The 2,300 residents of this isolated hamlet are united by a love of the outdoors and a sense of activism. But beware the developer or official who tries to alter their way of life: They’ve proved formidable foes.

SILVERADO —  At the local cafe, lunchtime topics often begin and end with the virtues of the turkey melt, one of the most delectable items on a menu that many know by heart. But recently, the conversation veered into much more distressing territory.

On this particular sun-dappled afternoon, the topic involved Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove) and his purported efforts to torpedo the town’s water district. As happens with most issues here, the debate was raging at the Pali Cafe.

Pringle, leader of the Assembly’s Republican majority, had set off a firestorm in this tiny community by threatening to merge its longtime water district with a larger, far more powerful agency, perhaps in Irvine or Rancho Santa Margarita. (The bill cleared the Assembly by a vote of 61 to 0, fueling alarm here, but ultimately died in the state Senate.)

And that wasn’t the only issue.

The 2,300 residents of this isolated hamlet, which sits like an Austrian village at the base of several steep rows of tall mountains, were also tangling with Orange County over the fate of the local library.

Silverado’s quaint one-room library opened 29 years ago, and ever since, people here say, periodic threats to slash its hours or get rid of it altogether have come from outsiders, or, for that matter, their elected representatives.

Over the years, the denizens of Silverado have tended to win their political scrapes. And certainly, the momentum shifted sharply in their direction in saving both the library and water district. Many here credit the turnaround to a kind of collective perseverance.

In the 1970s, for instance, the locals fought for and had written into law the Sil/Mod Plan, a county-approved planning document aimed at protecting Silverado from the onslaught of development.

Many here believe it offers the community an ironclad guarantee against the kind of encroachment that came to Trabuco Canyon and other wilderness areas years ago. At the very least, locals say, the Sil/Mod Plan (as in Silverado/Modjeska) offers legal protection should developers try to push too far.

“If you go against us,” says activist and resident Sherry Meddick, 42, “we will nag you until you leave us alone.”

Which pretty much sums up the way of life in Silverado, a mining town founded in 1878 when--what else?--silver was discovered nearby. For three years, the town was overrun by hordes of miners, who took every piece of ore they could.

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Would-be miners still come looking for slivers of shiny precious metal--the mine exists even now at the end of a curvy, poison-oak-infested trail--but the mill that went with it was torn down years ago.

“And there ain’t no silver left!” longtime resident Judy Myers said with a laugh. “Could you please print that?”

These days, Silverado is peopled by professors, lawyers, chemists, physicists, and, of course, its own legion of blue-collar individualists, such as coast-to-coast truckers, calf-roping cowboys and female ranchers.

Regardless of what they do, Silveradons are linked in spirit by who they are. Almost all of them live in houses that seem to dangle from hillsides or lie buried in sooted tangles of oak and leaves, like spiders in a massive, earthen web.

In the same spirit, residents share a sense of activism and political savvy. Meddick spends most of her time working for Greenpeace, the environmental organization. Local resident Shelly Solomon, 39, makes a living cleaning up lakes with a chemically free method that uses only plant life.

In a town that some local women like to call “a feminist’s paradise,” Dana Judd, 35, is an accomplished rancher and equestrian who runs the local stables.

Male or female, the one thing they all have in common is a love for the outdoors and a quiet appreciation for the solitude and remoteness that comes with living in Silverado and being around fellow Silveradons.

Myers, 63, a 27-year resident of the canyon--she actually delivered a child during the ’69 flood and had to be airlifted out by El Toro Marines--said the history of the canyon has gone from Indians to Spanish settlers to cattlemen to beekeepers and farmers.

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In the early 1900s, the town became known as “the health mecca” for offering natural mineral baths and for being a place where asthma sufferers could come to feel better. It then evolved into permanent settlements as part of a rural hamlet “that enables people to commute to work in town,” Myers said, “but enjoy all the wonderful parts of living in the country.”

“I like living here,” Solomon, the environmentalist, said, “because it’s one of the few places in Orange County that lets you feel like you aren’t living in Orange County. I also like the collective eccentricity of those around me and the fact that it’s all so wonderfully . . . natural.”

There is, for instance, the resident who lives in the county’s only subterranean house, the guy who collects old firetrucks as a hobby and stores them on his property, the kids who drive entirely too fast, the homeowner whose house is built on stilts with no foundation, the lesbians who say they feel comfortable nowhere else, and the guy who plays his fiddle on the front porch at midnight because no one complains.

But life here has its own built-in risks, most of which involve water.

Curiously, Silverado has avoided devastating fires, even in 1993, when Laguna Beach and so much of the Southland seemed to be engulfed in flames. Myers, the local historian, said the worst blaze was in 1967 but was nowhere near as bad as the flood two years later.

Five residents perished when a wall of mud and water cascaded down a mountain and collapsed the building in which they were waiting out the storm. A memorial in the center of town honors those who died in the flood.

Despite the specter of natural disaster, “we treasure our way of life around here,” said Meddick, a sly smile crossing her lips. “And we’ll do whatever we can to protect it. If it means we fight, we fight. And I pity the poor soul who gets in our way.”

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Most recently, that would have been Pringle, who never met a Democrat as tough as anyone in Silverado.

In the language that passed the Assembly in mid-July, Pringle’s bill, AB2109, would have merged the Silverado water district with one in a larger adjacent city. But lobbying efforts by most of the 1,023 registered voters in Silverado convinced state Sen. John R. Lewis (R-Orange) to amend the bill even before it met its demise in the Senate.

The same kind of benevolent fate came with the library issue, which at one time, during the county’s bankruptcy, some officials wanted to close or cut back to save money. The library survived.

As Meddick said, “I wouldn’t bet against us.”

Nor would anyone else in town. Silveradons seem to delight, as Meddick says, in “melting turkeys”--or, put another way, “anyone who gets in our way.”

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Silverado Canyon

Points of Interest: In Silverado Canyon, at the east end of Silverado Canyon Road, you’ll find the Trabuco entrance of the Cleveland National Forest, whose tens of thousands of acres offer protection for Silverado Canyon and much of Orange County’s outback on its northeast fringe. The canyon also is home to an abandoned silver mine, several ranches and hiking and biking trails (some of them infested with poison oak).

History: Settled first by Native Americans, then by Spaniards, then beekeepers and health aficionados who enjoyed its natural mineral baths.

Key Issues: Residents are fighting to maintain what they call the spirit and letter of the Sil/Mod plan, a county-approved document designed to limit or restrict local residential and commercial development. Some worry proposed development by the Irvine Co. may one day change the nature of Silverado by altering what happens at its western end. Many say the area is protected from development by the Cleveland National Forest, in which most of the canyon lies.