In years past, the mostly blue-collar families who have had vacation trailers at Lawson’s Landing on the north Marin coast for generations would have celebrated the Fourth of July with their homespun parade. But you can’t have much of a parade if there’s no one to be in it, much less watch it.

Over the past few months, families in this once tight-knit community have been reluctantly towing their trailers away, at least the ones in condition to be moved. The more dilapidated ones were taken away in Dumpsters, along with the wooden decks and fences, brick patios and flower gardens that families built around their trailers over the decades. They were primarily working-class people from the Sacramento Valley who had found an affordable escape from the valley’s sizzling summer heat. Most of them paid only $400 to $500 a month to have a spot in their low-rent Riviera.

Now they’ve been forced out by order of the California Coastal Commission in the interest of opening this privately owned seaside resort at the mouth of Tomales Bay to greater numbers of people.

“When you have trailers devoted to full-time residential use as opposed to visitor-serving use, full-time residential is a lower priority under the coastal act, whereas visitor serving use is a higher priority,” is the way Nancy Cave, the coastal commission’s north central district manager, put it. “The issue of removing trailers used for residential purposes is consistent with the law and the commission’s action.”

Once the permanent residents are gone, the commission wants the more than 200 trailer sites to be opened for short-term use by RVs and campers, but only for a maximum of 14 days. After two weeks, you’ll have to leave to make room for someone else.

The trailer folks have had five years to get used to the idea that someday they’ll lose their little piece of paradise. But that didn’t make it any easier when the time came for them to actually tear themselves away. Most are gone. They’ll all have to be out by July 13.

Many of the them, like 64-year-old Mark Schuyler, a retired union laborer from a suburb of Sacramento, have been enjoying Lawson’s Landing all their lives, spending weekends and holidays and long summer months fishing, boating, clamming, surfing, partying and hiking the resort’s constantly moving and shifting sand dunes, some of the last mobile dunes on the California coast.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Schuyler said one windy afternoon last week as he raked the sandy yard outside his family’s empty trailer, one of the last to go. “I could cry right now,” he said, his voice cracking. “This is the worst thing that could ever happen, but I’m trying to think on the positive side because of all the good times I’ve had here. I’ve got six kids, and they came here with all their friends. The best experiences I could ever have I had here.”



Schuyler said his parents and grandparents have had trailers at Lawson’s Landing since the 1950s. His own 40-foot-long, aluminum-sided mobile home had been sitting on the same spot for 20 years, long enough for the wheels to rust, making it immobile. He was waiting to have it hauled to its new home in the Sacramento River Delta.

“There’s no place like this you can go,” he lamented. “I wanted to stay here for the rest of my life. I didn’t think this would ever happen. There were 210 trailers, and all those people are gone now.”

But there was still evidence here and there of the good times he speaks of – white plastic patio chairs scattered around like headstones, a rusting Capt. Jack barbecue, piles of wood that used to be storage sheds for beach gear. Someone abandoned a beat-up black wheelchair that sat by itself in the middle of one sandy lot, looking forlorn and forgotten. Adding to the atmosphere of age and decay, the stink of ancient septic tanks being pumped out fouled the afternoon breeze.



The Lawson’s Landing Boathouse, an old wooden building painted barn-red near the resort’s fishing pier and boat launch, has traditionally been the community’s general store and community center. On this windy weekday, a retired couple, Carl and Helen Honebein, who live in nearby Dillon Beach, braved the chilly gusts to sit on a bench outside the boathouse watching the resort’s employees moving sand around with tractors, cleaning up decades of detritus.

“It upsets me that the government can come in on private property and tell you what to do,” Helen said. “This is a family-run business, and it’s very, very sad.”

The Lawson family has owned this environmentally remarkable and sensitive piece of coastline since 1928. In 1957, they opened it to the public as a 940-acre resort and campground. With the loss of the trailer park, the family is without a main source of income. They’re anxious to make the empty sites available to the next generation of short-term campers, but they don’t have permission yet to begin installing the underground utilities, restrooms and wastewater system they need to do that. They’re waiting for the go-ahead from the Coastal Commission and a scientific review panel formed to help bring their resort in compliance with environmental regulations on the coast. And they’re growing impatient.

“We’re being held hostage,” Mike Lawson, one of the current owners, complained, pausing in his rounds on the expansive property in a company pickup truck. “The worst thing that can happen is that I have to lay off all our employees (28 people) and we have to downsize because I can’t afford a staff. I don’t want to lose the property.”



The Coastal Commission’s Nancy Cave counters that the Lawsons have known the environmental conditions that they needed to remedy for five years.

“From my standpoint, I can’t say that there’s been any undue delay on the commission staff’s part,” she said. “We’ve tried very hard to help them expedite the process. I’m hoping that it’s almost to conclusion.”

Anyway you look at it, a little-known, long-hidden enclave that was one of the best kept secrets on the California coast is gone for good. And with it goes an institutional memory and knowledge of the bay and the ocean that will not easily be replaced.

And that’s a shame to someone like Alec Bennett, a 46-year-old San Francisco computer programmer who’s had a trailer at Lawson’s Landing for four years, making him a relative newcomer. He was one of the last to move in and one of the last to move out.

“Some of these families have been here for 50 years, so this place has a long history of people knowing the ocean very well,” he said. “Whether it’s fishing, sailing, kayaking or general ocean navigation, if you’re going to have access to the coast, you need a community of people who can educate each other and pass along knowledge. That’s a big thing we’re losing.”