SUSAN SWETNAM

SUSAN SWETNAM THE LOST COAST

“This country looks like Scotland,” we told each other as we crossed the grassy uplands stretching toward the sea. We picked our way on the rambling two-lane over ridges, down into gullies past tumble-down farm sheds, sensing the approach of the great drop-off ahead. To the south, the King Range reared straight up from the surf, 4,000’ in three miles. Psychedelic-yellow Scotch broom illuminated the hillsides; redbuds glowed pink.

Then, abruptly, not Scotland at all, but Redwoods, shafts of sunlight filtering through the heavy canopy, the verdant ground teeming with ferns.

“Check the map,” Ford had said an hour before, as we stopped for gas on Highway 101. “I think we’re pretty near something I’ve always wanted to see. And that was how we came to the Lost Coast for the first time, turning aside from our spring break trajectory toward Napa Valley, heading for a very different kind of place. The highway fell away, down a great vertiginous cleft to Cape Mendocino, the westernmost point in California. We turned south at the thundering waves, along with literal edge of the sea. Cows grazed in salty grass on the inland side, nestled under the plateau’s ramparts. A bull rolled on his back in spring bliss, raising clouds of butterflies.

“God,” Ford drew a deep breath, “This is incredible.” We stopped to inhale the ocean’s pounding, to absorb the utter stillness of the air. We’d long been connoisseurs of obscure Intermountain West outbacks 73

– Ibupah Peak, the Black Rock Desert, the Big Southern Butte, the Big Horn Crags. But this country felt more remote than any of them, more isolated.

And it grew wilder as the road wound to visit rivercanyon hamlets – Petrolia, Honeydew – then again rose thousands of feet to traverse a long ridge. After thirty years in Idaho I’d thought myself hardened to mountain roads. But the gravel and potholed blacktop of the King Range, often a single lane switch backing with stair-step steepness, edged by airy drop-offs, reminded me of how it felt to grip the car’s seat.

No signs warned of the approaching grade to the absolute end of the road, Shelter Cove, and that was probably a good thing. Far below, scattered houses clung to loaf-shaped peaks as in Chinese paintings, morphing in and out of view as we wound down the vast canyon. Tiny strips of green lawn edging the coast grew larger, then we could hear the pounding once again.

“What can we do to live here?” We’d driven straight to the little park at the seawall’s edge, right through the clusters of houses, by the rudimentary landing strip, the golf course, the handful of shops and mom and pop motels. But we hadn’t yet seen another human being. “Enchanted” is a word that makes me wince when applied to places. But it was the only word to describe Shelter Cove that March day.

We didn’t have enough sense to do what we should have done: cancel the dash south and set up our tent in the campground behind us. We were young then, and determined to go where we’d said we’d go.

At least we had enough sense to buy a guidebook in the general store. As we barreled south the next day, I read Ford descriptions of the eighty miles of hiking trails

74

we’d just abandoned. “The Lost Coast Trail – that’s what we should do,” he insisted. “Twenty-five miles of beach hiking, no access but each end – how amazing would that be?” We fantasized about other hikes, too – the King Crest trail, King Peak itself. What a spring break we’d have: exploring 60,000 acres of mountains cloaked in dark stands of Douglas Fir, sudden groves of Redwoods where the mist lingered on the brightest days. “New country’s always good,” Ford said.

But somehow other plans intervened, and by the time we returned to the Lost Coast, on our last spring break together, the prostate cancer had forever canceled all possibility of day hikes, much less uncharted exploration. That visit, too, was an impulse, for we were bound for San Francisco, but I caught Ford looking intently west as we passed the turn-off and insisted on one sunset, at least, in this place at the end of the world. We nearly missed the moment, for Ford was driving more slowly by then. By the time we reached the park, the red ball was in the process of drowning itself in thundering waves.

It took a long time to walk back up hill to the little house I’d reserved from a highway telephone. We lingered beside a garden of calla lilies, luminous in the rising moon, and touched them in silent delight. Then, just as wordlessly, my husband wrapped me in his arms. What energy he possessed was gone before I put dinner on the table. “I’m sorry,” he said, tears standing in his eyes. “So much trouble. But all I want to do is sleep.” I reassured him, stowed the untouched food in the refrigerator, and turned off the lights. Then I sat for a long time on the stoop, drinking the wine I’d opened

75

for us, looking toward the calla garden and the tiny, empty campground, and the sea.

But sacred places have compelling gravity, and eight years after Ford’s death I returned to the Lost Coast, alone.

This time I was the one who negotiated the road I’d never imagined I could drive. The greater challenge, though, lay ahead: when I’d booked a little house in Shelter Cove for spring break, I hadn’t realized it was the same one.

Panic thus, in the driveway. But dark was falling. And I had work to do for the next five days – writing with a deadline much too close. And I felt, suddenly, the ache of Ford’s longing for this thrice-lost coast. So I stayed.

I wrote the next day and the next, there in that pretty room with its view of the sea, thinking of how he could write no more, telling myself I was writing for both of us. One afternoon I blinked myself awake from many hours of words flowing, of problems solving themselves, to realize that the light was fading.

On other days I explored, daring myself to fight down apprehension as I was fighting down loneliness, fancying that Ford just might be able still to see this wild landscape with my eyes. I drove logging roads to a trailhead and climbed King Peak on a lowering day when the path shone with mud, its roots and rocks slippery, its hemming trees dark. No place, objectively, for a solitary woman in her fifties. When I emerged onto the open summit and a hawk soared above, though, I knew I’d been right to come.

How could anyone ever really know this country?

76

The vastness below me made me gasp: the maze of canyons and cliffs, the declivities black with trees and brush. Once off trail here, a person could disappear forever. And the place’s mysteries lay not merely on the surface – out below the sea, at a spot I fancied I could see, three tectonic plates intersected in an unimaginable epicenter of dormant power.

The next day I hiked north up the Lost Coast trail, slogging through cobbles and black sand that made my ten-mile out-and-back seem like twenty. This was hardly the untraveled beach we’d imagined. Six backpacking parties began on their own spring break traverses, a pair of young women trudged with kayaks strapped to their backs. With little of my own to carry, though, I outpaced them all and chose the sea’s pounding for company. And the rocks bristling with Cormorants. And the skimming Murres. And the deer that came down to dabble in the tide pools and the tiny little bear that fled up a brushy creek. And the bone-deep, inexplicable joy.

On the last night, I returned from sunset pilgrimage past the calla garden, now punctuated with deep blue shrub rosemary, and sat again on the stoop with a glass of wine.

We’d been naive to think we could learn the Lost Coast in a week…or a lifetime. All the secret places I’d glimpsed in the past few days simply beckoned on into remoter mysteries, extended paths.

Maybe we would get to come back around, I fancied, lifting my glass. Maybe, just maybe, we might have another crack at all this.

Then Ford’s voice sounded in my head – so definitively, so cheerfully that I startled, and then laughed aloud, there alone in the moonlight.

“New country’s always good,” he said.

77