In Santa Cruz, mystery only adds to the magic
At the self-described “gravitational anomaly” known as the Mystery Spot, our guide wielded a carpenter’s level like a magic wand, revealing a stream of water that appeared to run uphill. He asked our group to practice saying “Ooh” and “Ah,” before conducting us in a chorus of amazement. “At the center of the anomaly,” the teenager explained, hamming it up, “the normal rules of gravity and physics will cease to apply.”
Built in 1941, the roadside attraction set on a steep, wooded incline in Santa Cruz, is a prime example of what’s known as a “tilt box” — a hillside structure built to intensify visual illusion. We marveled at a billiard ball rolling backward and snapped photos of each other standing at seemingly impossible angles. We knew there had to be a trick. We didn’t want to know the trick.
When my husband and I packed up our high school senior daughter and her friend for a long weekend, college admissions were just beginning to trickle in and uncertainty was thick in the air. Our son, midway through his second year at UC Santa Cruz, had only slightly more information about college life than his younger sister. Because of pandemic-related restrictions, he had completed his first year at home, and although he now lived on campus, online classes had kept him isolated from many of the rituals and routines that had been part of my own college experience.
Weary from the effort of getting back to normal — whatever that was — we left much of the trip planning to kismet and synchronicity, grateful for a chance to lose ourselves in the magic generated by anomalies, towering redwoods and sea air.
We’d found a wee brick-colored beach cottage on Airbnb that presented a cozier alternative to double hotel rooms and tilted us toward whimsy. “When you stay in the house, you are literally meeting my grandparents,” said owner Kelsey Hammond, who, after inheriting the place at age 23, got a quick lesson in deferred maintenance, building codes and construction. “It was herculean,” she says of the renovation. “But 20 years later, this is still where we feel love.” We didn’t need to stage a séance to feel the legacy of good vibes.
Just steps from the sand, the cottage and others like it owe their continued existence to a historic preservation plan adopted by the city of Santa Cruz in 1974. The plan, which places limits on demolition and construction, turns a drive down any street into a survey of commercial and residential architecture dating from the mid-1800s to the present and adds a layer of interest to eating out.
On a search for dinner, we were drawn in by the eye-catching redand-green paint job on a repurposed 1950s ice cream stand, and we found ourselves at Charlie Hong Kong, an Asian fusion hot spot in Year 25 of its mission to create healthy, sustainable food. My vegan daughter, delighted by the plant-based menu options, devoured a bowl of spicy peanut noodles with tofu. Nearly all bowls were priced under $10 and big enough to share, which left a little room in the budget for a trip to the Penny Ice Creamery for locally churned ice cream served out of a Spanish Revival-style complex with wrought-iron details and a red tile roof.
We started our second day with a spin past the Red Brick Castle. Built in the 1940s by Kenneth Kitchen, the estate is a mashup of Turkish and South Asian influences, with recurring arches, towering spires, and loads of abalone and tile inlay. Long the subject of curiosity and conjecture, the abandoned property was purchased and restored by Artina Morton and her husband, Douglas Harr, before being put back on the market. The private residence remains a monument to creativity and self-expression and is worth a sidewalk gander.
Our tour of the unexplained continued at the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, where proprietor Mike Rugg was only too happy to regale us with tales of his life-defining childhood Bigfoot sighting. After a circuitous career path that included building hammer dulcimers and a stint “pushing pixels” in Silicon Valley, Rugg followed his heart and opened the museum in 2004. Along with a diorama of Bigfoot in the wilderness, the collection includes plaster footprint casts, pop-culture items, photographs and assorted ephemera. As we spoke, Rugg pulled out a 37-page term paper on the existence of the elusive biped, written while he was a student at Stanford. “My professor told me I hadn’t made my case,” he said, reading aloud the comment written below the scrawled C grade. “Anything is possible,” he said. “I gave myself permission to believe.”
Hoping to add our own pin to Rugg’s map of Bigfoot sightings, we charted a course for Pogonip Open Space Preserve. Set on 640 acres alongside the UC Santa Cruz campus, the park boasts more than 11 miles of trails, including the multiuse track named for trail advocate and equestrian Emmy McCrary.
With the kids on map duty, we began at a trailhead near my son’s dorm and headed downhill toward the oak-sheltered Spring Trail. Connecting with Spring Box Trail and keeping our fingers crossed for Bigfoot or the rumored secret koi pond, we eventually paused where three old-growth redwoods, too gnarly to be cut during the logging binge of the 1800s, stand guard over a square cement-lined pond known as a “spring box.” Catching a flash of orange beneath the water’s surface, my daughter dropped to her knees to admire the blaze of fin and tail.
Similarly colored, but rarer than goldfish in the forest, are the flowers of the plant genus Banksia in the Australian gardens at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum & Botanic Garden. Sprawling over 135 acres, this “living museum” focuses on the preservation and protection of rare and unique plants from around the world. While the pincushion Protea flower was recognizable from grocery story bouquets, other examples, such as the furry, pinkish teddy bear banksia, seemed straight out of science fiction. These jagged-leaf plants and shrubs with their Seussian blooms are built to survive fire. Some, like the Banksia serrata, have large seed pods that open like clamshells in extreme heat, while others sprout new foliage from a scorched base.
On our last evening, my husband and I wandered the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The kids, full of their own agency, appeared and disappeared. Above us, the bright, twirling ride known as the Sea Swings began another rotation. With its cargo of humans reaching arms and legs toward the sunset, it was reminiscent of the needlelike petals of the banksia flowers. Just beyond the lights of the midway, the ocean lay dark and unknowable. The bark of distant sea lions echoed over the water, easily discernible despite the roar of the Giant Dipper coaster. I was struck by the slim line between the natural and artificial worlds of Santa Cruz. I felt held there in a worry-free zone, where questions about the future stretched only as far as what to have for dinner. It was a fleeting feeling, but magical in its own way.