Unlikely jogging pals offer dose of reality

I’ve been stuck in the late 1970s recently. While jogging on Butterfly and Miramar beaches, I’ve been listening either to Black Sabbath or to Jimmy Carter’s memoir, “An Hour Before Daylight,” depending on my mood.

It turns out that jogging to Sabbath is better than any diet pill or exercise machine sold on TV. There’s something about the sense of impending doom they evoke that causes me to pick up the pace.

Jimmy Carter’s probably not as good for my long-term health, but he’s worth it.

Fifty years out of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, he noticed that about twice as many of his childhood peers had passed away as had his college classmates. His farming friends in rural Georgia smoked and drank a lot, worked hard, and were often too poor to afford proper health care. Economics trumped the dangers of military service.

For me, both Carter and Sabbath serve a purpose, as disparate as they may be. They counterbalance what would otherwise be a preposterously happy scene.

The beaches were full during the good weather at the end of May, offering a window into what people in Montecito look like. In a word, good.

Almost too good. If I had a mast and a crew I’d order them to lash me to it.

Granted, it’s a self-selecting group of people, but I have not seen a single obese person there.

This might be the only place in the history of the world where positive eugenics, breeding people like livestock, has actually worked. As Gregor Mendel, the 19th century father of genetics, discovered, big healthy green peas beget big healthy green peas. Kids and parents look like they’re modeling in a swimwear catalog.

People’s creativity is also evident on the beach, which, like their physical health, indicates a freedom from hardship here.

For instance, there are a bunch of rocks at the entrance to Miramar. When I see them I think, there are some rocks, but others see opportunity. Each time I pass by, someone has stacked them or laid them out on the sand in surprising and fun patterns.

There are always various little houses and structures made out of palm fronds and driftwood on Hammonds Beach, too. They appear for a while, gain additions over time, and are eventually knocked down. Montecitans, it appears, must always remodel.

During the Depression, President Carter’s family squeezed all that they could out of their farm. Young “Hot,” as Jimmy’s father called him, spent a lot of his time raising chickens and pigs, planting cotton, picking melons and peanuts and much more. Adverse conditions forced industry.

At a cocktail party the other day, a friend regaled me about how he takes his kids down to a loquat tree on Coast Village Road. Free fruit! Every year, they ravage it. That’s living off the land in Montecito.

I’m sure you’ve noticed, but we’re not living in the agricultural south during a depression. That’s a good thing, but sometimes it makes me wonder how to raise my kids here. Is it possible life is too easy? No, what an absurd idea; there is pain in every existence and what are we going to do, move to Cambodia so they know what reality is?

Perhaps, though, to give them perspective and balance, it’ll take a little more than a periodic dose of Black Sabbath while jogging on the beach.