Navigating California's hidden coast

I could feel our trip being ripped from my grasp. "Perhaps we could go sometime in late August," my friend Marilyn Wilens is saying. Our invitation for a two-week visit with her at her home on the northern coast of California is about to go up in smoke.

I was raised in Southern California and the ocean is in my DNA. "How about going next week?" I blurt into the telephone. "I suppose we could," she said so with our mutual friend Marilyn Shreve in one car and Orllyene, my wife, and me in the other, away we go.

Because grocery prices are perilously high on the coast, Marilyn W. suggests we rendezvous at Ray's supermarket in Cloverdale and stock up, turn onto Highway 128 and head into the hills.

At Boonville the "2 Marilyns car" turns onto a shortcut. We're on a logging road and completely off the radar. It takes us two hours to go just 62 miles. Finally, we emerge among a scattering of modest farmhouses and meet the ocean in all its glory. We are in the town of Elk on a remote stretch of the California coastline.

We turn south on Highway 1 and have the road all to ourselves. A gossamer haze of mist flows up and over us, dissipating as it rises. Pastures are dotted with grazing cattle and big red barns snuggle up to the road looking very Norman Rockwell.

A sign reads "Irish Beach." We've arrived. Marilyn W.'s house sits high atop a steep slope that slides directly down to a series of tidal pools. There's nothing but open sky between the house and the ocean. Hearing the rumble of the surf and inhaling the cool salt air puts us all in a very happy mood. As days pass, the deck becomes our favorite gathering place. Some days are bright and sunny, others gray and gloomy and of course the ocean changes accordingly from sapphire, to teal, to pewter. On the humorous side, formations of imperious looking brown pelicans drift by and on signal all glide to wave top level, never flapping a wing.

Morning brings a clear view of Manchester Beach and after breakfast we leave Irish Beach and drive down through a ravine filled with alders and ferns. I am learning to love the aloneness of this stretch of coastline. Massive logs and grotesque stumps clutter the beach. I study the waves. They crest, break, become billions of tiny bubbles then turn to white froth and in seconds vanish. Time soon becomes irrelevant.

Our first foray away from Irish Beach takes us to Mendocino, or Cabot Cove as it's known on "Murder She Wrote." Mendocino is Carmel-by-the-Sea's country cousin.

Yes, there are art galleries and gift shops, a French restaurant and even a doggy day care but the pace is slow, slow, slow. Mendocino sits on a headland with water on three sides. The wind comes at it full force. Gardens bursting with fuchsias, foxglove, daisies, and flowering vines are everywhere.We choose the resplendent Mendocino Hotel for lunch and dine in nautical elegance.

Point Arena is 15 miles south of Irish Beach and slices across a hillside for about eight blocks. It has a 1930s look to it. I park the car in front of a two-story wood house painted purple and lavender with an enormous yellow circle in the center. This is an art gallery. Several concrete buildings have their dates embossed on them. I pass a yoga studio and an organic restaurant and the 2 girls and a grill cafe. I ramble on, seeming to be the only person in town. I pause outside the Druid Senior Center and a sign tells me that a spaghetti dinner will be held on Friday night, $5. I had no idea Druids were fond of spaghetti. A sign reads "Zen House, the art of motorcycle maintenance." It's more of a salon than a garage. Pony-tailed Dave is tinkering with a Ducati. We chat, or at least I do but we have soon exhausted the possibility of further discourse. I cross over to Franny's Cup & Saucer. No need to look both ways, there isn't a car in sight. When I step into Franny's I feel like I just stepped through Alice in Wonderland's looking glass. A combination bakery and gift shop, Franny's is filled with trinkets and toys. Franny is a vivacious brunette and the place is packed with bakery groupies. She calls everyone by name as they enter. In a glass case on the counter are orange meringue tarts, wedges of cake with layers of cream, cherry-rhubarb pie and chocolate disks, each with a real rose petal on top. Clearly Franny has found a way to be an artist and at the same time be commercially successful (frannyscupandsaucer.com).

Two days before we leave, Marilyn S., Orllyene and I take a trip to the Elk Town Museum, open 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Prue Wilcox is the museum docent and Elk's answer to Old Faithful of Yellowstone. Prue gives us a full account of Elk's heyday, the lumbering that went on, the coastal schooners that plied the coast between San Francisco and Monterey and how all of the mules used over the years had the same name, Maude.

The grand finale of this oceanic tale is a description of the single most beautiful stretch of highway I found, the Elk Coast. This ribbon of land is sheltered by a forest cresting a ridge of hills, then grasslands to the highway and beyond that a jagged stretch of rockbound coast. Elk (pop. 482) rests indiscriminately along the highway and features the Greenwood Pier Inn. A group of shingle-sided cottages with Bali overtones hover on a bluff just a few feet from the ocean. Drowning in burgeoning flower beds, the setting is unimaginably beautiful. Patches of lawn connect the cottages. Statues, artworks and fountains are placed randomly to attract the eye. The sound of the ocean crashing against the cliffs is rhapsodic. An unintended eye catcher is a trellis that frames a gigantic rock just offshore with a carved hole at waterline

California's hidden coast combines the green of Ireland, the solitude of the Western Highlands of Scotland and the majesty of the world's largest ocean. Getting there is definitely a challenge but the end is well justified by the means.

Ron Walker lives in Smith Valley.