The smoke must be getting pretty dense around
here, because people who should be able to see where they’re going are making
some surprising wrong turns.
This isn’t about haze in the valley’s
atmosphere, it’s about the haze in people’s heads and the puzzling behavior
that tells everyone around them how hazy they are, and leaves us all to wonder
why.
On Jan. 14, a small group of men invaded the
San Lucas Ranch, which belongs to Santa Ynez Valley Journal Publisher Nancy
Crawford-Hall.
They entered the ranch surreptitiously by
creeping up a riverbed at nightfall like some kind of raiding party. They then
proceeded to fire guns into the air.
When they were apprehended, they claimed they
were hunting birds — an odd and unlawful thing to be doing in the dark —
which led to citations for hunter-trespass.
The leader of the brave nocturnal hunters was
Bubba Armenta, nephew of Vincent Armenta, chairman of the Santa Ynez Band of
Mission Indians.
It has never been clear what he and his
companions were doing there. They had no business there and had to go to some
trouble to get there. The only possible reward: counting coups.
That’s not actually an historical custom of
California’s native tribes, but in the Plains and some parts of the East Coast,
counting coups — literally approaching and either physically or
symbolically touching or striking someone or something they had reason to fear —
was a means of demonstrating bravery. The trick was to be so daring that the
subject to be struck was too surprised to strike back.
On April 12, the incursion was repeated, this
time in broad daylight and with no pretense of hunting. Armenta and his
companions, this time including his attorney, Kay Kuns, simply drove up the
Santa Ynez River on all-terrain vehicles.
And this time, when caught, they insisted they
had a right to be there because the riverbed, they insisted, is public land.
More likely than counting coups, stealing a
few score acres of land from the ranch owner appears to have been the ultimate
goal.
And they enlisted the most unlikely ally to
swipe the land, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown, a one-time Lompoc
police chief who campaigned for sheriff on a law-and-order platform.
Despite his public stance, Brown apparently
had decided to fall in with the riverbed rustlers’ attempt to expropriate San
Lucas Ranch property.
Armenta’s claim, eloquently set forth by Kuns
in a letter published in the last edition of the Valley Journal, was that the
San Lucas Ranch is beachfront property and the public has a right to enter and
use the beach under California’s constitution.
The constitutional provision cited by Kuns in
her letter says nothing of the sort, of course.
What it says is that property owners may not
obstruct navigation upon navigable waters of the state.
Being wet at times does not make the riverbed
of the Santa Ynez River a navigable waterway.
In fact, the California Supreme Court
considered the matter of the navigability of the Santa Ynez River as far back
as 1933, and it ruled then that the river is not a navigable waterway.
That ruling still stands, and cannot be
overturned by slick arguments in the media.
Only the Supreme Court of the state or a
higher federal court can overturn it, and neither is likely to happen.
So, the question remains, what’s up here? What
does Armenta really want? It can’t be the birds he couldn’t see that he said he
was shooting at.
Kuns is a pretty good lawyer, so surely she
told her client, even if she didn’t write it in her letter, that the public
riverbed argument was so much hot air.
What’s in this for Brown?
Ought he not to be enforcing the law, even
simple trespass law, instead of siding with lawbreakers as his department did
on April 12 when deputies refused to issue citations or to remove the
trespassers from ranch property?
Does refusing to enforce the law, especially
when the letter and the intent of the law are clear, amount to the same thing
as being complicit in the breaking of the law?
Sometimes critters that seemingly have nothing
in common, and may indeed be antagonists in nature, hang together because there
is some mutual benefit to be gained, even if just for a moment.
What could this mutual benefit possibly be?
If anyone knows, we’d certainly like to hear
about it.
That’ll be 2 cents, please.