COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:Don’t be ignorant of the adobe

I missed it. I was in Seattle, which is way up and slightly to the left.

Last Saturday, the Costa Mesa Historical Society threw a big birthday bash for itself at the Diego Sepulveda Adobe. The Costa Mesa Historical Society, an outstanding organization that is 40 years old and I wish I could say the same, was formed largely due to the dedication of the Diego Sepulveda Adobe in August 1966.

I missed that too, come to think of it.

In August of 1966, I was driving from New York to Arizona, heading for college, to become a highly educated person. That didn’t work, but I did eventually end up here and noticed the adobe straightaway, although I didn’t know what it was at first.

I bet a lot of you don’t even know what or where the Diego Sepulveda Adobe is. But if you have a taste for history, the adobe is huge, even though it’s small.

The where part is easy. It’s in Estancia Park, the little park that sits atop the hill at Adams Avenue and Mesa Verde West, which is also right up the street from my house. In fact, you could throw a baseball from there to my house, although I’d prefer you didn’t. More important, it is one of the oldest structures in California, dating from about 1820 — the adobe, not my house.

The world was a much different place in 1820, including Costa Mesa, which was a part of the world at that time. There were no cellphones, no computers, no Home Depot. There was one Starbucks, but it was only open until noon.

Life was hard. Getting around was harder.

There were very few roads, and traveling long distances was dangerous, what with things trying to eat you and bad people trying to bop you in the head, which really hurt, and take your stuff. The safest way to do it was to follow the Mission Trail, El Camino Real, which was a road, sort of, that roughly paralleled today’s Interstate 5 and linked together the 21 missions built by the Franciscan priest Junipero Serra and his successors. You could travel about 20 miles between dawn and dusk, what with the kids and the sheep and the swords and no restrooms, but the problem was that many of the missions were farther apart than that. The solution was way stations between one mission and the next.

By the way, how far is the Estancia Park adobe from Mission San Juan Capistrano? Right you are — 22 miles. See? Franciscans are very clever.

The primitive way stations were small oases where tired shepherds or mercenaries or parents with preschoolers could find some water or some nachos with jalapenos on the side or a nice pinot and some parmaggiano reggiano, which they only had once in a while.

The fading of the Mission Period marked the beginning of the Era of the Dons, during which the mafia controlled everything in California. No they didn’t. I made that up.

The California Dons were land barons and regional governors for Spain, like Don Pio Pico, who discovered Pico Boulevard, Don Diego Sepulveda, who discovered a winding road in West L.A. next to the San Diego Freeway, thus the name, Diego Sepulveda, and Don Drysdale, who discovered the Dodgers.