The air was sixty-eight degrees, smelling of sun-cured cedar shingles, salt spray, fresh-baked blueberry scones, and the clean, honest ozone of an un-broken American sky.
The historic forty-acre Mercer-Vance oceanfront compound had been completely transformed.
On the cleared site where the old corporate outbuildings had stood, the Department of the Navy and the State of California had installed a permanent geodetic monitoring monument; surrounding it now, occupying forty acres of protected coastline, stood The Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer & Ethan Vance Senior Sovereign Children’s & Legal Sanctuary, its state-of-the-art pediatric trauma recovery pavilions, single-mother legal advocacy clinics, and vocational classrooms training four hundred young pediatric nurses, street youth, and family law advocates every year in child protection protocols, sovereign trust defense, and constitutional property law.
On the broad, covered cedar back deck of my restored home overlooking the deep-water channel where the naval patrol cutters and aircraft carriers glided clean, smooth, and free toward the open bay…
