Malibu

Ash country. Standing mansions, no owners, no insurance, and one road.

Twenty-one miles of coast that has burned three times in thirty years, and after the second time no insurer would write a policy above the highway. So the money left, and the houses didn't.

What's up there now is the strangest real estate in North America: intact architectural houses with pools full of rainwater, whole streets of them, belonging on paper to trusts that dissolved or to people who never came back. Some are squatted. Some are shells. A few are held by people with the money to keep private security on a hillside, and those ones are held very seriously indeed.

The Pacific Coast Highway is the only road. Everything above it is canyon.

What the crew knows

• One road in and out means one place to be stopped. Anyone who wants to know you came here will know.
• The water off Malibu is cleaner than the water off Santa Monica — the Tide came from the south and thinned out around Point Dume. "Cleaner" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
• If you need a building nobody is looking at, with power you can improvise and neighbours who won't call anyone, it's up a canyon here. Everyone knows this, which is the problem with it.
• Pepperdine never closed. Walled, self-supplied, generator-fed, on its own hill above the highway, and taking the children of people who can pay in advance. It's the only functioning institution in Malibu.
• Fire season is most of the year now, and a canyon fire closes the highway, which strands everyone above it.

Getting in

Drive up the coast or over a canyon road from the Valley. No checkpoint, no permit, no cover story — Malibu's security is geography and the fact that there's nowhere to disappear into. Getting out during a fire is the actual problem worth planning for.