Leaving 'good enough' alone

Though a controversial military contractor’s plans to open shop in Potrero may have put the tiny San Diego County hamlet on the world’s radar screen last year, the community has been humming along nicely for more than 100 years—residents will have you know—with nary a lick of outside intervention.

Sure, Lindsay Lohan hasn’t done any time there, but the town, 45 miles east of San Diego, is not without its own low-level notoriety.

Through the years, residents have included Bill McNeilly, a chemical engineer who obtained a patent on xanthan gum (used to thicken the very Bubblicious that Lohan sardonically snaps) and sculptor Malcolm Leland, who created the brass Bow Wave in San Diego’s Community Concourse.

Still, given the chance, the majority of Potrero’s low-key inhabitants would gladly slide back into obscurity. Since the arrival of the first white settler in 1868, the population has swelled to only about 850 people (talk about slow growth). It’s a place where buzzards roost, coyotes holler, people refer to distances with “as the crow flies” and oaks and sycamores are fed by underground springs.

Capt. Charles G. McAlmond discovered Potrero while en route from Mexico to Pine Valley on a mission to mend his ailing health. At the time, the 27-square-mile area was home to a sizeable population of Kumeyaay Indians, who still regard Potrero’s peaks and valleys as sacred turf (when fire rages through the area, as it often does, the cleared land can be easily scavenged for Indian artifacts, locals say).

Surveying the region’s craggy hillsides and valleys dotted with coastal live oak, McAlmond reportedly sighed, saying, “This is good enough for me.”

Prior to his death in 1887, he would become Potrero’s first postmaster and a deputy county clerk.

McAlmond wouldn’t be the last to gulp down lung-fulls of Potrero’s untainted mountain air to get well.

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