place and memory – Scott Loftesness

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.

There Used to Be a Pier

There used to be a pier with a shack on top jutting out into Princeton Harbor in Half Moon Bay.

The fog still comes in low most mornings, softening the breakwater until the boats in the slips are only darker shapes. You hear the harbor before you see it—the wet cough of diesel, the slap of water against fiberglass and steel, the occasional metallic ring of a line pulled tight.

When the marine layer lifts, the place shows its modern face: rip-rap stone, poured concrete, the long gray L of Johnson Pier running into water that no longer knows how to rise up and test a wooden structure. The air carries salt and exhaust. Gulls work the edges. Trucks idle in the lot. It is orderly now, built to stay.

But the order has removed a sound. The old pilings no longer work against one another with that slow, heavy creak. The deck no longer gives a little underfoot after it was soaked with a firehose once a week. There is no longer the low groan of a chain hoist swinging a load of salmon or crab up from a boat in the dark, or the close, briny steam inside the shack where Vera kept coffee going and put food on whatever table or crate was free. The lights that once burned at the outer end—small and steady against the black water—are gone. Before the breakwater was finished, winter storms still reached that far end. Men braced the doors and listened to the ocean hammer while the whole structure trembled on its pilings like something that might, on any given night, decide to let go.

Joe Romeo drove those pilings in 1942. The shack he raised was built to be lived in as much as worked in. It smelled of diesel from the fuel tanks on the deck, of wet creosote warming in the sun, of fish blood drying on the planks, and of whatever Vera had on the stove. Fishermen came in with scales still stuck to their forearms. The wood stayed dark and heavy because it was never allowed to dry out completely. After the breakwater went in, the water inside grew calmer and the work changed with it, but the pier still took its beating every season. It held because the men who used it treated it like something that had to be argued with rather than replaced.

By the time the county harbor district took it over, the pilings had begun to rot and shed pieces into the channel. What had once been a place where men ate and slept and unloaded fish became, in the new language of the harbor, a navigational hazard. The district saw liability where others still saw memory.

In 2018 the cranes came and the pilings were cut and hauled away. The shack that had held the life of a fleet inside its four walls was dismantled and carted off like any other piece of condemned wood.

What remains is the absence of that sound and that light, and the particular way a working harbor can be made safe enough to forget what it once required of the men who kept it alive.

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