FOR O.C. ADDICTS, IT'S A 'LAST CHANCE' RANCH

For homeless addicts, the Double R Ranch represents a retreat from life's troubles and perhaps a final chance to save their souls.

By TOM BERG

WARNER SPRINGS - The pigs have been fed, the horses groomed, and the sun is still yawning over the Santa Rosa Mountains.

Down in the valley, 21 ranch hands finish breakfast and push back their chairs in silence.

"We pray," one says, "for those less fortunate than we are."

Twenty-one mouths echo, amen. Yet it's hard to imagine a less fortunate bunch than this roomful of castoffs collected from the streets of Orange County.

One smoked crack with his kids. One snorted meth with his mom. One lists some of the prisons he's been in: San Quentin, Soledad, Folsom ...

You want these guys? You can have 'em. Nobody else does.

Nobody but Pat and Melanie McNiff, a couple of retired Air Force veterans who occupy a fifth-wheel trailer among the high-desert shrub, rocks and rattlesnakes of the 142-acre Double R Ranch.

"I think they need someone to believe in them," says Melanie, an ordained minister.

Her ranch hands all ended up here for the same reason: They were homeless. And most ended up homeless for the same reason: They were addicts.

They've squandered more second chances than most of us get in a lifetime. So what makes anyone think this chance will be any different?

I'm told the reason before arriving but can't believe my ears. It's this:

Chickens, goats and horses.

THE DREAM

How can a chicken, goat or horse help a heroin addict arrested 78 times?

"Sixty percent of my whole life I've been behind bars," says Randy Garcia, 60, who's served time at San Quentin, Soledad and Folsom for heroin use and embezzlement.

Amazing, I reply.

"What's amazing," he says, "is I'm here to talk to you. I'm not dead. The people I practiced my addiction with - they're all dead or doing life in prison."

Garcia once used a Santa Ana curb as a pillow. Now, he sleeps in a small trailer next to the horse barn.

"I get up, say hello to my horses and rub their nose," he says while cleaning a horse's hoof.

"Do you have a minute?" he asks. "I want to show you something."

We walk to his tiny trailer. One room is filled with blue ribbons from horse shows he's attended. Another room is filled with Bibles and Christian books he reads each morning and night. He has something else to show me, something preserved in a small box, as if protected from all the hurt in his life. He lifts the cover and shows me his treasure: pictures of siblings, children and grandchildren - all abandoned at some point in the name of heroin.

"My sister," he says.

"These are my kids. And my grandkids."

He lingers over a photo of one son.

"The last time I saw him," Garcia says, "he called the police on me. He sat and watched me being put into a police car and taken to jail."

I ask Garcia about a poster of magazine photos and clippings behind him.

"That's my dream board," he says.

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