted by the state to spend $30 million to “renourish” their quarter-mile long beach, which disappeared so fast in recent years that they had to erect an “emergency” breakwall of huge boulders to save their real estate. By that metric, the windfall that the property owners on Carbon (Billionaires’) Beach would enjoy from the Corps’ plan would, if those benefits were accurately assessed, pay for the whole project many times over. The first in line, directly in front of the proposed dump site: the Malibu Beach Inn, bought by David Geffen in 2005 for $29 million; then Nobu Ryokan (a hotel where rates begin at $2,000 a night, with a two-night minimum stay) and Nobu restaurant, which replaced the tatty old Pier View Cafe and Windsail restaurants—dowagers from the trailer coast era—bought by Larry Ellison for $9 million and $18.5 million, respectively. The two billionaires’ houses are a little farther down the beach, as the current moves the sand. Nearby is another, on a mere half-acre, bought in 2019 by natural-gas billionaire Michael S. Smith for $110 million (making its annual property taxes $1.31 million). But they wouldn’t contribute a dime.

The value of Malibu begins, and probably ends, with the beach. In the 19th and well into the 20th centuries, the “road” was the beach at low tide: it was possible to traverse the entire coastline on dry sand, and this was the preferred route for homesteaders high in the canyons, north of the Rindge rancho’s boundary. Photos from the 40s show Colony Beach as a deep, wide crescent, and Broad Beach was so named for good reason. Today, Colony is impassable at high tide, as the waves crash and backwash against homeowner’s seawalls, and Broad Beach is a joke—sandless at high tide, the billionaire’s houses cowering behind their riprap wall. “Riprap” is a musical 19th century American word for rock, concrete, or other rubble placed to armor land against water or ice erosion. A large percentage, inexorably growing, of Malibu’s coastline is now riprapped: from the LA city neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, where Sunset Boulevard meets the ocean, all the way to Billionaires’ Beach, and from Pt. Mugu south to County Line, are already hardened, with the exception of a few creek mouths and the still-sanded beaches they generate. The bits in between are annually more eaten away, by the Pacific on one side, and the riprap of property owners on the other. Built to save the real estate and the highway, built here because of the beach, the armoring has the direct, if perverse, effect of destroying it: unable to move inland and rebuild itself with new, eroded material, the moving beach, which mediates between the ocean and the land, is stopped at the rocks, and the hungry, frustrated waves scour ever-deeper, removing sand, until they lap against the rock, and sand is visible only at low tide, if at all. In long stretches of the Malibu coastline, already, it is almost always, functionally, high tide, with ocean swirling against riprap. Any canoe, kayak, or board paddler who has passed by will attest that in these sections, backwash from waves dashing against the rocks and bouncing back out to sea make the coast what mariners call a “potato patch,” unpleasant to paddle for hundreds of yards or even for miles. The future of all of Malibu is one of no beaches, just an armored ribbon of highway increasingly inundated by the ocean.

Ronald Rindge also repeatedly and publicly asserted that the dam should be listed as an historic monument, to honor the achievements of his grandparents. (He and others applied for protection under the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.) To him, it seemed natural that the initiative of his pioneering family, embodied in the dam, should be lauded and recognized. Looked at another way, the dam is concrete proof of the heedless destructiveness of American property ownership, where an inherited fortune can be used to monopolize huge swaths of nature, then damage it, through a combination of self-aggrandizement (what some call greed) and blindness to how nature actually works. It is the glorification of uncountable, and so, by definition, unaccountable wealth. Nowhere did Mr. Rindge mention that he and his fellow heirs shared a remaining family fortune valued in 1985 at $75 million, based on the unearned value of Malibu real estate, nor that the citizens of the State of California had not only paid the family millions to take the dam, a clear danger of failure and therefore massive liability, off their hands, but to pay possibly hundreds of millions more to clean up the mess they had made.

