Twists and Turns

No one can say for sure who began this road.

Centuries ago, cows or coyotes, Chumash settlers or Spanish conquistadors might have carved the twisted way from the Pacific Ocean across two rugged mountain ranges to the lush Santa Clara River Valley.

Muscle and dynamite, the rush of wind and rain and wheels hammered the rough, curving ridge-side path into its modern incarnation as California 23.

Money, vision and a yen in city folk for country life pumped up tiny stagecoach villages alongside the road, shaping the modern cities of Moorpark and Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village.

Today, restless waves of growth and commerce sweep over California 23’s 32-mile length, obliterating its roots year by year and reshaping it into a patchwork of modern Ventura County life.

But plans drafted in the go-go 1970s to make the 23 into a wide, cross-county freeway linking the Pacific Coast Highway with the Ventura Freeway and California 118 and 126 have faded.

And beneath California 23’s motley layers of pavement, the gnarled path that those first travelers etched across southeastern Ventura County’s mountains and meadows so long ago remains the same.

“It’s a conglomeration of a whole bunch of different types of roads,” said California Department of Transportation engineer Nick Jones. “It’s probably about 50% urban-suburban, and 50% rural. It does have a lot of variety in those 32 miles.”

California 23’s two twisting lanes climb from the PCH in Malibu up through the Santa Monica Mountains for nine miles, past scattered million-dollar homes and rustic cabins.

At Westlake Village, it spreads out to four, then six tree-lined lanes of Westlake Boulevard before turning northwest onto a bustling, mile-long chunk of the Ventura Freeway, then north onto the Moorpark Freeway.

It rolls across Thousand Oaks meadows past condos and subdivisions, then swerves suddenly into the heart of Moorpark.

There, the road hangs a hard right onto Walnut Canyon Road and winds on past citrus groves, horse ranches and pungent egg farms, toward the craggy notch of Grimes Canyon.

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And just before its final descent into the lush orange groves of Fillmore and its end at California 126, the road convulses into a brutal knot of hill-clutching switchbacks and exposes some of its oldest roots.

These gnarled Grimes Canyon curves--like the ones on California 23’s southern leg through the Santa Monica Mountains--were gouged from sandstone by the Decker family.

Pacific Coast homesteaders since the 1850s, the Deckers set up the first ranches and built the first school in the Malibu area along the leg of California 23 still known as Decker Road.

“There’s a lot of history in those mountains,” said Earl Decker, 79, who now lives in Oak View but spent most of his life in Decker Canyon after his father moved the family there to escape a Louisiana malaria epidemic in 1928.

The road then was a narrow, treacherous dirt wagon trail. It hugged the mountains so tightly that if two horse-drawn wagons met, one had to back up so the other could pass.

Earl Decker’s father, Atha, worked for the Los Angeles County Highway Department. He shoved rock falls and mudslides off the road with just a shovel and wheelbarrow, flattened washboard ruts with a horse team and scraper.

Mildred Decker, Earl’s sister-in-law, recalls her own father’s shopping expeditions. He rode the rough-hewn track on horseback, along steep slopes through rain-swollen streams to buy 100-pound bags of flour from a little general store where Westlake Village now sprawls.

In the 1930s, the Deckers latched onto a big contract order from the state: Widen the road. At their father’s side, Earl and brother Jimmy learned the explosives trade.

Later, the two led state highway crews, jackhammering holes into rocky hillsides that had to be moved. Jimmy rigged the dynamite, then the brothers would take cover.

“You’d see it blow, the bank just blowing up and the rocks going everywhere,” Earl recalled. “The rocks were small, but big enough to kill you.”

Mildred--now 75 and living on her own in Decker Canyon since husband Jimmy died of cancer in 1991--chipped in too. She would fill holes to cover the charges, tie the wires together and sometimes push the plunger that triggered the explosives: “That was fun.”

Over the years, recalled Earl, movie companies capitalized on the Deckers’ demolition work. With cameras rolling, some rugged movie star would throw a dummy switch at the same moment Jimmy was triggering the real one, and BOOM, the director had his blast.

Nowadays, California 23 looks nothing like it once did, says Earl Decker: “But the memory’s always there.”

Shiny Jeeps and Range Rovers tool along the smooth two-laner, carrying the Deckers’ nouveau riche neighbors toward opulent mountaintop retreats.

