Ukiah, America’s Mystery Spot

We were at Todd Grove Park and he was explaining where the old Chevy pickup truck with a For Sale sign was parked.

“You take Dora here,” he said, pointing east down Grove Street, “and when you get to Dora you make a right and it’s just across the street. Big house with a picket fence.”

Some blinking and some furrowed brows, some exchanging of glances and rolling of eyes. None of us know much but we know enough to know he didn’t know nothing about the streets of Ukiah.

Not that anyone does, at least not anyone I know, and I also don’t know much either. But the point in this distribution of misinformation was the fact it marked the 25,000th time (I’m a journalist, I keep count) someone in my presence has utterly flubbed directions from anywhere in Ukiah to somewhere else in Ukiah.

How? Why? How can people who have lived in Ukiah all their lives be unfamiliar with the half dozen streets that criss-cross their own neighborhoods and blocks? Is it collective geographic amnesia?

No one knows where anything is, or least how to find it, or at least how to give coherent directions to a stranger to help him find it. Ukiah is the Mystery Spot of American cities.

Newcomers quickly realize they are dealing with a genuine, bonafide local when they stop to ask for directions, and the answer is a puzzled, cloudy face and a vague gesture in the direction of over there.

The fellow at the top of this story giving preposterous and incoherent directions to a parked truck on the west side, has himself lived half a century within a few blocks of the truck, but doesn’t know where it is or at least is unable to tell anyone else where it is.

The same guy could throw a baseball from his backyard into Anton Stadium, but I’d bet $100 he couldn’t give accurate directions on how to walk from his house to the ol’ ballpark.

I judge not. I’ve lived on the west side of Ukiah for 50 years and don’t know Hope Street from Wiltshire Boulevard. I have walked dogs all around my own neighborhood for a big percentage of my life and still can’t predict the next intersection.

Oh, ha ha it’s Hope Street. I knew that.

It will surprise me again tomorrow when I stroll the same route.

And this only proves our ignorance among the few blocks that surround us. But what of the wild, unexplored regions south of town, out where rumors of lands called Tedford and Wabash lie, or the vast, mysterious Deerwood territory and the estates of Eldorado? Know anyone who has ventured into these unmapped jungles? Did they return? Were they able to draw crude maps depicting where they’d been and the marvels they’d encountered?

West Stephenson and South Pine? A longtime resident will bumble around for 15 minutes trying to find the intersection before realizing he lives three blocks away, and has for 30 years.

As a freshly minted reporter for the (late, lamented) Cleveland Press starting in 1969, I had a better grasp of its hundreds of streets, blocks, acreage and alleys than I have of Ukiah’s. Other Ukiahans report a similar disquieting phenomena.

Wife Trophy lived part of a decade in San Francisco, and whenever we return to it she displays a photographic mastery of the city layout.

The same woman has done more than 40 years in Ukiah, but if required to name a few streets around our house (north-south-east-west) she’d lapse into pure guessery by the time she got to Willow or Barnes. She’d break out in hives before she could tell you where North Pine Street terminates.

But it’s not all our fault. You live in a town with a Brush Street, a Bush Street, two streets named Betty, where a street called Main Street isn’t, and where North Pine Street ends at Cypress Avenue heading north only to resume a few hundred yards distant, except now it’s heading east. North Dora terminates going west.

I’ve written about this before but it’s gotten no better. With my friends getting older and more forgetful it’s bound to be so much worse in another five years that we’ll all need self-driving Teslas to get us to the bowling alley, skating rink or drive-in movie.