Why people who live on the Southern California coast use the term "inland"


If you live in the flatlands, like where I am right now, in Arizona, you can easily get by with north-south-east-west for directions. Even if your sense of direction isn't all that great (and mine isn't!), that works just fine. But if you live along the coast in California, in places like Santa Barbara, or Malibu, you find yourself describing directions differently, based on whether you're heading towards the ocean, or away from it.

If you've never lived right on the west coast, you assume that the ocean is, of course, west. But in some places the coast is to the west, and in some places it's to the south. Yes of course the ocean always is to the west, but if you're in Santa Monica you don't drive west (you could do it, but it would be silly) to get to the coast, you drive south.

I lived in Santa Barbara for many years, and while I didn't spend much time on the ocean (I don't surf, I rarely swam, and I didn't have a boat), when you give directions, it's only natural to tell someone that they need to go towards the ocean, or away from it. The two terms are "inland" and "seaward", although I rarely heard seaward.

My Southern California looked like the map at the top of this post. And while technically the freeway was a north-south freeway, most of the time I was driving east or west. So, as I drove along the 101 going "south", it would have been strange to think of taking an exit going south to get to Malibu, so I just went seaward. To get back to the freeway, I went inland.

Old habits are tough to break, and just a few years ago while I was out history adventuring here in Arizona with a friend who had grown up in Southern California, he used the word "inland" and we both knew exactly what he meant. A few minutes later I realized what he had said, and that's when I realized how often we get into the habit of saying things and don't even realize it.

I used to house-sit for a friend of mine who had a house in Calabasas, which is about ten miles inland, and I would often sit there and ponder which way I should be looking in the direction of the ocean. The Pacific Ocean is, of course, west, but the route that I would take, on Malibu Canyon, to the ocean was due south. So I threw away any notion of north-south-east-west when I would visit there, and just go inland, and seaward.
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