The Long, Lonely Nights on Windy Ridge Take Their Toll

Midnight on Windy Ridge. What little traffic there was has trailed off. A transformer hums loudly, powering the huge lights that box out the enfolding darkness in a 16-lane-wide rectangle of yellow glare.

“Hullooo out there,” Wendy Fox chirps to a young driver who pulls up way wide of the open window.

“Oops, sorry,” says the young woman breathlessly, diving for change on the floor before arching out of the car window toward the toll taker’s patiently outstretched hand. Then she is gone, and it is quiet again.

Night after night for four years, Fox has assumed her post at Windy Ridge North on Orange County’s Eastern toll road -- California 241. The futuristic, burnished steel toll plaza was hacked out of a horizontal land mass thrusting up between Orange and Riverside counties, then took its name as well.

At midnight, the plaza atop the middle of nowhere is Hitchcock and Edward Hopper rolled into one fluorescent, caffeine-edged movie set. Other than the security guard, John Lumpkin, who hunkers down in an office chair alongside the one open lane, perhaps a few dozen people will make fleeting contact through the night with the toll-taker.

There is a giant sense of waiting. Waiting for the houses, the strip malls, the traffic, to surge up from the flatlands and engulf the empty darkness on either side of the ancient ridge. The Irvine Co. wants to build 7,500 homes here, but for now, there are just twin parabolic necklaces of lights swooping down toward the glowing bowls that are Irvine to the south and Corona to the north.

Road to Development

It is a testament to human will that the toll plaza exists.

Donald Bren, sole owner of the Irvine Co. and of all the land on both sides of the road, cut a deal with the California Legislature, donating open space in exchange for public backing of bonds to bulldoze private toll roads through the formerly impenetrable mountainous reaches of his ranch. Even the Irvine Co. couldn’t afford the cost of roads needed to open the land to development.

To get it built, earthmovers excavated 67 million cubic yards of dirt, rock and brush, a quarter of the total dug for the Panama Canal. That included 16 million cubic yards taken out of Windy Ridge, then stacked in piles 300 feet high in canyon beds below.

Paving crews dodged mountain lions and rattlesnakes seeking the warmth of the freshly laid asphalt -- or the insides of their machines. When herds of cattle wandered across, complete with angry bulls, workers on at least one occasion clambered up on the paving equipment.

Hours before the road opened Oct. 18, 1998, a celebratory picnic had to be relocated from Windy Ridge and its majestic views of three counties to a tunnel 10 miles away, after shrieking winds blew down displays, destroyed one tent and blew another up a nearby hill.

Four years later, winter winds still whip $20 bills out of toll attendants’ hands. Huge rattlers still stretch out on the southbound side.

Pay as You Go

Nowadays, it is mostly human life along the road that startles.

Mahesh S. giggles nervously when fellow employees tease him about the limo that pulled through his lane the night before -- with four naked women in back.

Southern Californians, who consider freeways their birthright, aren’t used to toll roads. Vestigial memories of the New Jersey Turnpike may linger for some, but for others, the spectacle of being forced to slow down and pay is astonishing. The labyrinthine nature of the transportation corridors -- which require payment for each segment -- doesn’t help.

Like slightly cranky children on a long trip, motorists pull in exclaiming, “I just paid! I have to pay again?” or “How much longer is this road? How many more times do I have to pay?”

The evening crew -- Marie C., Mahesh S., Mike P., and Wendy F., as they are known by the name plates on the side of the tollbooths -- have learned to murmur soothing replies: “This is the last toll before Riverside,” or “Three miles to the 91,” and, in kindhearted Marie’s case, when she can’t change a $100 bill: “I know, I know, it doesn’t seem fair to the customer, does it?”

In the predawn hours, the drunk, the wired and the rebellious stop by -- or don’t. Some speed up the long, steep grade, then, once they realize there really is a tollbooth, make a U-turn on the empty road and defiantly head the wrong way back to the 91 or the 5 freeway.

