This past Saturday evening, as the 1987 Acura Legend that contained my two traveling companions and myself teetered defiantly over the edge of a mountainside hairpin switchback, staring into the vast nothingness just below the Pacific Coast Highway, I was sure that I'd never been further from my home. We were one-hundred and twenty miles north of San Francisco, fighting the adversities of darkness, rain, and paved roads designed for the coastal passage of vessels no wider than Calista Flockhart in heroin withdrawal. This, compounded by our collective and mild retardation, came to bear at 8:00 PST when we hydroplaned through a slick downgrade to what, in the spur of the moment, as Bob Dylan blared through the car's busted speakers, seemed to be the kind of horrible bloody demise that requires too much of the local taxpayers' income to clean up.

Some twenty hours down the coast, Russell Crowe was s-tfaced and harassing the quiet patrons of a high-class Los Angeles pub, demanding they refer to him as Sparticus and so on. He was nervous. After all, it was the night before the Academy Awards and, unlike Gladiator, he was nominated for a movie in which he had to act, so there was cause for concern. He had always loved to release tension by finding all the guys wearing sweaters in a bar and breaking full beer bottles over their heads. "There's just something very satisfying about the dull throttling sound of a fag being bludgeoned," commented the suave leading man in a recent Entertainment Tonight interview. So tonight was no different, in that respect.

Back north, our derailed expedition to the redwood country of Humboldt County was looking equally as bleak. Incidentally, we weren't dead, so we had that going for us. A fleshy mound of California mud had snagged the passenger side wheel, cushioning much of the impact to the guardrail, which now leaned off the side of the mountain, holding the car back from an inestimable drop through an abyss of sharp, impaling things. That same mound now held the wheel triumphantly, refusing to let it go. The car was very stuck, and, because we knew how well this sort of thing generally goes in the movies, we immediately thought it best to split up. So we sent our buddy Dan off with the first car-full of Mexicans we saw. He went off to the next town over to call for help. It was Elk, California, population 400. As the car he was in pulled out of view, my friend Dave and I were left immobile on the sharpest curve of the black coastal highway, waiting for whichever came first: Dan's return, or the next douche bag to take the curve too fast and finish the job that we had started. So again we were staring into the horrid and grisly face of death.

Likewise, Whoopi Goldberg spent the evening looking in the mirror, dolling herself up for the next night. It would be her fourth shot as Oscar Host and she wanted to look her best. Goldberg, father of popular rock star Lenny Kravitz, wasn't too nervous. She had done this sort of thing before. Her biggest responsibility was to make jokes about how long the program was running, peppered with an occasional insight of the differences between black people and white people.

Across town, John Travolta couldn't contain himself. The butterflies in his stomach made a bad combination with the rum and Nyquil beverage he'd mixed for himself, and he ran into the closest bathroom to vomit. Oscar Night was now less then twenty-four hours away, and he'd barely had the chance to rehearse, as he'd been so busy approving scripts without ever reading them, and he had so little time left in which to practice. Just behind Whoopi, he had the second most important job at the award show. It was his charge to queue the prerecorded orchestra music every-time an award recipient tried to thank more than two members of his family. After all, the Academy Awards are on a strict time budget and nobody cares who this year's best sound editor is married to. So, as the first wave of puking sputtered and finally subsided, Travolta took a moment to consider the levity of his position.

In northern California, the people of Elk came together to rescue us from the lowest pits of despair possible outside of New Jersey. It was a relatively small neighborhood so word traveled fast of our tenacity in cheating death, and we fast became folk legends in the area. When rescuers arrived on the scene and found that we weren't hurt, they called off the helicopter and, somehow, Dan showed up in a tow-truck ten minutes later. Our car was dislodged and drivable, so we spent the night in Elk.

Elk was not the flashy California burg where Hollywood stars of yesteryear come to die. When Dan called the tow service from a payphone and was asked to identify a landmark, he was forced to explain that "the payphone is the landmark." And as we would learn over the next couple of hours, everybody in Elk does five different jobs. The bartender was also a farmer, a coyote hunter, the town's Little League coach and father to most of the children in the town. So it was the kind of place where networking was very easy. Which probably accounts for the amazing ease with which we were able to find emergency services, lodging, food, hookers and a drug dealer during the regrettably short time we spent there. It was a beautiful town, nestled warmly between a lush mountain-face and a Pacific Ocean entirely absent of syringes to the naked eye. The air was lightly scented by sage and lilac, and the only sounds in the air were bullfrogs and the tide. But even after spending a night there, basking in its people's hospitality, I wasn't quite at home. Here, in paradise, what was the intangible malaise that kept me at arms length from comfort and familiarity?

Sunday morning and the Oscars were just hours away. Ron Howard contemplated the comb-over idea for the millionth time before giving up and putting on a hat. He picked up a framed picture of Henry Winkler, smiled at it and yelled, "Where are you now, you filthy son of a bitch?" He was ready.

We had breakfast delivered to our cottage in the Griffin House. Some sort of egg quiche and bacon. Still, something was not right.

Gene Hackman sat on his bed, holed up in his Beverly Hills mansion, methodically loading a semi-automatic rifle and muttering incoherently to himself. He wasn't sure who he was going to kill tonight, but he was excited nonetheless.

We walked down to the beach in the morning to get a good look at the Pacific from Elk. The bartender had warned us about mountain lions, in fact describing rather articulately how said predators ambush their pray. He assured us that one mountain lion would never be able to handle all three of us, so we weren't too concerned. Still, in the pit of my stomach, there was burning void.

Robert Redford was to be honored for his lifetime achievements tonight. So he stood over the bathroom sink tanning his face with a hot cattle iron, after which he doused it in catcher's mitt oil and wrapped rubber bands around it to give it shape. He had to look his best. After all, it was Oscar Night.

In Elk, before we rolled out of town to continue our odyssey through the Great North Woods, it finally happened. A dazed woman of about forty, Candace, ran the County Store. As we grabbed some last minute road supplies, she took great pleasure in describing the seatbelt strangulation death of a former local in that very gorge that nearly claimed us. And then she invited us to an Oscar party in a town whose population is doubled by the number of Academy Award nominees this year. The people of Elk, California cared about the Oscars. We were in America. We were home.

And always remember, the monkey goes where the wind blows.