Devil's Slide
Several years ago, my wife and I closed our chiropractic clinic in the city for the day and took her mother on a road trip. My mother-in-law, from the flat world of Nebraska, was a few years away, at that time, from retiring as a chiropractor, herself. She’s a very nice person and somewhat adventurous for someone who seldom ventured out of the Midwest. In fact, she had an aversion to only two things as far as I knew — heights and bridges, both seemingly easily avoidable in the entire state of Nebraska. So it seemed incongruous to me that she wanted to take a drive along Highway 1, which we all know can be treacherous in parts. In fact, our destination that day was Devil’s Slide.
As it turned out, she’d recently rented the movie, “Portrait in Black,” and she wanted to see the spot where Anthony Quinn and Lana Turner sent a car containing her husband’s dead body over a cliff. My wife and I shrugged, and we were on our way. My Volvo weaved through a dense eucalyptus grove, ascended a steep incline, passed through a jagged gap between two steep rock walls, and emerged onto that familiar ribbon of clifftop roadway known as Devil’s Slide.
If you’ve driven along this stretch of Highway 1, you know that it is spectacularly treacherous or treacherously spectacular. But, anyway you say it, it is definitely heart-stoppingly beautiful. The windy bluff juts into the ocean at that point and seems as if it is suspended in mid-air. As we began our descent, gray-blue expanses of ocean, 500 feet below us, swept past the car windows. We were often forced to veer near-fatally close to the cliff’s edge. But, to my amazement, though I found myself white-knuckling the steering wheel, the only sound from my mother-in-law was a slightly audible, sustained expression of “awe.”
The drive only lasted five minutes, but my mother-in-law talked about it for the remainder of her visit with us. And, I have to admit, I was pretty awe-struck myself. Devil’s Slide is only ten miles south of the city, but for just a brief moment, a person feels in a whole different time and place.
If you haven’t been there yet, you’ll need to take a drive there soon because in 2011, the two tunnels that are currently being drilled into the bordering mountain, will open to traffic, and Devil’s Slide will be closed to vehicles. It is expected to be kept open as a path for pedestrians and cyclists, but the thrill of having your car’s tires skim the outside edge of the cliff will be a thing of past.
Comments
great post thanks for the great info.