The Sonoma Mission squats there like the last gasp of something that already knew it was dying when they built it in 1823. The final outpost, the twenty-first link in a chain of spectacular ambition and casual brutality stretched up the California coast. You can feel it, this desperate, magnificent hubris frozen in adobe.
Stand in the courtyard and you’re standing in the wreckage of empires. The Spanish padres with their visions of salvation, the Native Californians whose world got dismantled brick by blessed brick, the whole fever dream of manifest destiny before anyone even called it that. It lasted what, barely a decade before secularization gutted it?
The walls absorbed everything, prayers, screams, the mundane tedium of forced conversion, the sweat of people building their own cage. Now it’s whitewashed and placid, tour groups shuffling through, but there’s this residual voltage humming underneath. History as a low-frequency drone you feel in your bones.
Every mission’s a monument to complicated truth, but this one? Being last means something. They knew the party was over before they finished the foundation. There’s poetry in that, building cathedrals while the empire crumbles, leaving ghosts that won’t quite dissolve in the California sun.