An epidemic of paranoia has broken out at Goose Rocks Beach. The disease is familiar to everyone who owns oceanfront property and everyone who does not but wants to share in the pleasures of the seashore. “The beach belongs to everyone” goes the chant, and it is taken up one year in Long Island, another year in Nantucket, and another in New Jersey. This year it is Maine’s turn.
It began when about two dozen beach-front owners, noting that their deeds defined their property as extending to the low-water mark, claimed the right to eject trespassers from that part of the beach they owned. “Nonsense,” said the Town of Kennebunkport, “people have been walking Goose Rocks Beach from end to end for many decades, and the beach is now public by prescriptive easement.”
In olden times, when Maine was part of Massachusetts, the public was said to enjoy the right to walk, fish, fowl, and whatever else passed for recreation in the seventeenth century – in the area between the high and low water marks. The Town dismisses any such constraints, holding that modern beachgoers should be free to indulge in such twenty-first century pursuits as Frisbee throwing, picnicking, and volleyball.
Wherever the War of the Beaches is waged, the press stands ready to frame it as a holy war, a battle between the privileged few and the deserving masses. For law firms, of course, the few and the masses are just so many billable hours.
The paranoia is especially virulent in these contentious times. What at core is a rather prosaic legal point – whether deeds trump long-standing usage or vice versa – has turned into a crusade, with the crusaders marching under a banner emblazoned with SAVE OUR BEACHES. One side paints pictures of fences sprouting up and down the beach and KEEP OFF signs on the beautiful sands of Goose Rocks. The other side warns that if the beach is surrendered, hordes of drunken teen-agers will converge on Goose Rocks at spring break, with dune buggies not far behind.
A crucial battle will be fought in June, when the Town will vote to approve (or not) a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees to flight the 25 property owners. This is a considerable sum in a Town whose population is about 3500. With appeals, it could become more considerable.
It all reminds me of a 50s novel, Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys, by Max Shulman. The fictional town of Putnam’s Landing is chosen as a missile launch site, splitting the community into the hawks and doves of the day, and ending with an accidental (and hilarious) launch of an ICBM. The book was very funny, the movie (with Paul Newman) less so, but the idiocy of extremism is as ridiculous at Goose Rocks today as it was at Putnam’s Landing a half century ago.
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For the record, I live at Goose Rocks, but not on the beach front. As I see it, both sides have reasonable arguments. And when the smoke clears and the lawyers have been paid, nothing will have changed.
