When I became Travel Editor at the Examiner, I quickly realized how little I knew about the region in which I lived, and how much there was to do and discover right in my own backyard. There was a reason why people flew halfway around the world to explore Northern California! My daughter was born the same year I became Travel Editor, and while my wife and I enthusiastically took her around the world from the moment she could fly, her presence was one more important incentive for me to travel close to home. So I began to explore California. I made the journey described in this story on an October weekend in 1988, setting out with no clear idea of what would befall me or what I would write about, just trusting that the world would deliver. And as always, it did.
WHILE I LOVE WANDERING THE FAR CORNERS of the globe, I’m continually amazed by the range of riches our own region has to offer. I re-learned this again one October weekend when I explored a spectacular stretch of my favorite California road, Highway 1, from Bodega Bay to Leggett.
At the trip’s beginning on the outskirts of Bodega Bay, the road wound through green and brown hills, dotted with purple, red, white, and yellow flowers like drops from a pointillist’s brush; then ribboned along the coast, offering soul-soaring views of crashing white waves, ragged red-brown cliffs, and craggy black rocks at every turn. I passed trim clapboard galleries, boutiques, and souvenir shops, and peaceful houses of brown weathered wood tucked into the green folds and creases of the hills, smoke pluming from their chimneys.
for sale signs and fences demarcated the land, and satellite dishes symbolized reality, but more impressive were the profusions of wildflowers lining the road like nature’s bridal bouquets.
My first stop was in Point Arena, whose downtown displays just what a downtown really needs in Northern California in the 20th century: a post office, bank, deli and grocery store, telephone office, gas station, liquor store, movie theater and video rental place, café, natural foods store, and tribal office (the Manchester-Point Arena Indian Reservation is located just inland).
I drove to the Point Arena Fishing Pier and had my first close encounter with coastal life: the salty smell of the sea, the slap of the waves and the sight of fishing boats bobbing and bewhiskered men in messy blue jeans and flannel shirts casting off the pier. They caught only seaweed while I was there, but we all knew it didn’t matter: They were catching the sunshine and the bracing wind, the deep blue sky and the screeches of the birds, the weekend company of each other and the summer lusciousness in the air. Behind them a signpost at the Arena Cove Bar & Grill pointed the way to Acapulco, Berlin, Anchorage, Pebble Beach, Las Vegas, Honolulu—and I had a feeling that was about as close as any of them wanted to get to the outside world.
Beyond Point Arena proper, I followed a winding road to the Point Arena Lighthouse. This singular structure is lovingly maintained by a dedicated group of volunteers who call themselves the Point Arena Lighthouse Keepers, Inc. One of the keepers greeted me at the entrance and filled me in on some of the lighthouse’s history: how the original lighthouse began operation in 1870 and functioned until 1906, when it was effectively destroyed in the great earthquake; how the new 115-foot steel-reinforced concrete tower debuted in 1908 with one extraordinary addition: a first order Fresnel lens over six feet in diameter and weighing more than two tons, with 666 hand-ground glass parts and a brass framework, all built in France and shipped to California.
In an adjacent museum another volunteer pointed with pride to the old artifacts—plates, lanterns, tins, and other treasures recovered from shipwrecks; historical information about and photographs of California’s lighthouses, the 1906 earthquake, and the Point Arena area; and an enchanting exhibition of poems and drawings by local elementary school students.
The views from the lighthouse were inspiring: undeveloped, free-flowing countryside dotted with sheep; wild, unbounded water. But even more inspiring was the love these volunteers clearly felt for the tower and its surroundings. Call me a meandering mystic if you will, but I think that kind of love, concern, commitment adds a special quality to the landscape—it imbues it with a spirit that becomes a part of what you see and sense when you visit there. And if you are lucky enough to feel that spirit, not only do you carry it away with you, but you also leave some special part of yourself behind that enhances the area all the more.
In this sense, I thought, the lighthouse keepers are preserving much more than the lighthouse itself; they are keeping a vital piece of the state, and of ourselves, and deserve all the support they need.
After Point Arena, my next stop was in Mendocino, where something remarkable happened.
I had spent half an hour wandering among the galleries and boutiques, the upscale clothing and kitchen utensil places, the coffee and burger stops, and ice cream and sandwich shops. Despite its tourist orientation, I already liked Mendocino very much; for some reason, it reminded me of Lenox, Massachusetts, a resort town near the Tanglewood concert area where I spent many a youthful weekend trying to absorb symphony music and starlight.
I liked the feel of the town, the attention to gardens and benches and decks, the neat inns and wooden houses, the arts and crafts places, and then, in the opposite direction, the crashing white waves and magnificent, wind-slanted trees and wildly swaying grasses. It felt like what I once upon a time imagined much of California to be—or, more precisely, it felt like New England in California. Well, most precisely: It felt like me.
I sat on a bench outside the Presbyterian church, which could have been transplanted from a New England town, looked at the ocean and felt the world slow down a bit; I was beginning to get back in touch with what’s really important, like peeling paint and buzzing bumblebees, the feeling of sunshine and a salty breeze on your face, the surprise of wild roadside blackberries.
And then I came upon a gentle bookstore called The Book Loft, where Windham Hill music drifted through the air and books on yoga and Zen and new age science greeted fervent readers. It felt like a portal to another time, and so it became. I was standing in the back of the store, in the used books area, when I saw some old, well-thumbed, and obviously lovingly read copies of the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.
