The Fragment
For … shines out in time of need like fine bronze; but if the house is neglected, it collapses.
California doesn’t get summer storms. Not real ones. The state runs on a different weather pattern, a different logic. Dry summers, wet winters, and nine months of the year where rain is something you vaguely remember like a dream or a rumor.
But sometimes the system breaks. Sometimes in July you wake up at dawn and there’s weather happening. Real weather. Clouds moving, moisture in the air, the sky doing things it’s not supposed to do in summer.
So I’m standing there at 6:50 in the morning outside Watsonville, in the middle of industrial farmland, in the middle of a rare summer storm, with the sun rising behind me casting this weird golden light through the clouds onto an abandoned house that once upon a time must have been something magnificent.
The Redman-Hirahara Farmstead. Built in 1897. Queen Anne Victorian designed by William H. Weeks, the guy who built half of California’s most beautiful buildings. Commissioned by James Redman, sugar beet farmer, back when sugar beets meant money and this valley was printing fortunes.
You can see it in the bones. The architecture. The scale. This wasn’t some farmworker shack. This was a statement. This was someone saying I’ve made it, I’ve arrived, I’m building something that will last.
And here’s the thing: it did last. Through everything. Through the death of Redman in 1921. Through the sale to the Hirahara family in 1937, making them one of the first Japanese-American families to own farmland in the entire country. Through Executive Order 9066 in 1942, when the family got shipped to internment camps in Arkansas while their neighbors, people like attorney John McCarthy, protected the property. Paid the taxes. Kept it alive. Kept it waiting for them.
The Hiraharas came back in 1945. To a house that was still theirs. To a community that mostly hated them for having the audacity to come back. People shot at this house. Actually shot at it. Gas stations refused to sell them fuel. Grocery stores turned them away. Except one shop in Pajaro that would let them come to the back door at night, in secret, to buy food like criminals buying something illegal instead of families buying bread.
And what did the Hiraharas do with this house that had been protected, that had been maintained, that had shined like fine bronze when they needed it most? They converted the barn into apartments. They took in other Japanese-American families who had lost everything. Who had no homes to return to. They gave them shelter and jobs and a chance to start over.
That’s the house shining like fine bronze. That’s the fragment made real. Sophocles wrote it twenty-five hundred years ago: “For … shines out in time of need like fine bronze; but if the house is neglected, it collapses.”
The house served. For decades. The Hirahara family lived there until 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake made it uninhabitable. And then? Then everyone walked away. A foundation tried to restore it in 2005, went bankrupt in 2009. Elite Development bought it in 2015 and let it rot. In August 2025, it got delisted from the National Register of Historic Places. Which is bureaucratic speak for we’re clearing the way to demolish it.
And here’s the kicker: down the road, there’s an abandoned power plant. Inside it, they installed battery storage. The future. Clean energy. Except they neglected it too. And recently? It caught fire. The future, burning in an abandoned past, because nobody maintained it either.
Standing there in the storm, in the farmland, watching the sunrise illuminate this beautiful corpse of a building, you realize that’s the whole sick poetry of it. This house survived everything. Survived being built in 1897. Survived the death of its first owner. Survived being sold to Japanese immigrants. Survived internment. Survived racism and gunshots and systematic exclusion. Survived because people chose to maintain it, to protect it, to make it shine like fine bronze when it was needed most.
And now? Now that nobody needs it? Now that the story is inconvenient? Now that the land is worth more than the history? It’s collapsing. Exactly like Sophocles said it would.
The 19th century estate collapsing in the strawberry fields. The 20th century power plant abandoned and rotting. The 21st century batteries catching fire inside the corpse of the old infrastructure. Layer after layer of neglect, each generation building something or protecting something or valuing something, and then the next generation walking away, convinced the story doesn’t matter, the structure doesn’t matter, the effort doesn’t matter.
But it does matter. This house matters. It matters that McCarthy protected it during the war. It matters that the Hiraharas came back to it. It matters that they sheltered other families in it. It matters that it stood as proof that some things, some places, some stories are worth maintaining even when it’s hard, even when it’s expensive, even when nobody’s looking.
And it matters that we’re letting it collapse now. That’s the other half of the fragment. That’s the warning Sophocles left us. Neglect the house and it collapses. Not metaphorically. Actually collapses. And once it’s gone, all that shining bronze, all that time of need, all that resilience and community and protection and return, it’s gone too.
Nothing material lasts unless we make it last. The divine doesn’t need our walls, but the story does. The history does. The proof that we were better once, that we chose to maintain something, that we let it shine when it mattered most.
This piece: I incorporated a text fragment from one of Sophocles‘ lost tragedies to an image of an abandoned house outside Watsonville. Informally, the piece is called In Time of Need. This work is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the remaining textual fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Fragment meeting fragment. Collapse documenting collapse. The ruined text speaking to the ruined house, the abandoned power plant, the burning batteries. All of it neglected. All of it collapsing.