As it turned out, she’d recently rented the movie, “Portrait in Black,” and she wanted to see the spot where Anthony Quinn and Lana Turner sent a car containing her husband’s dead body over a cliff. My wife and I shrugged, and we were on our way. My Volvo weaved through a dense eucalyptus grove, ascended a steep incline, passed through a jagged gap between two steep rock walls, and emerged onto that familiar ribbon of clifftop roadway known as Devil’s Slide.

If you’ve driven along this stretch of Highway 1, you know that it is spectacularly treacherous or treacherously spectacular. But, anyway you say it, it is definitely heart-stoppingly beautiful. The windy bluff juts into the ocean at that point and seems as if it is suspended in mid-air. As we began our descent, gray-blue expanses of ocean, 500 feet below us, swept past the car windows. We were often forced to veer near-fatally close to the cliff’s edge. But, to my amazement, though I found myself white-knuckling the steering wheel, the only sound from my mother-in-law was a slightly audible, sustained expression of “awe.”

The drive only lasted five minutes, but my mother-in-law talked about it for the remainder of her visit with us. And, I have to admit, I was pretty awe-struck myself. Devil’s Slide is only ten miles south of the city, but for just a brief moment, a person feels in a whole different time and place.

If you haven’t been there yet, you’ll need to take a drive there soon because in 2011, the two tunnels that are currently being drilled into the bordering mountain, will open to traffic, and Devil’s Slide will be closed to vehicles. It is expected to be kept open as a path for pedestrians and cyclists, but the thrill of having your car’s tires skim the outside edge of the cliff will be a thing of past.

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