How the Oceano Dunes Became a Refuge for Artists and Writers in the 1920s

Just south of Pismo Beach, along California’s Central Coast, the Oceano Dunes are a popular recreation spot for locals and tourists alike. It’s the only beach in California that allows visitors to drive all-terrain vehicles and pickup trucks on the sand. But all that vrooming around makes it hard to experience the other thing that makes this spot special — eccentric local history hidden under the dunes.

For about two decades starting in the 1920s, the dunes were home to a colony of artists, writers and intellectuals called “Dunites.” It was a place where they could live freely and make art without much money.

“The weather’s good, and the climate — everything is perfect,” said local historian and Dunite expert Norm Hammond. “There’s fish in the ocean, clams on the beach and plenty of things to survive on out there.”

Hammond said people started living this way on the Oceano Dunes as early as 1895, but that the Dunites’ colony began in earnest in the 1920s when an astrologer named Gavin Arthur arrived. He organized the bohemians already living there to build cabins in the sand and called the settlement Moy Mell — “pastures of honey” in Gaelic.

Moy Mell quickly became a hub for creatives and freethinkers, whether it was the resident Dunites or famous visitors like John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair. But it wasn’t just a place to philosophize and create art — Arthur saw it as a utopian commune.

“The motto for Moy Mell was ‘individuality within community.’ We all live together, we’re all different, but we have a common goal to build a better world,” Hammond said.

Arthur and his fellow Dunites started a literary magazine called the Dune Forum at Moy Mell in the 1930s. Its six editions featured essays, poems and other works by Dunite authors.

One of the common themes of the Dunites’ art was that there was something deeply spiritual about the dunes. Gavin Arthur said so himself in a 1966 interview with researcher James Cain.

“Underneath the dunes there is a great spiritual force which I would never not acknowledge,” Arthur said.

Norm Hammond feels it, too. “When you look at the people who lived there, you can see embodied in those works the essence of the dunes themselves. And there’s a spirit there, and they talk about it — the spirit of the dunes,” he said.

World War II spelled the end for Moy Mell. Gavin Arthur turned the cabins over to the Coast Guard, while soldiers in training stayed on the dunes and patrolled for spies.

Most of the Dunites left during the war and didn’t return when it ended.

“The whole ambience of the dunes changed,” Hammond said. “The Depression was over and [there were] jobs everywhere, and people kind of didn’t go back to that lifestyle. So that really was the death knell for the whole phenomenon.”

Gavin Arthur went back to San Francisco to participate in the early hippie movement, even helping organize the Summer of Love in 1967. As for the Moy Mell cabins, the dunes slowly reclaimed them.

“There’s nothing out there now — nothing,” Hammond said. “The sand dunes are in constant motion. They got covered up or and sometimes people just knocked them down for bonfires.”

The former site of Moy Mell is now part of the Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area, one of the few places in California where visitors can drive on the beach. But that may soon change, as the state is phasing out off-highway vehicles over environmental concerns.