Getting Lost at Aptos High School

If we had not gotten lost, we would have never found ourselves looking down on Aptos High School from the mountain above. Seeing the sprawling school from the mountain side made me understand what a huge pillar of this community the high school is, huge in size and community support. Sometimes you just don’t know what you will find until you get lost.

Freedom Boulevard is my road home, I have driven by Aptos High School five hundred times, and I never gave the school a thought. “Not my place, not for me.”

Except for an occasional morning or afternoon traffic jam at the entrance to the school on Freedom, the arches emblazoned with Aptos High School in blue and white letters, towering over the entrance to the region’s high school never entered my mind. And if we had not of gotten lost on the mountain above the school, we never would have gotten to see this amazing school.

Indigenous tribes for centuries cultivated and maintained intricate trail networks before federal agencies claimed them. I don’t know who created or owns the trails behind Aptos High School, but you can get sensational panoramic views of the school from trails up on the mountain.

We find a path up the mountain out of the church parking lot, next to the
Highway Patrol Office on Soquel Ave. My compadres have their dogs on leashes to keep them from frolicking in the poison oak, which is everywhere. We notice there is no trail signage, none. The path is obviously used by lots of people, horses and even dirt bikes, but this surely is not a government-maintained path.

We are undeterred, we are rebels without a compass. We claim hiking days for our rebellion against structure and rules. We do give a wide berth around homes, we respect people’s privacy, but out on a trail there is no barrier we will not climb, no fence we will not hop, and no double negative we won’t use.

Our point man takes a steep animal path up the hill, and I scramble up the incline after my compadres on all fours. Once we make it to the ridge there is a well-worn, level, human path through a beautiful multi-treed forest that reminds me of the flora in Bonny Doon. We walk silently, not at odds, but the climb up the steep hill to the ridge has winded us and we focus on the next step, the next breath.

We come upon a rope swing, impossibly tied to an oak tree limb high over a steep ravine. This swing over the canyon is the first inkling I get that we might be near where young people congregate. Who would climb out this oak limb to attach the rope so far above the ravine floor? Images of myself as a teenage boy seep out of my reptilian memory, and I picture a young person inching his way out the limb.

We don’t understand yet that we are lost but I’m wondering if Aptos High School is closer than we think.

We originally had a destination, the Aptos water tower, but as we continue up the ridge trail, our point man says that we missed the turnoff to the water tower and we are now lost, we no longer have any idea where we’re going.

We continue on the ridge trail, now wonderfully lost, for a few moments we are set free, untethered, on a path to nowhere.

Getting lost may be the last frontier. Maybe the only one. If you know where you are, if you clutch your map that says “You Are Here”, everything is prescribed, you’re just passing through a pre-determined experience. There is no adventure, it all is just theater, where everything gets reviewed, everything gets Yelped. It’s the triumph of metaphor over reality. Getting lost may be our last hope.

Indeed, a few steps further and we find Tee 3 of the Aptos High Disc Golf Course.
The course rocked for years but closed down during the pandemic.

I’m sorry to have missed the water tower up the mountain behind the Highway Patrol Office on Freedom and Soquel, but we wandered lost, were set free, to feel our relationship with the entire mountain, not just the 18 inches wide path in front of us. And we wandered lost until we stumbled upon the disc golf course markers and then Aptos High School below us.

By Richard Stockton