Coyotes and Culture in Malibu

Before the inexorable present emergence as a real estate conceit catering to profligate monied interests, Malibu was an iconic sea coast community of many outlier residents committed to the city’s noble Vision Statement to sacrifice urban and suburban conveniences, “to preserve unaltered natural resources and rural characteristics.”

That was before the advent of voracious local real estate interests, select, self-interested city councilpersons and an accommodating self-serving City Hall, accelerated by the devastating Woolsey and Palisades firestorms that halved the local population including many long term, economically diverse residents.

It was this sad vision of a metamorphosing Malibu that I read an evocative and idiosyncratic “Coyotes And Culture: Essays from Old Malibu,” (University of Nevada Press), by Shakespearean scholar Claire McEachern., the review of which I wrote for my upcoming column “Shelf Life” in the cultural arts magazine, the Panafold.

It should be noted that while teaching at UCLA, McEachern married into a legendary Malibu ranch family, the Deckers, for which not incidentally Decker Canyon is named. The Deckers had homesteaded there since the Civil War, thus becoming a disciple of what longtime Malibu locals such as myself label “the coyote just ate my cat” demographic.

I have excerpted a few paragraphs of the review here for I feel in these dark days of plummeting publishing it merits wider exposure in a Malibu sadly correspondingly diminished by the recent firestorms and the city’s stumbling recovery, (by the way to which new city manager Joe Irvin is warmly welcomed.)

The book begins as McEachern flees a fire with her daughter and a menagerie of animals: “It’s ten in the morning and the air is almost too thick and dark with smoke to spot the flashing yellow light on the emergency vehicle I’m following. I am driving my husband’s truck at the unwieldy helm of a five-horse trailer down the Pacific Coast Highway, flaming tumbleweeds hitting the side of the rig as if flung by a medieval siege engine.”

Revealed in this and the ensuing essays is an engrossing portrait of a rough-hewn Malibu, worlds away from the scenes of celebrities and surf for which the community is best known. McEachern chronicles instead a diminishing cadre of old-guard residents navigating fires, floods, and the encroaching pressures of real estate interests marketing Malibu as a trophy house and tourist destination.

“The result is a rare, at times melancholy, yet illuminating portrait of a widely-misunderstood place that has long captivated the cultural imagination. "

The book ends with the reveal that the Decker matriarch, Millie, sadly passed soon after Woolsey Fire and that McEachern and family in 2024 sold the canyon homestead and moved to a farm in southern Oregon.

There, I presume the horses can run free with less fear of firestorms, speeding back roads traffic, and encroaching over development. And McEachern will continue writing.