Project Paradise: The Bell Springs Experience

I came away from this weekend’s mini-gathering up here on Bell Springs Road, with not only some pleasant memories, but the fourth and final manuscript that my mother Pauline wrote in the autumn of her life. My sister Laura had a box of various individual manuscripts, but advised me that we would need to be thinking about having additional copies made from the original type-written document.

“Project Paradise: The Bell Springs Experience” is a 106-page narrative of my parents’ move from The San Gabriel Valley in SoCal, to Northern Mendocino County, in the summer of 1977. It covers not only the events leading up to the great escape, but the early years as well, detailing the trials and tribulations of the pioneer members of our community here on the mountain.

I had a copy at one point, obviously lent it to someone, and never got it back. I have Mama’s first three manuscripts, describing first her childhood, then the period during WWII and how it impacted her family, and finally, the story of Fellowship Street, the home of my upbringing.

She has a lively "voice" and her personality shines through her words vividly. I find it’s just like sitting across from her and chatting, as I did a thousand times over the last sixteen years she lived here on the mountain, after Robert had passed. 

Writing both from memory and from correspondence she kept from the period, Mama details how she and Papa forged a new life, with much support from family, friends and neighbors. As I reread her words, I zeroed in on one passage, because though it is relayed in the most broad of terms, the event in question had much more happening behind the scenes.

Click on this photo to enlarge the passage.

“The next morning we headed up the road (which we had learned was called Bell Springs Road) to our Paradise, where Mark had agreed to meet us on this day.”

It was mid-August, 1976, and the folks, along with youngest family members Laura and Kevin, had traveled from SoCal up the coastline, and arrived near where Branscomb Road intersects with Highway 1. They stayed a couple of days, and when they woke up on the day they were heading up to Bell Springs, they encountered morning drizzle. The party pulled up stakes and headed up to the property.

To their astonishment it was raining inland as well, in a rare August downpour. Pulling onto the land and taking a quick look-see, revealed heaps of downed, dead manzanita wood, which would provide excellent heat-if they could start a fire in the rain.

With the help of a “vast quantity of Coleman fuel,” the task was accomplished, because that is what Nancy, my first wife, and I found when we pulled into the site, around nine o’clock that night, just as it was getting dark.

The funny thing is, however, that we did not approach our Paradise from the south, coming up the five miles from The 101, but rather, from the north. Stop me if you have heard this story before, but the VW bus I was driving, had spun a rod bearing right up there near Hayfork, in the same neck of the woods as Mount Shasta.

Desperate to avoid the nightmare of having Old Paint towed all the way back to San Jose, I found that if I kept my speed under 20 miles per hour or so, I could limp along with the engine clattering like a lawnmower clipping gravel.

It was ugly but after googling a map of Northern California, we were good to go, following dirt roads down the center of California.

The author of Mark's Work, in 1976

Googling in 1976 meant taking our outdated roadmap out of the glovebox, and noting that a gray line existed from Mount Shasta down the center of California, merging with our very own Bell Springs Road at some vague intersection in the middle of nowhere.

Five different times during the approximate fifty-mile journey, we stopped travelers and asked for directions. All five times we were redirected back to a spot where we had guessed at a fork in the road-and guessed wrong. At least we were consistent.

There was no way to communicate because the ‘rents had been camping and we had been traveling, with no destinations that could have been pre-planned. How primitive it all sounds, with no cell phones and no internet, and yet we got along. Who’d a guessed?

So indeed, when we climbed out of Old Paint after ten hours of off-roading, the bonfire and camp-food were welcome. No one seemed to mind the rain. It was to be almost another year before my parents made the final move up to the mountain, but this early scene remains indelibly stamped on the etch-a-sketch of my razor-sharp mind.

Thanks for the memories, Mama.