The Captain

by Greg Utrecht 9/26/2000

It was another perfect day, with some different colored clouds in the sky. The back road from Pismo Beach was deserted. Between Pismo and Lompoc there are 2 places big enough to have a name, and signs that lead to three others. None of the towns is big enough to have a national brand name store, and the busiest businesses seem to be the antique store, the diner, and the man who sells firewood.

Driving along the treeline you can see the dunes to the west about 1000 yards and beyond that the ocean. Pismo-Lompoc is about the only coastline in California that runs north and south. Past Vandenburg, where they are building the Missile Defense, and past the Santa Ynez River, the road turns inland over the mountain.

La Purisima Concepcion Mission sits there in a valley astride a small creek. The grounds include the Church, monastery, barracks and servants quarters, as well as pastureland, tilled fields, and outbuildings for livestock, blacksmithing, pottery and Indian barracks. The Chumash Indians lived in California when it was colonial Spain. It was easy to see how the Mission once included 12,000 sheep and half that many cows. I think that several hundred people could have found permanent shelter within the walls of the mission buildings. I arrived at the Mission on the hour, and the campanero was up in the campanil ringing them.

La Purisima is the most fun of the Missions, at least the ones I have been to. Here they have volunteers dressed in period costume who help interpret the displays in the rooms of the mission. It is a big place, including numerous kitchens, servants quarters, barracks rooms, priests quarters, dining rooms, studies, workrooms for tanning hides, canning foods and peach brandy, looms, spinning, batting wool and so on.

The volunteers were funny, senior citizens pretending to Indian servants, or visiting sailors from down along the coast. They could look you in the eye and say they were an Indian and you could tell they weren't any more Indian than my third grade teacher. It was funny listening to their stories too, because they all had more or less a script. It reminded me of Disneyland where the actors talk to strangers, but stay within a script devised by a professional marketing department.

The most extreme example of this at Disneyland is the Lincoln Animatronic. Here a robot Lincoln stands and moves around on stage while a recording plays snippets of his speeches, such as House Divided, or Gettysburg Address. The thing is 45 years old and there is nothing more complicated than hydraulics, gears, cables and electric motors. I agree with what Henry Adams was taught in 1840, that among the Founding Fathers, Washington stands alone. But my idea is that among all the Presidents, Lincoln stands alone.

I listened to the volunteers at La Purisima, the Indian servants making quesadillas for the other volunteers to have for lunch, and the sailor batting wool with the Indian girl who taught him how to do it every five minutes. After that I got a lecture on the Mission's extensive and complicated water works and irrigation. Down by the creek was the lavenderia that was just for the Indians, proving that separate was never equal in this country, even when it was colonial Spain. After this I watched a demonstration of how to make an iron nail at the blacksmiths. It took exactly 56 blows on the hot iron, and a tap with some pliers to snap the sharpened nail off the rod. Exactly every 20 blows he tapped the hammer on the cold anvil to keep it from getting too hot.

I watched women at spinning and cleaning and they were funny because in their Indian costumes they looked just like hippies wearing scarves. If they had been just a little younger I would have thought they could have been hippies. Finally I saw a man dressed like a sea captain asleep in a chair. He had on a blue suit with double rows of buttons, pantaloon pants and white hose, topped off with a flat broad brimmed black hat. He fit my mental image of a sea captain likely to doze off before lunch on a day that was bright and clear. He woke up when he heard me and gave me a big friendly grin and a wave as though we had gone to the naval academy together. He looked at the sky and then he settled back on his bench and fell asleep.

All this is likely to make you as happy as Disneyland and not as tired. When you drive away you might like to sing in your car. The theme from Gilligan's Island is a good one to warm up on, it's easy to sing and everyone knows some of the words. After that you might like to sing "Hay Hey ee, baby, I want to know-o-o, will you be my girl." If I ever get stuck I always sing, "God gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to you, put it in the soul of everyone. God gave rock and roll to ya, Gave rock and roll to ya, same rock and roll for everyone."