The Costa Mesa Grange, old Cali-style white, rumpriding muckraking wobbly-rousing revival hall style by the side of Victoria, no one ever there, like a ghost of agrarian unrest over silver or having to tent in irrigation ditches. The milk plums and honey kumquats have long since been plucked from the trees, the veritable Egypt of sun God oranges has been converted box by box into storage units. The Gospel Swamp that once spread clear to Newport Bay with its blood of the lamb ten foot corn, enough lima beans to feed the Israelites, potatoes no one had ever before seen, is a pestilence long gone, like the vaqueros and Pimungans and the rusted equipment that passes for stones of that last Atlantis outpost. All history is for bartering, on the bourse of whose account fools the most, like the shot I captured from imagination and experience of Mexican farmers with cigars and candlelit love in their eyes dealing cards and trading, talking the decisions on the fruit wheel through and invoking strange Masonic rites involving the Four H's to align spirit's laws with sound ag practice.
Today the parking lot is packed. The Grange is rocking. Either the world has changed again, or there is an AA meeting, where the ghosts have to sing, and some chips at least are green.
