In the first dawn when the ocean receded and life evolved, the road was but a path trod smooth by soft moccasins of gentle Maidu Indians who gathered acorns. Their culture, comprised of basket weavers and boatsmen, apexed and ebbed, giving away gradually to the Spanish.

     Harsh, hot wind rippled sand, obscuring the path from coarse-cloaked priests, with rough-hewn sandals and walking staffs, who trekked over stubborn crags and down into the virgin vale. The padres planted seed and the valley burst forth in fruit and grain. Vaqueros on horseback etched the footpath more clearly.

     In their time, ruling Dons widened the dusty trail to accommodate their matilla-coiffed women in wagons teeming with muchachos. Travelers found shelter in their thick-walled haciendas molded from the soil, and savored the land's bounty and the vine's nectar. Many a proud patriarch watched his cattle graze on green hills, blissfully ignorant of carefree sons gambling away their inheritance. Their hoofbeats pressed in a relentless staccato...and the road grew more defined.

     Americans arrived sporadically by wagon and stage, oftimes relieved of their valuables by wily banditos at the crest of the pass. In season, these Yankee farmers, their teams laden with fodder and fruit, rumbled over the same rutted pass, then crossed San Fernando Valley to sell their wares at farmer's market. Sunday excepted, their children rode bareback down Norwegian grade to collect the mail at Camino Real junction.

     The road required straw in summer to keep down the dust, only to be transformed by winter rains into a muddy sea. Men traveled the road in terrible anxiety to fetch a doctor for their women in childbirth. They cursed the road's crudities, and praised it profusely when it brought the whistler, the pianist, the singer, and especially the teacher, to their isolated valley.

     When the neighboring county decided to pave the road up to the summit, determined women in poke bonnets marched with pick and shovel to improve the remaining portion. Their men sent them home and labored and sweat, transforming the road into a smooth stretch of asphalt. Along the roadside, the women planted eucalyptus and lugged water until the seedlings took root.

Model T's began chugging along the narrow black strip, distressing the horses who shied and snorted. The trees stretched skyward; the road grew cool and inviting.

     One day, people began spilling over from the adjoining valley, streaming down the pockmarked road into endless rows of matchstick houses. The road suffered under its new burden. Mornings and evenings traffic snailed over the pass. Tempers flashed.

     The road was widened and adorned with bright yellow and white belts. Traffic approached, then surpassed, maximum density. Bicycle and horse vanished from roadside. Motorists played Russian roulette at intersections. Traffic lights were erected as monuments to luckless pedestrians, who in their demise, served as payment.

     Daily fresh new asphalt strips bisected the main road. Work crews labored from dawn to dusk to broaden the road into a four-lane highway. Those mighty trees were mercilessly decapitated. Dynamite shattered solid shale peaks standing in the path of the freeway.

     Thus the road moves on, impervious to time and progress, impervious to Indians, Spaniards, to early and latter-day pioneers. It moves, impervious to man, horse, wagon, stagecoach and automobile, serene that it will exist after these. It will live after the trees are felled and mountains and lowlands are despoiled. The road lives on through evolution to eternity.