Pass me if you like. Driving along U.S. 101 in northern California, flanked by ocean and redwoods, I felt no need to rush or speed, honk or make pained faces. Aggrieved drivers don’t belong here.
Unlike so many thoroughfares, this coastal road is the destination. As long as my car was in motion — minus the occasional stop for elk, an American Indian village, ancient trees that graze the clouds, etc. — I was continually arriving.
“From here to the Oregon border is just so dramatic. It’s breathtaking,” said Nancy Short, co-owner of the Booklegger used bookstore in Eureka, a town on the highway. “It’s a different drive every time you take it.”
The 101 is the longest highway in the Golden State, stretching 807 miles from downtown Los Angeles to the northern border. Many segments go by catchier names, such as the Hollywood Freeway, the Bayshore Freeway and the 370-mile Redwood Highway, which this year celebrates its centennial.
The “birthday” refers to the 1910 passage of California’s first State Highway Bond Act, which financed the construction of a statewide road system. “California officially established the Highway Bond Act to start funding the highway,” said Richard Stenger, a spokesman for the Humboldt County Convention and Visitors Bureau. “This was the first step in what would become the Redwood Highway.”
This spring, to commemorate the highway’s inception, I plotted a road trip preset at 100 miles. When I hit the century mark, I’d pull a U-turn. I had a few stretches to choose from: San Francisco to Hopland, Hopland to Garberville, and Eureka to Smith River. The San Fran route, which ribbons through wine country, was too trafficked for my taste. The Hopland-Garberville portion veered inland and featured such urban totems as billboards and stacked buildings. The northern section, however, was just right, with connect-the- dot towns tucked between the Pacific and forested parkland, the soft contours of the Coastal Mountains sketched lightly in the background.
Redwood Highway
Mile 1, Eureka: I set down my wheels on a road paved in gold.
Before the seminal bill of 1910, the main modes of transportation between San Francisco and the Oregon border were boat and train. The overland route was a bumpy tangle of dirt roads, stagecoach paths and Indian trails.
The first paved patch of the Redwood Highway appeared along a 14-mile stretch in Ukiah, the largest city in Mendocino County, and the first “tourist” to travel the burgeoning highway was Jack London. The wily writer rode a horse-drawn Studebaker from the Bay Area to Crescent City, recounting his adventure in an article titled “Four Horses and a Sailor” and published in a 1911 issue of Sunset magazine.
Not quite 300 miles north of San Francisco, the highway cuts straight through Eureka — no exit required — and is a few streets from Old Town, a restored district lined with Victorian structures sheltering art galleries, bookstores, restaurants and other enterprises. At the opposite end of the commercial area and overlooking Humboldt Bay, the Carson Mansion preened its ornate feathers. Built by a lumber mogul in the late 1800s, the overdressed Victorian mansion is now owned by a private club and can be toured only by telephoto lens.
By contrast, the Eureka Inn does not require a secret handshake to let you through its redwood doors. The stately property opened in 1922, the same year the San Francisco-Eureka leg of the highway was completed, to accommodate the unprecedented swells of travelers, including presidents, royalty and Hollywood stars. After a seven- year renovation, the hotel is receiving guests again.
To return to those early days, I popped into the Clarke Historical Museum, assuming that the walls would be splashed with old-timey images of the highway, black- and-white stills of holiday-seekers in fanciful toppers and gas-guzzling cars. Not quite. The glass cases held American Indian artifacts, including a jacket made of seal intestines, taxidermied birds and a special exhibit of wedding gowns showing their stylistic age. Art Barab, the museum registrar, had to burrow deep into the archives to retrieve some 101 memories.
He returned with a box of postcards, matchbook covers and menus, some preserved in plastic sleeves. “This area was so remote, and it’s still fairly remote, considering how far we are from San Francisco,” he said. “Building 101 brought a lot of people here and turned it into a tourist spot.”
I sat down at a desk, removed the plastic sleeves and perused the menus as if I were a customer. Smith’s Restaurant and Coffee Shop wasn’t bluffing about its “popular prices”: The New York prime cut cost 85 cents, an egg sandwich went for 15 cents, coffee for a nickel. Walt’s Famous Steakhouse tempted customers to “Eat out more often in pleasant surroundings,” and probably kept them coming back with its $1.25 special of steak and eggs with hash browns, toast and coffee.
Across the bay, the Samoa Cookhouse carries the torch as the last lumber-camp- style cookhouse in operation in North America. For more than half a century, the dining hall fed three daily meals to the hundreds of millworkers and longshoremen who lived on the peninsula of Samoa (nee Brownsville) and worked with the local resources. Today, the restaurant serves diners who don’t mind sharing table space and big serving bowls of chicken with strangers.
“It’s preserved rather than re-created,” manager Jeff Brustman said of the 1890 feedhouse as he showed me around the adjoining Lumber Museum. “For the history of the logging, this is where you get it.”
