Why this is called that.

The mean high tide line. I love this phrase. mee-hye-tye-lye. me-i-i-i.

In California, the mean high tide line is the legal delimiter between privately-owned beachfront and public property. Also known less precisely as the high-water mark, the line is the border of the foreshore or so-called wet-sand area, a zone whose exact boundaries are naturally fuzzy in spite of the expert language that attempts to define it, and which remains a terrain for disputes between locals and out-of-towners, and property owners and the public at large.

Growing up at the beach, it was part of the topology of my childhood, encountered, for instance, on the black and white signs that were posted at various intervals in those times, and which bore those words,

THE MEAN HIGH TIDE LINE

in large, stern block capitals surrounded by a cloud of finer but equally enigmatic legalese. For us the signs had sinister, if vague implications. Some asserted they were warning of an invisible oceanic danger, perhaps an especially fearsome, even sentient rip current. A large, moist, lurking-in-a-lair type of thing. Like John Irving’s Under Toad. But our intuition was not entirely mistaken, for every line, even and especially one drawn in the sand, implies conflict and it seems to me now that in the comparatively insignificant territorial quarrels that remain part of beach life in Malibu and elsewhere, much broader and much meaner struggles were reflected. The ones for example, in which ignorant armies clash by night, or haves and have-nots take things from one another.

Thanks for sharing.

Among the less menacing of these, though not without its own risks, is the challenge of maintaining boundaries when publishing something like a personal journal on the web, a “wet-sand area” where the lines between public and private are constantly in dispute, regularly breached, frequently mean (in the sense of crude) and often treacherous.

Somewhere above the ebbtide skirts where the successive posts here deposit their cargoes of microdebris, a wrack line will form. The imagined audience whose imagined attention I’m exploiting to generate content and perhaps refine the form of some navel gazing or journalistic experiment, will at times turn mean, and I’ll turn around and stop typing and return to the shell bits, the smaller driftwood and the dead bees. In that sense, the title of this blog (a phrase whose personal significance I’ve been trying to tease out for years) refers to its limit.  The mean high tide line will materialize as the threshold where judiciousness, self-censorship or repression will draw the curtain behind my public brand. Where that will be remains to be seen, and is among the curiosities I mean to satisfy in beginning.

Following the title, beach-related tags are beginning to overtake the others, so it might turn out taking its focus on this topic considered very broadly. Or, more broadly, on questions of public and private. In the meantime NPI, this blog is a showcase for my photography and printmaking, a place to collect the sources that inform it or somehow seem relevant, and the occasional reflections to which those give rise. Plus some old cars. Oh and maybe some French translations. And—you get the idea.

email: blake at blakeferris dot com