I stopped when I hit this passage in Theo Baker’s new book, How to Rule the World:
“…through the redwood forests so thick with foliage that we couldn’t see the sun… some of the greatest driving roads in the world, with empty switchbacks and hairpins and sweeping corners to test ourselves. Never in my freshman year did I feel freer than on those drives.”
Seventeen years old, newly arrived at Stanford, and already he’d found the loophole. A few minutes off campus, past the ambition and the networking, the road empties out and climbs into redwoods so thick the sun disappears.
I know those roads. I’ve driven them for decades. Skyline on a clear morning, fog still sitting in the valleys. The curves above the coast when the Pacific goes the color of hammered silver. The sudden dark under the redwood canopy, ten degrees colder, the world narrowed to headlights and wet pavement.
Take Skyline up to Mountain House some evening for dinner with friends and you’ve driven the whole argument of this essay without meaning to. A few miles of switchbacks first, the fog closing in and opening up again, and then the parking lot with its redwood out front and the wood carving of Neil Young standing under it, watching you arrive.
What struck me wasn’t nostalgia. It was that Baker had gotten the feeling exactly right. The phone in the cupholder, the next meeting, the slow arithmetic of a life — gone, for the length of a few good corners. Just you, the machine, the light.
I felt an early version of it as a boy, in the back of a blue Dodge Dart, summer of 1960. Every evening my father spread the day’s map across the hood and studied tomorrow’s route. By noon the thin red lines were real places under our wheels. I never lost that. Decades later, living a few miles from the campus Baker writes about, the same lift still comes when the road opens and the hills start to roll.
The switchbacks demand attention and punish you for withholding it. In return: the rare feeling of being exactly where you were, with nowhere else to be. These days I find myself more protective of those pockets, not less.
The roads are still there. The redwoods still offer the same deal they offered a seventeen-year-old freshman. And at the top of the hill, under the big tree, Neil Young keeps watching the cars come up.