How to understand a culture that operates this way? One doesn’t have to look far. In a not-atypical editorial, Arnold York, the publisher of The Malibu Times, complained that “We’re willing to spend millions to preserve steelhead trout,” when what we ought to do is let them all go extinct, to be replaced by better competitors. “I believe in Darwin….We all compete. Plants compete for air, sunlight and space. Animals compete for food, breeding grounds, for mates. The stronger and more adaptive survive, the weaker die out, ultimately vanish, and become extinct.”

Mr. York’s philosophy is not Darwinism, it is Social Darwinism. And it dovetails with, and is scarcely evolved beyond, Frederick Rindge’s casual Victorian racism. In Happy Days in Southern California, Rindge wrote, faux-complaining about the success of introduced English Sparrows: “His ubiquitous self, like the Anglo-Saxon race, has been born to conquer.”

Nobu Malibu is the hottest ticket in town. I arrived for dinner recently via a Tesla Model S, belonging to a friend, one of the town’s leading pot dealers (a legal pursuit in California since 2016). Unable to resist showing off to a newbie like me—almost a Val now, since I live 20 miles inland, near Dodger Stadium, in the cheapest house I could find the closest to the beach 10 years ago—he demonstrated the electric car’s blinding torque by stopping cold in the fast lane of PCH at rush hour, shifting into “Ludicrous +” gear, then stomping on the accelerator. The streamlined, slightly irridescent, blue beast lurched forward like the Millennium Falcon hitting warp drive, pinning me to my seat for the scant three seconds it took to hit 65 mph. Then, slowly and elegantly, as if nothing insane and illegal had just happened, he dropped me by the restaurant’s front door, facing the parking lot, full of row after row of equally shiny Range Rovers, Porsches, Ferraris, BMWs, and other exotic machines. The squat, modern building is made of a warm-colored concrete, “board-formed” with un-sanded planks in order to leave the rough, organic impression of the wood sacrificed for the purpose—a textural juxtaposition of a type that the Japanese call wabi-sabi, a notion of beauty defined by the asymmetry, roughness, and simultaneous imperfection/perfection of nature’s forms, and a certain self-effacing nod to austerity, if not poverty. This building, built by code to withstand a 7-point earthquake, is likely the most expensive commercial structure per square foot ever erected in the city.

Inside, a sushi bar of warm-looking wood, honey-colored to complement the tinted, tree-haunted concrete, was thronged with chefs and glass cases packed with exquisite piscine offerings: tunas of several stripes—bluefin, yellowfin, bigeye, albacore; yellowtail, salmon, fluke, cod, char, monkfish, mackerel, and seabass, along with octopus, urchin, crab, and other invertebrate delicacies. Nothing from local waters featured. All had been gathered here—-that is to say, flown into LAX by refrigerated 747s—from the four corners of the world, demonstrating Nobu’s command of the world’s oceanic resources. The Nobu nameplate is a global enterprise: 47 restaurants, from Los Angeles (2 locations), to Monte Carlo, Moscow (2), Mexico City (2), London (3), New York (3), Sao Paulo, Cape Town, Budapest, Ibiza, and Dubai, to begin with, as well as six hotels. Anyone fortunate enough to have eaten at one knows that the dishes are spectacular. From the omakase menu, a parade of delicacies chosen by the chef, each one more ineffable than the next, I can recall only Canadian sockeye salmon wrapped around something I’d never heard of, monkfish liver paté with caviar, yellowtail sashimi with jalapeño relish, and seabass with buttery shimeji mushrooms. It is expensive: a “small” dish such as bigeye and bluefin toro tartar is $40, while the brand’s signature black cod with miso is $38. Wagyu beef from Kyushu runs $36 an ounce. At $135, the cheaper of two omakase dinner menus is the most economical way to feed oneself.

Nobu sells not simply seafood, but a kind of entertainment delivered through a carefully curated mixture of food, ambience, and exclusivity which induces a certain euphoria. (Mine was helped by sake—one branded Onigoroshi or “kill the devil,” as any proper firewater should be.) Like a dream, the experience is vividly sensual, but as soon as it’s over it begins to fade, until only a blurry impression of what you just consumed, or were consumed by, remains.