Freelance video cameraman Bruce Schwartz says he loves the solitude and the starlit nights there, the lush hillsides where he cultivates 400 organically grown lemon and tangerine trees.

“The thing I like about living on this road is that most people don’t like taking the road,” he said, savoring the clean winter breeze. “It’s too wind-y. My wife calls it ‘the throw-up road.’ By the time she gets to the bottom of Westlake Boulevard, she’s green.”

Remotely posted firefighters and Caltrans workers soak in the view, too. But they curse reckless beach-bound surfers and motorcyclists who screech through plunging switchback curves as if the risky road were a raceway.

“I’ve got my signs out--ROAD WORK AHEAD, BE PREPARED TO STOP, FLAGMAN AHEAD--and people don’t pay any attention to them,” grouses Caltrans worker Rene Ayala, repairing an old culvert. “People see you at the last minute, and they lock up their brakes to where they’re swerving. It gets pretty hectic. We’re always thinking which way we should jump.”

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Out here, California 23 is just a route through the wilderness. The land itself still belongs to manzanita and sage that explode in ferocious wildfires every decade or so, to coyotes that nip into the brush just ahead of passing cars and to the hawks that wheel overhead.

But the road snakes on toward civilization, widening into subdivision-lined Westlake Boulevard. Where Spanish missionaries en route from Los Angeles once camped at Triunfo, modern motorists do not slow down.

Tom McDonald remembers the 1960s, when his family moved into a new home at the end of Westlake Boulevard, when traffic was so scarce that deer ambled across the freshly graded dirt street.

The rich, fast-growing Lake Sherwood development around the corner on Potrero Road has pumped more commuters onto his old turf, he says, and sucked out a lot of the charm.

“There was kind of an old, rustic, Southern California ‘get-away-from-the-city’ feel out there,” grumbles McDonald, 38, an LAPD sergeant who bought his childhood home. “And then they put in, excuse my French, a . . . freeway.”

The newest neighbors--earthquake refugees from the San Fernando Valley, corporate transfers from out of state and yuppies fleeing L.A.--have swelled California 23 traffic at its junction with the Ventura Freeway to a peak of 37,500 cars per day.

The rush of commuters and the growth of Ventura County have wrought the most radical change on California 23 here, in Thousand Oaks, where it follows the Ventura Freeway for about a mile.

Where once stagecoaches jounced along rutted dirt tracks between L.A. and Santa Barbara, now four to eight lanes of traffic roar along the meticulously engineered freeway past faceless roadside views of the huge Thousand Oaks Auto Mall.

In 1961, Caltrans began a $22-million project to widen the northern leg of California 23 from the Ventura Freeway along Moorpark Road, creating the Moorpark Freeway. And by 1970, traffic was barreling across the meadows toward Moorpark.

Last June, the California Legislature renamed this 10-mile stretch of road to honor thousands of Japanese American translators and intelligence experts who served in World War II. A big green sign proclaims the mouthful: Military Intelligence Service Memorial Highway.

But just about where that sign is planted, before California 23 merges with the Simi Valley Freeway, the old route zigzags again down an offramp.

The road flows along New Los Angeles Avenue for barely a mile through downtown Moorpark, then turns north onto Walnut Canyon Road past strip malls, storefronts, quiet neighborhoods full of old homes.

Here it resembles the California 23 of the 1920s, save for some recent widening by Caltrans where it bends past Moorpark City Hall--and a huge increase in traffic.

Semis and tandem rigs lumber through, some skirting the Conejo Grade scales on the Ventura Freeway.

“The road has been there for years, and the big problem is it’s indicated on maps as a state highway,” said Eloise Brown, former mayor. “If you see some of those fellows driving 18-wheelers as they come down the ramp, you can see their knuckles turning white.”

*

Moorpark, too, has changed. The one-time farming village incorporated in 1983, and the ensuing building boom left little room for the kind of work some folks once did along old California 23.

For 10 years, Ron Irlbeck ran the 12 1/2-acre Coast Auto Salvage yard in 1973 much the way the previous owners had since the 1940s, selling parts he pulled off old auto wrecks.

But the 1983 zoning laws came down--hard, says Irlbeck. Now he cannot even pull a window out of a car door in his parking lot without fear of being written up by city code officers.

