J is for Judgement

stickers. This she considered essential preparation for life.
    It was ten of eight and still light out when I hit 101 again. I ate my laptop picnic, steering with one hand while I held my sandwich with the other, humming to myself as the flavors mingled on my tongue. My car radio had been ominously silent for days, and I suspected some relevant fuse had given up the ghost deep inside. I flipped the on button anyway, on the off chance it had somehow healed itself in my absence. No such luck. I flipped the radio off, amusing myself instead with recollections of the annual celebration of Perdido/Olvidado township history, which consisted of a dispirited parade, the erection of many food booths, and the local citizens walking listlessly about, spilling mustard and hot dog relish on their PIO T-shirts.
    Father Junipero Serra, who was the first president of the Alta California Missions, established nine missions along a six- hundred-and-fifty-mile stretch of California coastland between San Diego and Sonoma. Father Fermin Lasuen, who assumed leadership in 1785, the year after Serra's death, founded nine more missions. There were other less luminous mission presidents, countless friars and padres whose names have vanished from public awareness. One of these, Father Prospero Olivarez, petitioned in early 1781 to build two small sister missions on the Santa Clara River. Father Olivarez argued that adjacent presidios, or forts, established on dual sites would not only serve as protection for the proposed mission to be built in Santa Teresa, but could simultaneously convert, shelter, and train scores of California Indians who could then serve as skilled laborers for the projected construction process. Father Junipero Serra greatly favored the idea and granted enthusiastic approval. Extensive drawings were submitted, and the site was dedicated. However, a series of frustrating and inexplicable delays resulted in postponement of the ground breaking until after Serra's death, at which point the plan was quashed. Father Olivarez's twin churches were never built. Some historians have portrayed Olivarez as both worldly and ambitious, positing that the withdrawal of support for his project was intended to subdue his unbecoming secular aspirations: Ecclesiastical documents that have since come to light suggest another possibility, that Father Lasuen, who was championing the establishment of missions at Soledad, :an Jose, San Juan Bautista, and San Miguel, saw Olivarez as a threat to the achievement of his own aims and deliberately sabotaged his efforts until after Father Serra's demise. His own subsequent rise to power was the death knell of Olivarez's vision. Whatever the truth, cynical observers renamed the dual sites Perdido/Olvidado, a mongrelization of Prospero Olivarez's name. Translated from Spanish, the names mean Lost and Forgotten.
    This trip, I bypassed the main business district. The architecture in the town itself was a mix of boxy, blocky modern buildings interspersed with Victorian structures. On the far side of 101, between the freeway and the ocean, there were whole sections of the land enlrely covered with blacktop, a series of interconnecting , parking lots for supermarkets, gas stations, and fast-food establishments. One could drive for blocks through Inked acres of asphalt without ever actually going out onto a city street. I took the Seacove off ramp, heading for the Perdido Keys.
    Closer to the ocean, the houses seemed to take on the )ok of a little beach town-board-and-batten with big decks, painted sea blue and gray, the yards filled with impossibly bright purple, yellow, and orange flowers. I passed a house where there were so many wet suits lung to dry on a second-story balcony that it looked as if the guests from a cocktail party had wandered out on the deck for air.
    Daylight had faded to indigo, and all the house lights in the neighborhood were coming on when I finally located the street I was looking for. The houses on both sides of this narrow lane backed onto the keys, long fingers of seawater stretching back from the ocean. The rear of each house seemed to boast a wide wooden deck with a short wood ramp leading down to a dock, the channel itself deep enough to admit sizable boats. I could smell the cool marina cologne, and the quiet was underscored by an occasional slap of water and the chorusing of frogs.
    I cruised slowly, squinting at house numbers, finally spotting the address Whiteside had given