Love on the beach

For Olga Ayala, left, and Eveline Bravo, Saturday's Coastal Cleanup Day is a day to celebrate.

From cigarette butts to lottery tickets, you never know what you’ll find at the International Coastal Cleanup. Eveline Bravo and Olga Ayala, for instance, found love.

It was 2007, and Bravo, brand new in her job as Heal the Bay’s beach programs manager, was recruiting site captains for the worldwide volunteer day, which this year takes place on Saturday.

Ayala was enlisted to help with the effort—the second year in a row that she had been called upon to round up volunteer trash-pickers.

At first, neither was particularly enamored of the other.

“The year before, and I kid you not, they had called me just one weekend prior,” Ayala remembers. “And I had dropped everything and done everything in my power to help them, but only about 15 people showed up.

“So this time, I was thinking ‘Maps, geographic zones, resources, highlighters—I’m gonna show them how you do this.’ And she was, like, ‘Uh, that sounds great, but actually, here’s how we’re going to do it.’ ”

“We clashed,” Bravo says, laughing. “I wanted to do my job my way.”

For months after that first meeting, their relationship remained frosty, even though Ayala—secretly impressed by the competence of the 10-years-younger Bravo—mustered hundreds of volunteers and broke a Heal the Bay record that year with the tonnage of trash they retrieved from their assigned cleanup site, a Panorama City park. (Cleanups in inland areas are a large part of the beach initiative because everything that gets into local waterways ends up in the ocean.)

With time, however, the ice melted. “She became like a challenge to me,” says Ayala. “I was like, ‘I’m nice, and you’re gonna like me.’ ” Bravo, meanwhile, says she began to do some soul searching.

Ayala, left, and Bravo in Calabasas last month, on their wedding day.

“My New Year’s resolution that year had been to be nicer to people, and for some reason, as I made it, my thoughts went to her. So I sent her an email and a few months after that, we went out dancing. And somebody at the club asked me, ‘Are you two together?’  And after I said yes, I realized that she hadn’t been asking if we had come there together.

“So I looked at Olga and said, ‘I think we just told that girl that we’re together together. And she said, ‘Do you want to be?’ ”

The two became a couple, bound in part by the gifts that had drawn them to public service.

“I admire hardworking people who know what they’re doing,” says Ayala, who at the time she met Bravo was a field deputy to then-Los Angeles City Councilman Tony Cardenas. “And she was so hardworking, and straightforward, and kind, and beautiful—I fell in love.”

For Bravo, Ayala’s open heart was a revelation.

“As we became friends, I realized how pure and genuine she is—nothing bad ever comes out of her brain. I thought that people like that didn’t exist, but somebody can be mean or poor-spirited or a bad influence, and Olga just won’t see it. She never judges. Her heart is just genuinely into doing the right thing.”

In 2010, the bond deepened: Bravo was diagnosed with cancer and they discovered how much harder an ordeal like that could be for gay and lesbian couples, who lacked the legal protections that straight, married people took for granted. After her treatment, Bravo says, they made a pact to throw all their leftover energy and expertise into the marriage equality movement.

“We had to make all these hard decisions and go through surgery and get legal permission for Olga to be in the hospital with me,” says Bravo. “We decided that we needed our rights.”

So last month, a scant six weeks after the courts officially re-opened the doors for same-sex marriage in California, the two were wed in Calabasas by Ayala’s ex-boss Cardenas, who was elected to Congress, representing the San Fernando Valley’s 29^th District, in 2012.

Now they live in mid-city Los Angeles with their cocker spaniel Sparky. And on Saturday, you’ll find them at this year’s Coastal Cleanup, picking up trash—together—at the Santa Monica Pier.

Posted 9/18/13