"This is a place where people live in denial of the rest of the world," said the retired manufacturer, lining up a three-foot putt on a carbon-copy glorious morning in paradise. "The Ranch is a place where people practice civility in an uncivil world. How ironic that this kind of madness could come visiting here."
How ironic, indeed.
That's what many residents repeated yesterday as this community of moneyed exteriors celebrated the Easter holiday, scratching their collective heads as they resumed their lives inside churches, sand traps and mini-marts following the nation's worst mass suicide - which unfolded Wednesday in their own well-groomed back yard.
Because if San Diego is a cul-de-sac of America, a city existing as a theme park, then tiny Rancho Santa Fe is its scrub-brushed, squeaky-clean center - its Disneyland, Magic Mountain and Six Flags combined.
In Rancho Santa Fe, news is normally made on the society pages, not in screaming headlines and worldwide sound bites about mass deaths and mental hospitals, crew-cutted cultists and aliens from another world.
At the Ranch, uproars usually come in the form of some misguided move to paint all-too-revealing street numbers on the curbs in front of houses or a drive to allow joggers and walkers to venture onto the Country Club grounds.
"We just want the whole world to go away and leave us alone, just like always," said Blaine Briggs, as he waited for Easter services at the Village Community Presbyterian Church near the heart of the village.
Added another church-goer: "What gives people some solace here is that these people were just renters, not longtime residents. We just feel sorry for the poor guy who rented to them."
He was bamboozled into thinking they were a nice clean-cut bunch."
Other people opened their hearts a little wider Sunday and expressed sympathy for the families of the cult members. "Everyone will be praying for those families," said Ranch resident Betsy Brown. "And our faith is strong."
"Nobody ever expected that those people would choose our community to take their lives," said another golfer, Gary Madden. "Maybe they did it because it's so beautiful here."
For its 5,000 residents, the Ranch is a place of towering eucalyptus trees that shade elegant riding stables, where each sprawling mansion is a gated community to itself.
It's a place that - at $2 a gallon - claims the most expensive gas prices in California, where a hot-selling item was once a locally produced videotape on how to communicate with your Spanish-speaking housekeeper, and newcomers sometimes wait months, even years, before being invited to neighborhood parties. Even admission to the Ranch's Garden Club requires sponsorship.
For three generations, the community has provided safe harbor for a wealthy cadre of residents seeking to escape the constant change of the outside world, many of them attracted by its legendary Covenant, a set of iron-clad rules that for 68 years have strictly maintained status quo throughout the hamlet.