This was the same trilogy that my brother had persuaded me to read more than two decades earlier because he had loved them so much, the same books I had inexplicably been thinking of earlier in the day—after not having thought of them for years. Suddenly I was aware of tears filling my eyes.
I don’t know quite what it was: the conjunction of youthful idealism and older-age reality, perhaps, a sudden and overwhelming sense of times past and distances traversed. It was not only sad, but a combination of happiness and astonishment and sadness; it was like something had tapped a spring in my soul, and all the waters burst out from within. I thought of my brother and parents on the East Coast, and then of my wife and child, equally far away, it seemed, in Oakland. And I wondered: What happens to our youthful dreams, our fantasies about what life will be? How can I reconcile the glories of the present with the goals of the past? Where do they come together?
I had no answers, but somehow in The Book Loft, among the blooms and benches and boutiques of Mendocino, that was all right. And when I resumed the trip, I realized that that moment had transformed everything: The world around me seemed stunningly beautiful, had taken on a deeper life.
I spent the night at an inn overlooking the sea in Elk. After an excellent dinner at Harbor House, I walked down Highway 1 to my cottage. From my balcony, there was only the wash and scrape of the waves, the vast slumbering outlines of rocks against the sea, and the intricate puzzle of the stars.
In the morning, soft sunlight lent the visible world a magical quality. Bumblebees flitted patiently from flower to flower, hawks turned and glided in the air; trees bent in the wind, water broke over the rocks. I felt calm and far, far from the city.
After a hearty breakfast highlighted by fresh blackberries and thick cream, I was back on the road. Above Fort Bragg, the scenery alternated from opulent open vistas of sea and sky to the surprise of sand dunes, to dense green groves of evergreens. On one side I passed flower-bright meadows and rolling hills, on the other broad white-sand beaches with picnic tables and ample parking lots, where the only litter was driftwood.
I passed through Westport in the time it took me to say “a couple of inns, an all-purpose general store and gas station, and not much else” into my tape recorder and then began to look for Rockport, which I had been told was the last checkpoint before the unmarked turn-off to the wilderness area known as the Lost Coast.
The road turned steep and twisting, and soon the sea seemed only a memory. Massive white birches, redwoods, and other leafy trees I couldn’t identify towered beside and over the road, giving it a kind of gloomy enchantment. To complete the effect, a gentle rain had begun to fall, and clouds were covering the trees like soft white comforters. Plush pine needles and green gossamer ferns carpeted the floor; the only signs of habitation were rotting, abandoned farmhouses and cabins.
And where was Rockport? Suddenly I came to a sign for the “Drive Thru” redwood tree in Leggett, which was well beyond Rockport on my map. Since I was so close to the Drive Thru tree, I decided the only thing to do was to drive through it, but my mind was on Rockport and the Lost Coast.
But first I drove to the end of the road, literally, the nondescript intersection where the forlorn green signs say End California 1. Then fate led me well. The ticket-taker at the Drive Thru Tree Park said she loved the Lost Coast, had once spent ten months camping there—“and one week when I didn’t see another soul”—and told me exactly where to find the dirt turn-off twenty-five minutes back toward Westport.
“Rockport?” she echoed when I asked. “Oh, that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Back along the winding road through the towering trees until there it was, ten minutes after the sun came out, a dirt road charging uphill with a tiny, virtually illegible white sign indicating Mendocino County Road No. 431, the pathway to either disaster (what if my reliable rented Reliant got stuck in the mud?) or paradise.
Six muddy, bumpy, grass-graced, vista-vibrant, lupine-lovely, heart-stoppingly beautiful miles and half an hour later I came to the end of another road, a dirt trail off the county road that stopped at the Usal Camp beach. I felt like I had stepped into an undiscovered world: Waves tumbled and roared; seabirds wheeled and screeched. Before me and to my left was sand, rocks, seaweed, driftwood; to my right, rocky cliffs plunged into the sea; behind me, grassy hills rose into a blazing blue sky. I sat and watched, and these lines drifted into mind: “The sea moves in white waves toward the shore; the wind moves—white waves toward the sky.” I saw bright orange poppies, purple thistles, blue and white baby’s breath, exquisite tiny white flowers with yellow centers.
The day moved, but I didn’t.
Thirty minutes that seemed like hours later, it was time to leave sea and seaweed, wave and wood, behind, but one adventure was left.
As I was driving back along Road No. 431, I came to a particularly tempting trail, stopped the car, and ran under the trees into a grassy expanse with a precipitous view of the glimmering sea. I was running through this meadow, exulting in the sunshine and pure, pristine freedom of the place, when I saw what looked like horse’s hoofprints in the grass. I knelt over them to get a better look, and as I was absorbed in wondering what a horse had been doing in that isolated place, a cool shadow passed over me.
I looked up to see one red-tailed hawk, and then another, spectacularly silhouetted against the sun. Wings outstretched, they were dancing in the air, riding its thin highway, swooping and soaring, wheeling with wordless grace out toward the ocean and then back over me. They performed this pas de deux for perhaps ten to fifteen seconds, hovering motionless in the air, wing tips almost touching, then soaring away, until they sailed out of sight over the trees.
I knew then that this was really the end of the road: This was where things, in some obscure way, came together—up in the air, catching the current and gliding, circling, swooping, hovering with ruffled tips on the wind. And even as I write these words, those hawks are still in my mind, swooping, soaring. The breeze freshens; the ocean glints below. They are dancing, dancing. I see them dancing. Still.