Old Malibu: Connected to the tides
As we sat in Marsha’s home in Old Agoura, she remembered a Malibu from another time. She smiled softly and gently closed her eyes, almost as though she could feel the ocean breeze and the sun on her face. As a teenager, she would ride her horse down the empty beaches between Trancas and Santa Monica without even using the road much, observing the rock formations and the tides. “You could go down there, get on a sand dune, take your clothes off, stay there all day and never see a single soul,” she told me.
She remembers herself as a “dorky” teenager, and “a little bit shy,” who was “totally enamored with mountains and horses and the ocean and weather and tides and time.” Marsha kept a diary, which she called a log, but instead of chronicling the emotional roller-coaster of adolescence, she jotted down observations about wind direction, red tides, and sea bass. She would ditch school and go down to Paradise Cove where she eventually got a job on a fishing boat.
Marsha described Malibu in the 50’s and 60’s as a small, peaceful community of people who really cared. She felt safe there. Her father, who was a CHP officer, died on duty in a motorcycle crash, when she was very young. So, the people of Malibu looked after her. There was a Native American man named Dell Gonzales who worked on Rancho Maria Louisa up Latigo Canyon. He was in tune with the natural world and would pass his knowledge on to Marsha. Once, when her horse, Sheba, got a terrible gash above her eye, he plucked a hair from the horse’s tail and sewed up the wound.
“Today we don’t know jack. I feel bad for kids today because they don’t have much connection with the world, they just have their devices.” Marsha was connected, and although her mom could be “fierce,” she understood that Marsha needed her freedom.
A Topanga of the Past: Naked with a chainsaw
Marsha never wanted to move to Topanga and buy a house. She insisted on holding on to her freedom. But a boyfriend, named Chuck, had other ideas. Marsha remembers him as clever and strong. He knew every tree, creek, and mountain around, as well as wonderful stories from the old days. She compared him to John Muir and was dazzled by his knowledge. In May of 1971, they found a house up where Fernwood meets Basin for under sixteen thousand dollars.
Marsha’s first experiences with her new neighbors were terrifying. A local boy, from the Doolin Family, “browned her out” when she was driving up Fernwood. She chased him down. A group of brothers from another local family would break into houses and steal what they could. They showed up with a bunch of stolen records and wanted Marsha to help them read the band names to see if they were any good.
John Stehelin, who was a Vietnam veteran, stopped by her house looking for lemons from an old tree. He told Marsha he had been picking those lemons since he was a kid and then revealed that one of his goals in life was to become a soldier of fortune. She described the Quinn boys, who lived up the street, as a cyclone. One of the boys went down the time tunnel after a big rain and ended up with two broken arms. Marsha was overwhelmed and remembers going to her room and hiding her head under a pillow to cry.
But it didn’t take long for her to make friends in the canyon and find the freedom she had always treasured. “People just did whatever they wanted in Topanga. It was so magical,” she said. “Nobody even really comprehends that concept.”
There were houses built entirely out of found material. “People would live in vans, and trees, and refrigerators, it was amazing.” Marsha could go out at night and shoot her gun, and the neighbors wouldn’t think anything of it. That kept the coyotes away. She would cut firewood out on her property with a chainsaw, buck naked.
She remembers when Topanga Days was called the Strawberry Festival and people would dress up their chickens and take them to the fair. The main event was a tug of war with a giant pool of mud in the middle. Marsha was impressed that the people of Topanga built the community house with their own hands. She chuckled when recalling the day that “Boxcar Bruce” got his buddies together and laid a piece of a train over the creek. When the cops showed up, everyone just played dumb, and they got frustrated and left.
What Marsha loved most about Topanga was the sense of community. She remembers a Topanga where people would trade seeds and food and take each other to the doctor. It was “small, quiet and tight, and “even if you were down and out, you had something to offer the community.” At first, Marsha kept her distance from the “creekers”, who lived under the bridges, but then she met Jim Hayes, who she describes as “epic.” Even though he was a “down and out drunk,” she was inspired by their conversations and his wisdom. Soon, she had met all the other homeless people living in Topanga.
Times were not always easy for Marsha in Topanga. Her life changed dramatically when she found her ex-boyfriend, Chuck, who had brought her to the canyon, dead on the Fernwood property. He had taken his own life.
“I think he is happy now. I hope he is free,” she told me.
Later in life, Marsha was riding a dirtbike on the dunes at Pismo beach and got in a terrible accident, the motorcycle landing on top of her, leaving her with a broken back, ribs and neck. She had a concussion and was temporarily paralyzed. Marsha couldn’t even hold a fork. Her neighbor picked her up from a hospital in San Luis Obispo and brought her home. The community took care of her by bringing her food and money, helping her walk around and feeding her cats.
“I’ll always be grateful to Topanga for that little time in life, it was pretty valuable.”
After that Marsha gave up motorcycle riding.
A New Topanga: Where did all the hippies go?
One day, Marsha watched The Doors movie, and she realized that everything in Topanga had totally shifted. The hippies were replaced by yuppies and that sense of community she loved so much had vanished.
“It went from, can I give you a hand? To, I’m putting up a fence, get away, please can I have my space.”
She remembered a Topanga from the past, when if you saw a man walking down the road with a guitar on his back, you’d ask him if he needed a place to stay. She wondered why people had become colder and more fearful.
“Money changes everything and money changed Topanga,” she concluded.
Nowadays, when Marsha meets people who are ecstatic because they have just discovered Topanga, she doesn’t want to rain on their parade and tell them what they missed out on. She congratulates them and smiles to herself, remembering what Topanga used to be.
Marsha: A different point of view
You don’t meet people like Marsha every day. She has a unique perspective.
“My goal in life was to have no husband, no children and no job. And it worked. I pulled it off. Pretty impressive. I have no regrets, that’s the best part,” she reflected, with a sparkle in her eye, as though she had tricked a system that is forced upon us all.
How did she do it, I thought to myself, what’s Marsha’s secret? “If you find joy in little fun things, then your life is rich, and I just keep on looking for the fun little things.”
As the light began to fade, a shadow fell over Marsha’s face, but her magnificent white hair, which glowed from the window light behind her, reached up toward the ceiling. She stroked her little dog, fairy, who had a similar hairdo.
“I still have fun, but my life has gotten really tiny in the last few years.” She firmly believes that she should have the right to leave this world when she feels it is necessary.
Marsha, who is now 81 years old, still gets inspiration from life’s magic. But when her body fails, she doesn’t want to end up in a hospital bed with her freedom stripped. She insists, “I really would prefer to find a new playground.”
