I’ve been living in the Santa Cruz Mountains for fifteen years now, in a proper mountain town nestled between Redwood City and Palo Alto to the southeast, and Half Moon Bay to the northwest. La Honda’s defining features include a post office, a general store, a biker bar, and hundreds of coast redwood trees surrounded by a stand of old growth humans and a ring of persistent sprouts around their elders’ roots.
The drive up here is not for the faint of heart: Hairpin turns. Switchback stretches. Falling rocks. Low hanging live wires. The earth moves beneath the pavement, causing cracks to ripple through the shoddily applied (and patched and reapplied) tar. The whole mess seems poised to slip over the side into Silicon Valley at any muddy moment. And during fire season, all the flora looks like fuel.
But I know these roads by heart. I’ve developed a rustic and hardy approach to navigation up here, since GPS generally fails. Directions incorporate local color: Take a right at the red barn. Veer to the left, around the yellow dog who likes to rest in the middle of the dirt-and-gravel right of way. Come down the steep driveway and pass the madrone with brown bark peeling back to reveal rust. Don’t hit the feisty gray fox and her kits tumbling all over each other under the deck. Look up and marvel at the canopy of evergreen.
I drive by muscle memory, an adaptation for which I am immensely because it allows me to take in the earthy rainbow of my adopted home.