The Road That Shouldn't Be There

Sometimes I think I've seen everything. But I never will.

One day many years ago, I found myself driving home to Santa Cruz on Highway 17 around mid-day. I don't remember the errand; a job interview, possibly.

Highway 17, also known "That @(#$*@ing Highway 17," would need a book to describe. In fact, somebody wrote one. Suffice it to say that Highway 17 climbs and descends 1800 feet or so in about fifteen miles. It is a narrow ledge hacked into the side of mountains.

People drive Highway 17 like a freeway, but it is not one, at least not through the mountains. The curves are sharp and sudden -- traps for the unwary that flip cars or bounce them off the center barrier . The shoulders, in places, are nonexistent. Perhaps two feet separate the inner lane from the center barrier. The speed limit is 50, and rightly so; but few keep it.

Fifty thousand Santa Cruzans commute daily over this eccentric strip of asphalt. Rhumba and I did, for years. And if I had it to do all over again -- I wouldn't.

But at noon, traffic is light. I'd made the summit with no trauma, and was descending to the Glenwood Cutoff through a series of sharp s-curves. The roadbed is narrow there: two lanes, a barrier in the middle, and no shoulder. Just a vertical wall of dirt two feet from the outside lane.

And just at that moment, the Japanese sports sedan in front of me began to scream.

It was the hoarse, basso scream of locked brakes, of melting tires giving up their rubber. The rear end of the sedan swung forward and threw the car into a spin. Black smoke spewed from all four wheels.

Spinning end for end, the sedan continued to hurtle forward. Never quite touching the center barrier or the outer wall. Twice it revolved, three times, six times, now nearly invisible in a cloud of burnt rubber. And the tires screamed and screamed. As I followed behind at a safe distance, my eyes like dinner plates.

But gradually, the car slowed and on the eighth revolution its rear end hit the dirt embankment and it stopped, nose sticking out into the road. And there was no shoulder at all there, none. And we were in the middle of a blind curve.

There was nothing to do but the right thing. I pulled in behind the sedan and hopped out on the roadway, half expecting some car to flatten me at any second. But again, traffic was light, so approaching drivers had the leeway to swing wide. And, thank God, they did. Though not one slowed down.

I knocked on the driver's window of the beleaguered car. Its engine was still turning over. The tinted window slid down; behind it sat a middle-aged woman in a suit, She wore a cell-phone headset. A briefcase and a stack of binders lay scattered on the passenger seat: she was a businesswoman, perhaps a lawyer or successful realtor. And her face had gone white as a sheet.

"What happened?" I shouted over the traffic noise.

"I don't know," she said, voice unsteady. "The brakes just locked up on me."

"Are you okay?!"

"I think so."

"I can drive you somewhere for help!"

"No. I can drive. I"ll go down the road a little ways and park. I can call people if I need to."

I asked her if she was sure, and she was. Though I wasn't. But I got back in my car and she pulled out. I followed her closely for a while until we came to a turnout, a mini-parking lot by the side of the road for distressed motorists. She pulled over, out of danger, and I left her.

This incident ranks low in the great scheme of things. Though I can still hear those tires shriek: like elephants in agony. And I still wonder what failed: the car, or the driver's nerves as she, perhaps, rushed into a tight curve too quickly. It's easy to do that on 17.

In these parts, everybody has a Highway 17 story: stories of accidents, near accidents, overturned big rigs, crushed cars bent over the center barrier, wooden-faced emergency crews drawing the shroud over motionless forms. Sometimes it's funny: a truck spills hard candy across the road, completely paralyzing traffic until the road crews pick it all up.

But mostly, it's not funny. People die. And even when they don't, crossing the Hill is a little ordeal that thousands must undergo twice a day just to pay the bills for what they're told is a "normal" life.

So it's no surprise that the locals gave Highway 17's curves and features the kind of terse names that befit some grim battlefield: Glenwood Cutoff, where cars coming onto the road risk being t-boned by drivers screaming out of a big fast curve; the Summit, a long straight, level stretch at the top of the mountain that lures the unwary into thinking that the worst is over; Valley Surprise, a sharp descending curve at the north end of the Summit where centrifugal force tries to pull you off the road; Little Moody Curve; The Cats; Lexington Reservoir.

And Big Moody Curve, a 270-degree monster so notorious, so tight and steep and nasty in the downhill direction that it has its own web page. Big Moody Curve is a truck-flipper, a tight-knuckled exercise in adrenalin secretion where the center divide bears the long black scars of many past accidents. The individual sections of Big Moody Curve are banked -- but in the wrong direction, so that Big Moody pushes you at the center barrier on the downhill, and off the shoulder on the uphill.

And yet, nobody faults the highway department for this horrible road. They shouldn't. Caltrans does the best it can to stabilize the road cuts (which often slide), improve the safety barriers, install road surfaces that improve traction, and so on.

But there's only so much they can do. Highway 17 must conform to the shape of the shifting, creaky, unstable mountains whose sides it clings to. And it was never designed to carry tens of thousands of commuters a day -- which was never in the plans until, against all odds, Santa Cruz became a suburb of Silicon Valley for individuals who want the Valley money and the Santa Cruz lifestyle.

Only, they don't get the lifestyle, much. They spend an hour getting to work, work nine hours, and spend another hour getting home -- or more, if there's an accident. Because there's so little spare space, any accident anywhere on 17 routinely adds 20 minutes to the commute, at least. At that point, there's barely enough energy left to nuke a dinner and collapse in front on the TV once you get home, much less trip on downtown and hang out at a trendy cafe with your friends.

Rhumba and I commuted over The Hill for years. And then we figured out that we weren't really living in Santa Cruz: just sleeping in it. For me the defining moment came when I realized that I hadn't gone down to the ocean in months. Though we live only a mile away.

So I got a job over here in Santa Cruz, and Rhumba wangled a telecommute gig. And we left the Hill behind. We still drive it occasionally, and the old adrenaline comes right back every time.

Highway 17 -- the Hill -- is a road that isn't supposed to be there, but which is Santa Cruz' only link to a high-tech economy that it once could live without, but now cannot. It is the great conundrum of Santa Cruz: a city that prides itself on participation and humanism, yet is increasingly home to people who don't participate and have little time to express their humanity.

You can slap a "Keep Santa Cruz Weird" sticker on your beemer, if you like, as hundreds have done. But the only real way to do it is to give up that damned Highway 17 and start living in the town that you profess to love.

And if you have no choice, may the universe watch over you. But you might be better off moving to San Jose.