Orr Springs Road

Orr Springs Road is both an incredibly beautiful and treacherous. It was one of the first roads from the valley of Ukiah to the coastal town of Mendocino. In fact, it used to be the stagecoach road. When I first started driving it in the early seventies, only the first four miles west of Ukiah were paved, as well as the last two miles to Mendocino. In the winter, the road would get squirrelly, and cars would slide off the road. One time as I followed my then husband to town in the rain, his truck slid off the road right in front of me.

In the summer, the road became a washboard and the dust covered our windshields like a blanket. We wore out cars like wearing out cheap shoes. Some people didn’t want the road to be paved, because they feared that doing so would make it so everyone and their brother would come live out in the hills with us. When it was still a dirt road, city slickers who didn’t want to get dust on their car would never take our road. It scared the shit out of people who were from flat places like Chicago and Phoenix. To this day, people drive off the road all the time—some to their deaths. There are still places where the road is only a single lane, and if there are two vehicles, one of the vehicles has to slow down or stop to allow the other car to pass.

As a little girl in the early eighties, my daughter, Christina, would sit on her step-dad’s lap and “drive” his Volkswagen bug up and down the hill. Both her and her brother, Calvin, became incredibly familiar with Orr Springs Road. When Christina finally got her learner’s permit at age fifteen and a half, driving up Orr Springs Road was a snap. Her challenge was driving in town, parallel parking, especially the freeway. Now that was scary.