This is also where you can stuff your belly so full you will have to readjust your seat belt. The dinner menu that day was a roll call of baked ham, chicken fried steak, soup, salad, cookhouse bread, vegetable, potato, dessert and coffee or tea.
American Indian culture
Humboldt County has a bit of a reputation; among certain sets, it’s known as the Fields of Marijuana Dreams. (Qualifier: “medical” marijuana.) But as I drove north, a pot leaf could have been on the side of the road trying to hitch a ride and I wouldn’t have noticed. The ocean is its own kind of drug.
After the college town of Arcata, the road turns theatrical, with boundless Pacific views and sandy beaches that shimmer with moonstones and agate. At Patrick’s Point State Park, just off the 101, hiking trails lead to such surprise endings as seaside cliffs, sculptural rock formations and a re-created Yurok village.
American Indian culture has a strong presence in this region. In earlier times, the Yurok assembled seasonal villages along the coast and the Klamath River, hunting and fishing for clams, cockles and other briny edibles. Some sections of the 101 pass through reservation land, and I dropped more than a few nickels at the Lucky 7 Casino, run by the Tolowa Indians of the Smith River Rancheria.
An easy hike in, the Yurok-built Sumeg Village materialized from a clearing of spruces, hemlocks, pines and firs. As I contemplated the small assemblage of traditional-style family abodes, sweat house and ceremonial staging ground, a dark-haired woman toting a toy poodle approached me.
“They’ve done a lot of good work, but the entrances are wrong,” Marie Marye, a Yurok who lives in the area, said of the crew who constructed the domiciles. “They should be facing the rising sun.”
Holding tight to her pooch, Marye critiqued the replica community, which was built as an interpretive attraction in 1990 to preserve the tribe’s culture and, through occasional events, revitalize their traditions. “It’s not for dwelling, it’s for show,” she said. “There should be self-pride to keep them up and not leak.”
Without context, the buildings lacked soul, but Marye injected life into the vacant structures and silent surroundings. She explained how the mother spirit dwells in the trees, a union of life creator and life sustainer, and how Yuroks never turn their backs on the sun when entering their homes. They step indoors backward, unless a fire is roaring inside; then they can enter front first.
“The trees, all of this, is our heritage. We are all related to nature,” she said, the feather in her hair ruffling in the breeze. “We don’t want to lose our wilderness, because then we are gone.”
She plucked a small branch off a pine tree and described a homeopathic cure for conflict. “If there is fighting in the family, sweep the pathway at the door,” she said, demonstrating with a flick of the wrist. “The spirits that brought the argument will go away.”
With only one road to follow, I never expected to lose my bearings. Yet I defied logic and did.
Around Redwood National Park, the 101 runs through a gantlet of trees so tall and dense that they nearly obscure the sun. Driving while craning your neck is hard enough. Throw in an alternate route, the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway, and state-run offshoots of the national park, and you might as well just abandon the car and join the local herd of Roosevelt elk.
To right myself and map out some short hikes, I stopped by a state park visitors center near Orick. The backyard was a log- strewn beach with crashing waves. At the information desk, Carey Wells directed me to the Lady Bird Johnson Grove, a 1-mile loop peppered with placards, and Big Tree Wayside, a stunning specimen measuring 304 feet high and 21 feet wide.
Before taking my leave, I asked Wells about the highway’s placement in the park, recalling a photo I’d seen in Eureka of a car inches from the redwoods, as if it were rambling off-road.
“It looks much different today,” she said. “They have made a lot of changes historically. They have moved sections.”
Over time, nature and man have stressed the road, forcing the state to reroute rather than repair parts of it. Along a stretch of nearby coast, for instance, it began to crumble and, for safety measures, was shifted inland a few miles. The highway also previously cut through the national park but was moved outside its borders in the 1980s, in part to protect the old-growth redwoods from further damage from car emissions. The 101 also fell victim to the 1964 tsunami that wiped out nearby Crescent City, a river flood that washed out the Klamath Bridge, and a spike in vehicular volume that resulted in an expansion from one lane to two.
Remnants of the original still exist, however, such as a rutty patch south of Klamath that clings to an ocean-side cliff. When my eyes stopped jiggling from the ruts on the old road, I could see the faint painted lines of the 101 that was.
An Easter-lily ending
The 101 goes onward, but for me, it ended at Smith River, known as the Easter Lily Capital of the World.
I clocked my 100th mile at a giant boat beached on a lawn, a millionaire’s yacht turned kitschy roadside attraction. I drove into the Ship Ashore Resort, parked and walked along a mucky trail until I reached a dock where a pair of egrets stared out to sea. Before me, the Smith River intersected with the Pacific, a meeting marked over and over again with a great crash of waves.
I had reached my destination, but the trip was not over. I still had the drive back, and I’d be in the slow lane.
