It's a pile of rock, a mound 12-feet high, 15-stones fitted so, placed just so, sure but why? &why 'The Spirit of the Lima Bean'? raised above the long illusions of plateau and meandering canal on a tessellated floor. Dry sandstone recalls the sweeping vistas once proud Californios must have known at least as well as their horses knew the contours of the valley lands by the grass winds and pollen blown, by salt-scented loam and sea spray tossed in the off-shore breeze. It was one of the brightest spots to be found in all our bright land John Muir said of that still most wilderness, the smooth brown bosom of the Valley, is what he said he found. Here and there, along with their conceits, he saw little towns baked in tired argument their petty differences, white and brown where shingle and adobe met and priest and pioneer had once contended. While all else slept, then and now would draw the same breath from the same mountain air. He looked at the sky, he said, and to the garden lands as well. The rest was just a checkerboard affair— scant preview, things to come whence idyll ends and soon enough the new barbarity begins. That is what he said he found, and we'll take him at his word. So much blood was shed by then. It was 1877 and there was little left of those affairs, little point to wonder why no thatch or long-pole settlement remained. No hovel, no adobe, nor the grog shops of San Gabriel or pueblito sinkholes troubled that landscape with their abject cries to the gardens of the sky. The Chumash, Serrano, Gabrieleno are not even mentioned in his catalog of semi-barbarous civility—They do not appear at all, stewards from another time another year among the brightest of places he'd embrace for its exuberant wholeness. By then they had all but disappeared, all hundred and thirty-thousand of them, all but a handful that stooped here and there to pick a little cotton, corn or bean or an orange, sweet-bitter orange that blessed his bright wilderness, Oh Wilderness, swept clean. Now the office workers file by seen through curious garden eye, homage to the spirit of the lowly bean. Nothing in the plaza stands still where the shadow of the passerby makes its escape by some slant geometry beyond the walls, the hills, the valley. For, say the spirit will not rest there in the noonday still. It will not stay there among those who come and go along the way. Do they ever stop to ask themselves, why? "Milk and honey, and plenty of money," Dr. Conger said to Muir. Among the olive, walnut, lemon and orange— or the banana with its dark comb leaf— but above all, the orange. Sweet and lucrative the night air becomes to those who can afford to wait, and corn. But not a whisper of the little bean, torn just so, from some unknown and more bitter, transitory plate. There was once a wilderness here, too. Once, here beneath these shimmering glass falls all sky was open to view with little need for walls' disguise, the lima left to fable on the tables of Peru. Enough to gather and hunt, some pretty damn big canoes and plenty shell-bead to go around. Don't kid yourself, long before, Alta California commerce was a lively game in town and down around the Santa Anna river, the boys would whoop it up and bury their dead beneath the ground. They are not fit like the ancient concourse stones that abut a perfect surface on the slopes of terraced Inca farms. Rather segmented, open and articulate as though, a moment more, leaf will open above the semi-arid plain, root will show and bur into the vastness of this California Scenario. Beans grow and yes, plenty of money flows.
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