Like a flush bank account, this abundance isn’t always easy to sustain. Even the Nobu empire, in a good position to bid for what remains of the world’s wild fish, has to reckon with the accelerating collapse of the world’s seafood stocks. Many of the restaurant’s offerings are now from fish “farms,” including the bluefin tuna, the most desired and most endangered, quickly being fished to extinction on a global scale. A single, 612-pound fish sold for more than $3 million earlier this year in Japan, which consumes 80 percent of the world’s bluefin tuna. Efforts to ban or even seriously constrain overfishing founder on the cocaine-like economics of the global seafood trade. And bluefin aquaculture is no solution: juveniles are taken from the ocean before they can reproduce and fed wild-caught fish, 10 times more by weight than to salmon. This capital-intensive practice is called tuna “ranching,” the expensive ironies of which Frederick Rindge would no doubt have appreciated.

The Tesla seemed to me to offer a parable: like a bluefin tuna it is sleek, sublimely powerful, expensive, and rare. So were all the other cars in the lot out front. But, unlike them, and like the ranched bluefin, the Tesla a concerted, highly technical effort at engineering an alternative to the spiral of collapse we have made on Earth: extinction, sea level rise, dying oceans. Salvation through sexy, pricey technology. Like the ranched bluefin, and like Malibu’s overdue sewage treatment plant, the Tesla is not a good enough answer: affordable only by a select few, too little too late. It illustrates that, versus the relatively simple nature of the problems—overfishing and over-burning of fossil fuels—the solutions we have so far consented to undertake are so indirect, complex, slow, and conditioned, as to be unlikely to forestall the worst consequences of our culture’s unwillingness to curb its appetites. Even in the face of imminent disaster, there is bluefin toro tartar, for those who can afford it.

For a while, anyway. But, so what? There may be extinctions, but there is no extinction at Nobu—any of the Nobus, anywhere in the world. Local stocks, irreplaceable genetics, even entire species may disappear, but only in certain places—at least that is Nobu’s, and its customers’, bet. The supply chain moves on. The credit cards are honored.

Next time, I leave the surfboard at home. I pull on a dive mask, slip under the glassy water at Surfrider, swim out over the fan of rounded rocks, and begin to see its real life. Mussels, barnacles, limpets, and chitons cling, crabs scuttle, hidden by waving algaes in green, brown, red, and pink. Fish dart—first small in the shallows, gobies and blennies, then as the floor drops away, topsmelt, grunion, anchovies, sardines. Farther out, the mottled bottom of rocks and sand hosts halibut, octopus, round rays, lobsters, bigger crabs, thornbacks, shovelnose guitarfish, little horn and larger leopard sharks. On larger rocks urchins crowd, picked at by bright orange Garibaldi (the state fish, named after the hero of the Italian Republic), tri-colored, aptly named sheephead, schools of corvina, croaker, kelp bass, opaleye, and halfmoon. All edible. Based on remains in their middens (kitchen trash heaps), the Chumash enjoyed at minimum 40 species from these waters. From the nearshore, mussels, clams, limpets, sardines, anchovies, halibut and rays, and abalones—vanished now many decades from overfishing; from deeper water, mackerel and bonito, and possibly yellowfin tuna, yellowtail, sharks, marlin, and swordfish. A local omakase, to rival any on earth. But today, only a few, dedicated spear- and kayak fishers know of the bounty. Commercially, spiny lobsters taken in traps are mostly sent to Japan, where their bright, briny taste is preferred to the heavier, duller Maine variety, and squid netted under bright night lights is mostly sent to China for processing, before some is sent back to us, to fry into unrecognisability.

A sharp-eyed diver or swimmer might even see, hunting among the reefs and kelp beds, a flash of what might be a precious and intelligent metal, waiting for the winter rains to fill the stream and breach the berm, sending freshwater flowing out to the sea and inviting its wandering children back home.