“That’s an interesting bulletin board you got,” I said.
He nodded.
“Maybe I should leave a note with you for my loved ones,” I said. “Just in case.”
“Where you headed.”
“Swann’s Flat.”
“That so. Thirty-eight-sixty.”
I handed him cash. “I need a receipt, please.”
“Yuh. Can I ask what you’re driving?”
“It’s a RAV4.”
“Four-wheel drive?”
“No.”
“Uh-huh. Well. Keep it in low and take your time. Once you start, you’re committed.”
“I have to get there, one way or the other.”
He slapped down my change. “Let’s hope it’s not the other.”
Five minutes from town I was alone again, cruising west along two twisty lanes relieved by the occasional turnout or gravel spur. Ahead towered the broad back of the King Range. GPS predicted two hours to cover the final twenty-four miles. For the first nine of those I couldn’t understand what the big deal was.
At Blackberry Junction, Swann’s Flat Road splintered from the main highway, and a pockmarked sign issued from a thicket of manzanitas to admonish me.
I downshifted and trundled forward.
The paving contracted to a single lane before petering out into cratered dirt. The grade pitched up violently, the forest closed in, oaks and madrones and Douglas firs mobbing the roadside like bloodthirsty spectators. Branches knitted. Shadows spread. My tires spun in the soil and loose stones. I lost the horizon, then the sky. With them went any sense of orientation, leaving me switchbacking blindly through billowing khaki clouds, jouncing in my seat, mashing the horn at every turn to alert oncoming vehicles. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I did run up against someone. Back up? Move over? How? I had six inches of clearance to either side. On my left the earth formed a sheer wall bristling with roots thick as baseball bats. On my right it collapsed into a tangled gulch.
I climbed slowly, watching the temperature gauge tick upward.
GPS had frozen, as if I’d driven off the planet.
I was pouring sweat. I’d turned off the air conditioner to avoid overheating the engine, but when I cracked the windows dust flooded in, and I rushed to close them, steering with one hand as I hacked and sneezed and blinked tears down my cheeks.
Cresting a ridge into dazzling light, I glimpsed bright, turbulent water.
Then the grade plummeted and I plunged downhill, picking up unwanted speed, braking, skidding, struggling to correct, gravity taking over and the car a two-ton anchor to which I was strapped. I’d given up honking. I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to. I simply had to ride it out.
Ten terrifying helpless minutes ended in a trough with a bone-rattling bang.
I jammed into park and threw off my seatbelt, sucking air.
When my head cleared I saw that I was at the bottom of a valley. A log bridge spanned the dry creek bed. Redwoods blotted out the sun. The foliage beneath grew stunted and waxy, a vast, rumpled carpet of wood sorrel and ferns, bark and leaves and needles and dirt and stone.
Across the bridge the grade spiked again. I shifted into gear, my heart pounding in dread. I had eleven more miles of this; eleven nauseating yo-yo miles of basin and range.
Up, up, up.
And down.
I’d traveled to other forbidding places — the Utah desert, the remote reaches of Yosemite Valley, where tourists never venture — and the same thought always occurred to me.
How did anyone ever find this?
Two hours was starting to feel awfully optimistic.
At mile eight, crawling around a particularly gnarly hairpin, I came to a roadside cross.
I stopped, grateful for the break, and got out.
Wooden crucifix, the inscription burned in.
A Jack Daniel’s bottle stood nearby, neck sawn off to form a vase stuffed with dead flowers. The bottom was scummy and crawling with insects.
The memorial had been set perilously close to the edge. No choice. Otherwise it would obstruct traffic. At the same time, the placement seemed like an invitation to tempt fate. The cliffside was uneven, bitten by wind and rain. Craning, I saw a vicious slope of exposed sedimentary rock with nothing to break a fall.
I tossed a stone. It bounced, spun off into space, and sank into the void far below. I couldn’t hear it land.
At mile eleven, I reached the last and highest ridgeline.
The world tore open.
To the north, to the south, the coast stretched in a jagged ribbon. Whitecaps detonated against crags of black rock. The Pacific Coast baring its teeth.
It was a crude, ax-hewn land, bunched like the front end of a head-on collision, steep and inhospitable but for a squarish peninsula knuckling into the sea.
Swann’s Flat.
I’d spent so much time studying it on a computer screen that it looked fake in real life.
Four miles wide, two miles deep, crisscrossed by black-green belts and hemmed in by soaring granite bluffs. The highly touted beach was a slender cove at the southwest corner. Adjacent was the marina, where the inn and boat launch were located.
Modest progress had occurred since Elvira Dela Cruz’s time. From my vantage I could pick out twenty-five or thirty structures, spaced far apart, lurking through the trees or plonked down in the open. The largest were situated along a prominent boulevard that ran parallel to the waterfront. Other than that, the street plan was scribbly and erratic, as if it had been laid out in crayon by a toddler.
I began my descent.
The grade relaxed and the canopy thinned, redwoods giving way to alders and pines, chokecherry and incense cedar. Trails periodically broke off into the woods. They didn’t look especially well groomed. I’d have to take it up with the Swann’s Flat Resort Area.
Paving reappeared. Power lines came loping out of nowhere.
I crossed another bridge, wider and better maintained.
Wikipedia had given the number of residents as thirteen. Evidently there had been some attrition, but no one had gotten around to updating the entry. At ground level, I could no longer see clear to the ocean, though I could read its influence in the back-slanting tree trunks, blasted by relentless onshore winds. Lowering the window, I gulped a mouthful of salt.
My intention had been to start by running down addresses. GPS was still paralyzed and my cell showed no bars. I meandered at five miles per hour through a warren of streets named quaintly for local flora and fauna. Pepperwood Way. Screech Owl Court.
Block after empty block.
There was plenty of movement — the agitated thrashing of the pines, the furtive sorties of rodents, rabbits, quail.
Yet it felt barren.
Hostile.
Plastic lot markers sprouted in the weeds, heedless of reality.
Mocking it.
Numerous dead ends and wrong turns delivered me to the western edge of the peninsula, Beachcomber Boulevard. Misnomer: There wasn’t any beach to comb, just a tarnished railing and a sheer drop to the rocks. Waves boiled in the hollows, gulls plunged screeching into ruffled blue silk.
I would have expected the lots closest to the water to be intensively developed, but the area remained largely raw, a battleground for native and invasive species: reed grasses and fescue, bright California poppies. Seaside woolly sunflowers, the zombie creep of ice plant.