You'd be forgiven for mistaking members of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers for real park employees. After all, they wear official-looking uniforms and speak with authority (plus a touch of Scout-tastic chipperness) about what you can and cannot do on public lands.
But as anyone who has spent time with them knows, the whole thing is something of an elaborate charade -- or is it closer to tongue-in-cheek performance art? It's often difficult to tell, and the ambiguity is definitely deliberate.
"People often mistake us for the real thing, and we don't go out of our way to correct them," says Jenny Price, one of the founding members of the group.
The L.A. Urban Rangers make it their business to inhabit a gray zone where reality meets fiction, art mingles with life and public interest clashes -- sometimes dramatically -- with private concerns. This month, they are conducting the latest in their series of "safaris" along the exclusive beaches of Malibu, showing their audiences how to negotiate the fuzzy line that separates your right to enjoy the beach from another's right to spectacular oceanfront property.
(The remaining safaris are today, Aug. 22 and 23 and are free to the public, but space is limited.)
In one sense, the safaris are a practical exercise in hands-on urbanism, L.A. style: The Rangers instruct their participants to stake out spots on public easements -- the patch of sand between the ocean and private property that the public is legally permitted to occupy. Easements can be difficult to discern because they literally shift with the tide -- the official boundary is the mean high-tide line over the last several months.
Once situated, participants are asked to perform typical "beach activities," such as yoga, building sand castles and reading trashy magazines. The intent, according to the Rangers, is for people to exercise their right to be on the beach as demonstratively as possible.
But there's an intellectual angle as well. "We want to shift the rhetoric of public discourse," says Sara Daleiden, another founding member of the Rangers. "We want people to think of these places as public beaches with private land next door, not the other way around."
The Rangers are planning to take the public-private debate to other parts of L.A., including downtown, where they hope to launch an urban safari next year. For now, however, they are concentrating on Malibu.
