EUREKA, Calif. — "Congratulations," said a man I met along the shore of Humboldt Bay. "You've managed to penetrate the Redwood Curtain."
I laughed because I hadn't heard that expression since I lived here, 25 years ago. Back then, this North Coast outpost of vast and noble redwood forests, handsomely restored Victorians and lonely driftwood beaches seemed impossibly remote from the Bay area.
Breaching the Redwood Curtain meant negotiating Highway 101 as it dwindled to a potholed, two-lane road that twisted in and out of river canyons and slalomed around individual redwood trees. I always seemed to drive it alone, at night, in the ever-present drizzle, with huge logging trucks flashing their brights in my rear-view mirror. It always left me jangled and drained, and it made Humboldt County feel 1,000 miles from San Francisco, rather than the 250 it is.
But state transportation officials have been busy over the intervening quarter-century, straightening the worst of the curves and transforming the road, for the most part, into a modern, four-lane highway. It's shaved close to an hour off the drive and untold wear from drivers' nerves.
But the notion of the Redwood Curtain persists, and Humboldt County remains a place apart — separated by landscape and culture, if not distance, from the rest of California. It's a place where you can stand in the silent cathedral of a redwood grove and then sit down to a Paul Bunyan-size supper at the last logging-camp cookhouse in North America. Where, in the same day, you can wander among the finest collection of Victorian mansions in North America and drive right up to a herd of startlingly large Roosevelt elk. Where you can buy still-gesticulating Dungeness crabs right off the boat or salmon smoked over alder according to a traditional Yurok Indian recipe. And where, once a year, you can witness the Dali-esque spectacle of immense and whimsical works of art racing one another across the landscape.
The Kinetic Sculpture Race, held over the Memorial Day weekend, is as good an excuse as any to peek behind the Redwood Curtain. Picture the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade combined with the television show "Junkyard Wars" and the Paris-to-Dakar rally. On the Saturday before Memorial Day, three-dozen colossal, mobile objets d'art — armadillos, flying saucers, dragons, mermaids and many that defy description — will set off from the central plaza in Arcata for the Victorian hamlet of Ferndale, 38 miles to the south.
"It's the triathlon of the art world," said Bill Croft, the race's executive director. Almost never is the first across the finish line declared the winner. The trophy is awarded according to an obscure formula apparently known only to the judges and those who bribe them. Audacity and panache are prized over speed. "Plus, we encourage people to cheat," said Croft.
The gingerbread village of Ferndale, with its gaily painted storefronts and lavishly gabled Victorians, is almost too perfect to believe. If it looks instantly familiar, it's because it is often Hollywood's go-to location whenever it needs an idyllic small town. "The Majestic" and "Outbreak" are among the movies and television shows filmed here. Known locally as "butterfat palaces," the Victorians were built at the turn of the last century by immigrant dairy farmers who grew wealthy grazing their herds along the fertile bottomland of the Eel River delta.
Typical of the town's showpieces is the grand old manor where we spent the night. The Collingwood Inn Bed and Breakfast is an 1885 Italianate-style home with Queen Anne windows on Main Street; it once served as the town's hospital. The owners, San Francisco refugees Chris Hanks and Peter Consello, have restored and furnished it smartly with the full Victorian treatment.
Humboldt County is speckled with redwood forests, but there was one in particular I yearned to see. The Headwaters Forest, 15 miles southeast of Eureka, was the subject of a bitter, decadelong struggle between environmentalists, the Pacific Lumber Co. and various government agencies. It finally ended when the public ponied up $380 million to buy and preserve the 7,400 acres of old-growth redwoods. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and what we got for our money.
One drizzly morning I set out on foot along a muddy logging road with two personable young rangers from the federal Bureau of Land Management, Emily Evans and Julie Clark. These interpretive hikes, which are free to the public, are the only way to see the Headwaters. The gates are locked, and you're not allowed to walk in on your own. And here's the biggest surprise: You can walk to an overlook where you can view the Headwaters Forest from a distance, but you can't actually set foot in it.
"That's the hardest part for us to explain," said Evans. "People put in all the effort to save the forest, they did the protests and they put up the money, and now they can't go in and hug the trees." It's to preserve the threatened marbled murrelet and coho salmon. "This was set aside not for us," Evans said, "but for the creatures who live there."
Instead, the hike reveals the effects of logging and the regrowth of forests. An hour of mostly downhill walking through spindly red alders, second-growth redwoods and Douglas firs that soared to 275 feet brought us to a clearing. There, a quarter-mile away on the far side of Salmon Creek, was the famous Headwaters Forest. I don't imagine I'll get a gold star from the Sierra Club for saying this, but from this distance it looked pretty much like every other redwood forest I've seen.
"It's a unique and special habitat," conceded Evans, "but, frankly, there are much better places to see redwoods up-close." She recommended the Rockefeller Grove in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, the world's largest grove of old-growth redwoods.
Twenty minutes' drive from Arcata, near the cheerful company town of Samoa, stands the Samoa Cookhouse, the last logging-camp cookhouse in North America. Opened in 1894, it began serving the public alongside the lumberjacks and mill workers in the 1960s. Today it serves only the public — tourists, mostly — but it does so in staggering volume: 600 people a day in summer.
I was seated at a long table with a red-checkered tablecloth, and as others came in they joined me at the table.
After a huge meal, our our waiter returned with two armfuls of apple pie, he said, "I hoped you saved room for dessert." No, but we gobbled it down anyway.
The next day, with my seat belt uncomfortably snug, I drove north to Trinidad, a village perched on a rocky, wave-battered bluff above Trinidad Bay. Once a raucous port serving gold mines along the Klamath, Trinity and Salmon rivers, it's now an agreeably somnolent village populated by a few hundred fishermen and artists. There I found a Trinidad institution: Katy's Smokehouse, a ramshackle little stand that has been doing business here since the early 1940s. The current owner, Judy Lake, buys king salmon and other fish off the boats in Trinidad harbor and puts them through a laborious process of brining, drying, seasoning and smoking for three days over alder wood, according to a recipe founder Katy State obtained from the local Yurok Indians.
"We do it in small batches," Lake said. "If we get too big, we'll lose what makes it special."
She sells a little to the upscale Dean & Deluca shop in St. Helena, but otherwise there's only one way to taste what one reviewer called "the best smoked fish you'll ever eat" — you have to venture behind the Redwood Curtain.