Rugged Individualist or Just a Plain Lawbreaker? : He Wants to Be Left Alone to Pursue His Simple Lifestyle but San Diego County Has Different Ideas

SUNSHINE SUMMIT, Calif. —  Meet Laurence Peabody: rugged individualist by some standards, lawbreaker by others.

He lives in this scrawny little hamlet along California 79, tucked beneath the eastern slopes of Palomar Mountain in northern San Diego County.

On a six-acre knoll peppered with chaparral and manzanita, lilac and ribbonwood, he sleeps at night inside a weathered 1950s-vintage mobile home.

He has no sewers or even a septic tank. Every day, he digs a hole next to a tree. Another day, another tree.

He has no electricity; a small solar panel recharges a car battery.

He pumps water out of the ground, 40 to 60 feet below the crusty surface, and stores it in a tank and an old water-bed bladder that he salvaged from a garbage dumpster.

I’m a live-and-let-live kind of a guy, he says; so as long as I’m not bothering anybody, leave me alone.

But they’re not. Somebody--Peabody’s not sure who, but he figures it could be just about any one of his neighbors--complained to the county about his way of life. And now county bureaucrats--who say they don’t sweep the region for building code violators but react to individual complaints--are taking Laurence Peabody to court.

That mobile home he’s living in? It was built before 1971--the oldest model year that mobile homes can pass as legal, single-family residences. There’s citation No. 1.

That vacation trailer on Peabody’s property? It can’t be stored there unless there’s a bona fide, honest-to-goodness home on the property as well. And there’s not. Citation No. 2.

Nice geodesic dome, Peabody. Erected it yourself as a storage room, eh? So where’s the building permit for it? Hmmm. There’s citation No. 3.

Peabody doesn’t deny any of the allegations. But he’s going to fight the county anyway. He says he’s being picked on and, moreover, he’s being denied his constitutional right to live as he pleases as long as he doesn’t bother others. Pursuit of happiness and all that.

“There are very few legal anythings out here,” Peabody says, his voice soft and slow. He raises his arm and draws it from one end of the horizon line to the other. Look at that trailer someone’s living in illegally, he says. And that one, and that one over there, and that one, too.

“Not only do I not have the money to build myself a house, I don’t even have enough money to apply for the permits,” he says. “Besides, this isn’t just the only lifestyle I can afford; it’s my lifestyle by choice. I cherish this.”

But says Sue Gray, San Diego County’s principal code enforcement officer: “The county’s desire is not for people to be forced to live on the streets. We are trying to establish minimal standards of living, both for his sake and that of his neighbors.

“The older (mobile home) coaches are not built to the standard that they can continue to be maintained adequately as full-time, permanent residences,” Gray said. “Besides, there’s the aesthetics value, and what it does to adjoining property values when there’s a trailer that’s certainly not a house, on property next to regular homes.”

County zoning regulations, Gray notes, are land-use compromises, establishing the limits of what’s proper, and what’s not, in a given neighborhood.

Peabody’s hovel is clearly outside those limits, she says; we’ll see you in court.

A former welder, Peabody arrived here from the San Fernando Valley 10 years ago in search of clean air to replace what he considered crippling smog.

He has virtually drained his savings and admits to living on borrowed money. No time for a job, he says; there’s too much work around here, cutting the wood and pumping the water and all.

Peabody’s run-in with county bureaucrats is big talk in this little place that’s most notable for its general store and small, homey restaurant where the $1.99 breakfast special will get you pancakes and eggs and bacon and a front porch table to watch the hay trucks drive by.

It’s not just the dilemma he’s got himself in, folks here say. It’s the whole irony of it.

After all, Laurence Peabody has fought against a proposed landfill because of fear it would contaminate the ground water, and he opposed a high-volume cattle ranch because of the dust it would kick up in his little valley.

Peabody knows how the bureaucratic process works and uses it to stop this and that; now the bureaucracy has closed its jaws on him.

“He helped get rid of that feed (beef) lot. People give him credit for that,” said Shawn Esterline, 20, who lives down the street from Peabody, in a mobile home park with his parents. “But he’s a real nuisance. He sits up there on his rock and spies on everybody, looking down on us with binoculars and getting the sheriff out here to bust kids. He’s like the local law enforcement.

“If I’m out shooting somewhere, he’ll give me papers about the county’s shooting ordinance and how I shouldn’t be doing that,” Esterline said. “He messes with everyone. He’s like a one-man Neighborhood Watch.”

Peabody takes the criticism with pride.

“I tried to establish a Neighborhood Watch out here, but nobody wanted to cooperate with me or participate,” he complained. “What are they hiding?”

He has complained about target shooters, off-road vehicles, illegal dumping, loose dogs.

He insists, though, that he’s not hypocritical by calling the law down on others while trying to dodge some of the bureaucracy himself.

“I’ve never challenged anyone’s right to be on this planet,” he says, “and I wish people wouldn’t challenge my right.”