GAYE LEBARON: Beyond Redwood Curtain to another Humboldt

As a first-time traveler, driving north from the Bay Area on Highway 101, you may wonder for the first 200 miles just why this particular road is known as the Redwood Highway.

Then you cross a bridge over the south fork of the Eel River, passing from Mendocino to Humboldt County and, within a few miles, everything changes.

The road gets very narrow — two lanes, but barely — as it passes between enormous trees, wider than your automobile, that hug you as if they were reaching out to draw you into their cathedral of sunlight and shadow.

You have entered Richardson Grove, where Caltrans is now four years into its plans to make a wider road.

It should not surprise you to learn that several environmental organizations have mounted a public campaign to stop the realignment.

Foremost among them is EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center based in Arcata, which is part of a coalition that is suing to see that it doesn't happen.

This grove was "saved" by the state in 1922, even before the highway was completed. Early conservationists, fearing "potential destruction of the trees by highway construction and logging," persuaded the state to protect the grove. It takes its name from the 1920s governor, Friend Richardson.

EPIC's website describes the trees as "the famous redwood curtain that has kept the county from becoming another exit along the superhighway of modern development."

Proponents of the new, straighter 1.1-mile stretch of highway would, indeed, argue that the present road is a stumbling block for commercial hauling. And they would like to see that "curtain" EPIC talks about lifted to allow for economic growth in an area impacted by the loss of the timber industry.

I THOUGHT ABOUT all this when I drove north earlier this month, about how awesome this passage into the forest is, even for those of us who have passed that way countless times.

Conversations lapse. We turn the music down. And, if we aren't in one of Humboldt's famous rainstorms, might roll the windows down to breathe that first scent of redwood, which, once you've experienced it, is unmistakable.

ON THIS TRIP I was on my way to a unique reunion of people who have lived in five communities in southern Humboldt — Pepperwood, Shively, Holmes Flat, Larabee and Redcrest. Four of these virtually washed away in the disastrous Eel River floods of 1964. Redcrest, being on top of a hill, is the exception.

I lived in Redcrest for the first 11 years of my life, went to school in Holmes Flat, shopped in Pepperwood and knew families that lived in all five.

Many of them I had not seen for 60 years or more.

I would guess that about 200 people gathered in a redwood grove behind the old Pacific Lumber Company mill in Scotia, including people I went to school with in a one-room school in Holmes and people whose families knew my family - like the grandchildren of my mother's best friend.

The first surprise was that we recognized each other. It had to have been family resemblances. You realize later that this person you hadn't seen since you were 11 years old looked just like her mother or his father or even an aunt looked the last time you saw them.

Each of us, as Thomas Wolfe so pithily suggested, "is all the sums he has not counted."

So, for five hours that Sunday, my childhood passed before my eyes.

What, you may ask, could I possibly have to talk about with people I knew only as children?

We talked about whose mother made the best whipped cream cakes the Grange Hall had ever known.

My first "best friend" and I talked about the time she pulled my pigtail and we had a hair-pulling tussle right alongside Highway 101 and a passing CHP officer, who knew us by name, stopped and delivered us to our parents. We were all of 6 years old.

We remembered the herpetology lesson we got when some of the "big boys," sixth grade and up, captured a large gopher snake on the playground in the act of swallowing a frog.

Followed by a flock of all us young'uns, they rushed it through a hole in the fence to the house next door, put it on the chopping block and chopped fore and aft the bulge moving down through the snake. And the frog hopped away.

All these years I've thought I was the only one who remembered that — or even imagined it — but not so.

We talked about playing all-age "work-ups" (not softball; we had no such animal) on the pitted and lumpy pastureland that served as our diamond.

We talked about swimming at the Women's Club Grove, which we called, and still call, "Gladwood;" about the time spent on our family friends' ranch across the river at Larabee; about climbing the tree over the hog pen to pick (and eat) Bing cherries (this explains why, when I eat a Bing now, there's a subtle whiff of pig sty); about riding along to drop "green feed" to the cattle; about taking a dare to touch the electric fence.