“They built $150,000, $300,000, $400,000 homes in a [town] that was basically a field workers’ community,” he said. “It sure put the kibosh on me. They were profiting by what was going on, and they didn’t want [new homes] to overlook a junkyard.”

Under city orders, Irlbeck brought in car-crushing machines, mashed flat hisstock of 2,500 to 3,000 wrecks, and promised to do all salvage work off-site at a Ventura yard.

But Irlbeck’s own future looks a little rosier, thanks partly to commerce that California 23 brought to Moorpark: The land he bought for a song 23 years ago is worth millions today. Developers are sniffing around. He might just sell out and retire--and he might not.

“In a way, I hope it doesn’t sell,” says Irlbeck, a cigarette smoldering in his rough, grimy fingers and a glint in his ice-blue eyes. “What am I going to do then?”

Farther down the road, Parmjit Sunner bought the 35-year-old Moorpark Central Market in 1993 and changed its stock from mostly American goods to mostly Mexican. Business picked up.

Now, the native of India banters easily in Spanish and English with his customers, cheerfully bagging chorizo and canned chiles, telenovelas and cassettes of banda music.

“These people are wonderful people, they’re like 24-karat gold,” Sunner says with a smile. “Americans, if you don’t have the right flavor of iced tea, they will die. In this place, you can suggest another product, and [Latino shoppers] will try it.”

As California 23 leaves Moorpark, city airs fall away. The road takes shape as a busy route for local commerce: sand and gravel dug from neighboring quarries, oranges plucked from nearby groves, eggs laid by the million-plus chickens penned up at two huge egg ranches.

Fillmore-bound traffic rushes past the ranches, then down the dizzying hairpin bends of Grimes Canyon. Along the way, graffiti artists smitten with love--or their own egos--have chiseled passionate proclamations into soft sandstone.

Unfit for building, farming or much else, the steep mountains barely tolerate the cliff-side road chiseled out by the Deckers. Heavy rains unleash mudslides, and rock falls shaken loose by the 1994 Northridge earthquake temporarily severed the road.

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Last winter’s downpours submerged Mort Montazeri’s nearby sand and rock quarry under 10 feet of mud and water, cutting off the road.

Montazeri and his workers hopped up into their own giant skip loaders and cruised out to help Caltrans. “We had to help them open it, because without the road, we didn’t have an entrance,” Montazeri said. “It was a little selfish, I suppose. We did it to help ourselves.”

It took 11 months to disassemble, clean and reassemble the rock mills before Best Rock Products was back at work producing sand, gravel and the reddish rock known as burnt diatomite used on base paths at Dodger Stadium.

From here, California 23 slopes gradually downhill past Bardsdale and on into Fillmore. It makes a sharp elbow bend at the entrance to Elkins Ranch Golf Course, then beelines to its terminus at California 126 in Fillmore.

And here, it changes course just once more:

The Bardsdale Bridge carrying the road over the Santa Clara River opened in 1909 to an all-day celebration that drew 4,000 people to an open-pit barbecue. But 19 years later, the St. Francis Dam burst, wiping the bridge off the map.

Soon thereafter, a new bridge was built. For 65 years, the boxy, green steel truss span carried two narrow lanes of California 23 traffic to and from Fillmore before Caltrans earmarked it for upgrade in 1993.

*

Today, a broad concrete span crosses the river just downstream from the old green bridge, which is up for sale.

Louie Reyes--astraddle a shaggy-looking horse named Miaia that he keeps at a nearby ranch--rides across the new bridge along the last 1,000 yards of California 23. His mount bucks a bit at the roar of trucks even though she is on the sidewalk protected by a guardrail.

The previous bridge made it impossible to even consider riding into town along California 23, Reyes says, “but this one is great.”

A double-tandem gravel truck roars past, spooking the horse. Reyes reins her in before finally letting her walk on, past old orange groves and new homes, like a specter from the past.

And here, California 23 shows its oldest face, the one it has always borne and probably always will: It is just a way, under whatever power is at hand, to get from here to there.

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ABOUT THIS SERIES

“On the Road: Journeys Along Ventura County’s Highways” is a five-part series profiling some of the most heavily traveled thoroughfares in the county. On previous Sundays, the focus has been on the Ventura Freeway and California 126. Today’s installment features California 23, a crazy-quilt road of wild terrain and prosperous development that reaches back to a rugged past.