In the Santa Cruz mountains is a little town called Felton. It's a cute place nestled in the hilly redwoods and is the last bit of civilization you'll see if you're headed deep into the mountains. The mountains are filled with dark valleys, tall cliffed and blanketed in trees, the denizens tending to be a mix of soccer moms and the self-declared pariahs of society. People who prefer to keep to themselves for one reason or another.

Far down the road, past Quail Hollow and the new old firehouse, there's a fork in the road that will take you right to Zayante, or left to Lompico. Lompico is the place I was raised, where my first memories come from.

It's the most peaceful place I've ever been. Nights there were utterly silent, if you forgave the occasional illegal deer hunting that went on. The number of street lights in the entire valley could be counted on one hand and not with all of it. The houses were packed tightly closer to the stream at the base of the valley, and became more sparse as you went up the mountain, with my family's house being near the very top.

Near the pinnacle, the roads were no longer paved, and instead became poorly maintained dirt roads with a sheer drop on one side and wide enough to let one car through. If you followed the road around the corner from my home, about a quarter mile up you could see clear down to the Pacific Ocean and across the bay to Monterey.

At night, if you could find a clear spot away from the trees, you could see the milky way splashed across the sky like cosmically vomited diamonds. My girlfriend at the time hated that simile.

There is only one road in and out of the valley, going alongside the stream. There are no sidewalks, and the turns are largely blind. There used to be a bus service in the 80s but it had long since become defunct. Felton was about five miles away.

I would often take my dog and explore the valley. I'd heard many rumors about strange people deep in the valley. I found a goat farm once, nestled by the stream near the end of the road. I'd heard there was a nudist colony, or that some global conspiracy had a meeting house hidden somewhere. My neighbors ran some kind of witch's temple.

Oh and of course there were lots of drugs. Occasionally you would find a barbed wire fence with a violent warning hung up barely concealing illegal plants. I'd heard that a local autistic boy in the 80s would dress in camoflage and tac gear and go hunting for them to rat them out to the authorities. I'd heard in the 60s that the whole valley was a headquarters for the Hell's Angels' drug operation.

When I was last there, I lived off the grid with my family on a piece of property we owned. Without constant access to a lot of the amenities of civilization that one normally takes for granted, I found myself living both my most and least anxious life.

I dream of it often. I dream of impossibly steep roads that wind and dance up the mountain into the sky. I dream of a quiet dilapidated trailer that served as home, still there after so many years. I dream of quiet.

On our last day there, I woke to the strange cries of an animal I'd never heard before or since. I followed it up the mountain to an old water tank that had once served the old old firehouse of the valley at the turn of the 20th century. I peered in and discovered them to be the cries of raccoons, who had crawled in and become trapped.

My Dad and I carried a big piece of plywood up the hill to the tank and dropped it in. When I came to check on it a few minutes later, they had escaped.

That was the last thing I ever did in Santa Cruz.