Stupid Californian comment of the decade - so far

By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger

January 09, 2010, 11:50AM

A nice winter day at my local surf break here in Jersey

One of the hazards of being on the Internet is that my column can be read everywhere, even in California. And that means that on occasion I get comments from some people who've been indulging a bit too freely in that medical marijuana they have out there.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it does lead to some really stupid observations.

After I ran a blog post including the above photo of winter surf here in Jersey, some reader who was apparently from the West Coast registered the following comment:

"That brownish-green stuff in the photo is water?  And you criticize the west coast?"

That has to qualify as the stupidest comment of this decade - or last decade for that matter.

As I noted in this column way back in 2001, New Jersey's ocean water was been much cleaner than California's for years now.

And even back when we were getting all that bad publicity about water quality, the pollution was coming from New York City, not New Jersey. Once the New Yorkers stopped sending their pollution south, our water cleaned up quick. Now if only they'd stop sending their tourists and moronic MTV people south. But that's another topic, one I addressed in this column.
 

Anyway, California's water was disgusting even back then. I can recall surfing a spot in Northern California that the locals called "Sewer Peak" because an outfall line emptied right where the waves broke. As for Southern California, whenever it rains the rivers deposit huge amounts of pollutants into the ocean.

In that regard, I am running once again for your reading pleasure - and for the edification of the clueless Californian who wrote that comment - a column I wrote on the topic back in 2001. It was headlined "Want toxic surf? Go west, young man."

Summer's coming and the ocean water quality is just terrible. In fact, a New York newspaper carried a letter to the editor from a guy who wrote, "I recently surfed my hometown beach and the beach was contaminated with raw sewage." People are complaining about sewage spills and what the locals call "the feces factor."
 

Not in New Jersey. Our ocean water is now ranked with the cleanest beaches in America. It's California that now has the dirtiest ocean water in America.
 

I mention this not just to reassure you at the start of the summer season at the Jersey Shore. I also mention it because it will irritate Californians. Last year I wrote about the fact that one of our beaches had made a "Top 20" list while no California beaches had done so. Somehow my column got into the hands of some Californians. I got hate mail. One Californian even told me that he had handed my column around at a conference of California newspaper editors and that I would never, ever get a job at a California newspaper.
 

He's right about that. I could never get over the language barrier. For one thing, I only know three or four words for marijuana and apparently it's necessary to know several hundred just to get through a typical day in California. And then there are the other weird expressions. A friend of mine who lived out there for a while reported hearing one Californian tell another, "You're harshing out my party space." I'd need a translator.
 

Also, I couldn't stand living in a state filled with people who have no sense of humor. In my own brief time in California, which was long ago, I was always amazed by the way Californians would insult New Jersey to my face but would take deep personal offense if I pointed out that California is something of an Oklahoma-by-the-Sea. Yes, the Golden State has plenty of flaws, chief among them its brown water. But until recently I didn't realize just how bad that problem is. Then I saw that letter to the New York Times from an Imperial Beach surfer complaining about raw sewage in the waves. A few days later I noticed the following posting on a Web site devoted to surfing in California: "The lack of crowds in Orange County also could have been due to the feces factor - both Newport Beach and Laguna Beach had posted signs due to sewage spills."
 

This piqued my interest. So I called "Dr. Beach," the guy who makes up those lists of the country's best beaches - including the one last year on which our own Long Beach Island was ranked ahead of any beaches in Southern California.
 

He told me New Jersey's water quality has been improving ever since we got the real culprit - New York City - to stop emptying its sewers into the harbor. But California's water quality just gets worse and worse says Dr. Beach, whose real name is Stephen Leatherman. He is director of the coastal research laboratory at Florida International University. Every year when he releases his list of the best beaches he gets a lot of heat from Californians for leaving their prized beaches off the list.
 

"They've got the best climate, I have to give them that. Scenerywise, they're fantastic," Leatherman says.
 

But when it comes to swimming, California beaches leave a lot to be desired. For one thing, the water rarely reaches a comfortable temperature, even in summer. And then there's the pollution.
 

"They've got a problem because they're mountainous there and everything runs downhill. They get stuff from the parking lots. Their sewer plants overflow. It's really a big problem finding a way to deal with all that."
 

And getting bigger by the moment as Southern California's population continues to grow. To find out just how bad things are out west, I made a call to San Clemente, to the national headquarters of the Surfrider Foundation, a group of surfers fighting for clean water and ocean access. Chad Nelson, the environmental director, told me, "We have had an incredible number of beach closures in the past few years."
 

Gee, I can't recall the last beach closure in Jersey, even though we have one of the best monitoring systems in the nation, one of the factors that gives us Surfrider's highest rating for ocean water quality. California gets the lowest. Nelson pointed out that California still has lots of outfalls that sometimes dispense primary-treated sewage into the sea. This leads to illness. "All sorts of bad stuff, all sorts of gastrointestinal stuff," Nelson said. "There's a streptococcus called 'flesh-eating bacteria.'"
 

I asked him what happens to surfers who catch that bug. "They go to the hospital for three weeks or so and get pumped up with antibiotics and hope to make it out alive," he replied.
 

So there you go. Next time you hear a Californian make a joke about our beaches, tell them about the flesh-eating bacteria out west. But whatever you do, don't tell them about our clean water, our clean, white sand and our warm summer water temperatures. They'd all move here. And that might harsh out our party space.