“I had a truck driver come in scared to death one night,” Fox recalls. “Someone had just passed him going the wrong way at 80 mph.”

It is unsettling to sit in the narrow, tall cubicle and watch the twin headlights speeding toward you again and again, then miraculously parting left or right at the last second. Marie, who trains new hires, says she can tell within half an hour who is going to last on the job and who isn’t, just by their reaction to the traffic.

“One gentleman just walked out halfway through his first shift,” she said.

For the faint of heart and the curious, here are answers to questions drivers may have: Yes, the toll clerks can see the discarded fast-food wrappings, moldy gym clothes and other detritus in your back seat, and they can hear the rap/pop/hip-hop/oldies/NPR/baseball/Rush Limbaugh blasting out of your speakers.

No, they don’t go to the bathroom in the booth. Evening-shift workers get two 15-minute breaks and a half-hour break in an eight-hour shift, leaving them just enough time to dart into the small white office building next to the plaza to wash up, eat, or catch a snippet of television.

Many of the customers are regulars, hotel and construction workers heading inland over the ridge to sleep off another day of labor in the wealthy coastal cities. Often they come bearing trinkets. “It’s the Snapple man!” exclaims Marie on a recent Friday night. He smiles and hands her a sample of the drink company’s new flavor before roaring off.

Marie carefully freshens her makeup each time she takes a break. Many of the women have elaborately manicured nails, which are, after all, the most visible part to the customer.

Fox, the night owl, is more casual.

“We’re the bartenders of the road,” she jokes. From 30-second interactions week after week, she knows which customers are pregnant, which are studying for college degrees, which are going to Las Vegas to get married that night. Once a man came through the south side headed for New York City. Fox kindly told him that he was taking the long way, considering his car was pointed toward the Pacific.

Even the language of the computer inside the booth bespeaks an odd intimacy -- once someone pays, the machine blinks “COMMIT” to let them through. If someone whizzes though without paying, the machine is “VIOLATED.”

Sleeping-Bag Blues

In spite of the instant intimacy, there are unconscious boundaries on both sides of the booth. Customers can give, but they have more difficulty receiving. Fox gave a Christmas card to one regular, and he never showed up in her lane again. But when a strange man approached Fox in her regular grocery store smiling and waving, she was taken aback.

“He said, ‘I drive one of the red trucks, don’t you recognize me?’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘No, I do not.’ ”

A Brit from industrial northern England who divorced her American husband nearly 20 years ago, Fox never expected to find herself working a tollbooth.

Pay is less than $10 an hour, less than $400 a week before taxes. She lives with her daughter in a mobile-home park in Corona and frets when the price of a cup of coffee rises from $1.08 to $1.29.

Fox, who is studying history at UC Riverside, says she would never be able to work a day job and go to school. She studies for several hours each night, listening to her favorite rock ‘n’ roll DJ on a boombox. At 2 a.m., the shift manager arrives and gives her an hour break.

She unrolls an old sleeping bag in the office inside.

“I sleep under the table,” she says. “You can’t turn the lights out.”

Fifty-eight minutes later, the phone rings -- the manager calling from the booth. Sometimes she bangs her head on the underside of the table sitting up, and she often loses track of where she is, here and at home.

Too groggy to concentrate on the textbook print anymore, she spends the rest of the predawn hours doing crossword puzzles or reading mail and newspapers.

“You just have to tell yourself sleep is not an option,” she says.

If she struck it rich, Fox would buy a piece of land in the country and open an animal sanctuary. She can’t bear to hear about the deer and mountain lions that venture onto the toll road and too often are struck and killed.

By 4:30 a.m., the morning traffic begins to roar and throttle and whine up the hill. She has made it through another night.

At 6 a.m., as the sun pinks the mountain tips, she wearily removes her thin orange vest and heads for her Saturn. As she drives down the long artificial slope, a cheery mechanical message by the side of the road, spelled out in dingy yellow dots: “Life’s Too Short Not to Do This All Over Again Tomorrow.”