They live in the woods up here, like trolls. Matter of fact, that's what folks call 'em. With their hair all Rasta'd out, twisted atop their heads like stool samples, the flowing Moses-on-the-Mount colorful garb, and their scrunched up, weather-worn faces, they look like those troll dolls, hence the name. They live off the weeds of the land, literally.

"Dude, we got a farm, we can legally have twenty pot plants for each of us "a troll says, and waves at the picnic table of trolls around us. I met them while stopping for a fast snack at a health food store.

"Uh, does that include the kids?" I ask, looking at the nursing baby and the five-year-old girl, her hair one aggressive combing short of dreadlocks.

"Duiiiide!" He only laughs and nods knowingly. And that's the thing about Mendocino. As you drive the winding roads toward it, one hundred miles north of San Francisco, you pass hairpin access roads, heavily chained with blood red PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. Live and let live, just stay in yer dingy. I don't know what it is about this area - maybe it's the thick fog broiling off the Pacific Ocean, catching in thousand-year-old redwoods, maybe it's the trolls' pot fumes, but as we drive toward The Stanford Inn, five minutes from the town of Mendocino, it feels as if we've entered another dimension. It's almost an electrical current that I experience.

"Oh, those are the ley lines," Jeff Stanford tells us casually. He and his wife Joan are the architects of this mist-coated Shangri-La, the ten-acre wonder world of The Stanford Inn. Jeff has that unmistakable, guru-like, charismatic presence, combined with a brain that would rival Einstein's for tipping the scales in an autopsy. Ley lines mark an energy grid. They pop up mostly in mystical places, like Stonehenge and St. Michael's Mount. And those ley lines keep plants in the inn's two-acre organic garden from freezing when frost is everyplace else. You can just feel them. Like how I always wake up right before an earthquake. I just fancied I was a super-psychic, ready for my own Miss Cleo show. Then I read that before a quake, the earth releases a huge gasp of energy, like a magnetic fart. That's what dogs feel, and some folks. I am sure the ley lines are why I feel at peace when I am here.

I just know if every street kid got a chance to spend time here, after they, uh, detox, they would know what is possible in life beyond tricking and the next rig. I walk the black-tar paths that take me between the llamas that live here to the Ravens, the organic restaurant at the inn. I eat food that my body soaks up.

For breakfast, citrus polenta served with a creamy cashew-nut sauce, all these sautéed-in-tamari vegetables, and oh, they have organic coffee. They don't have to give you those organic packets of decaf and regular in your room, but they do. That little thing alone won me over right away. They give you wine; they even supply you with handmade vegetable soap, not the Fight Club lard kind. They give you a plate of cookies, and more soap shaped into hearts. I lie in my soft bed, fireplace blasting (all the rooms have them) and stare out at the ocean rocking. The slick black ravens that live here as well are cawing. There are hummingbirds, butterflies it's a Disney still-life. But I've only been here a few days, so my brain is still very sick. I am measuring the distance an earthquake-caused tsunami would need to cover to get to us here.

Mendocino is home to Big River, and the Inn runs Catch A Canoe And Bicycles Too!, which rents outriggers designed and built by Mendocino artisan Robert Cummings. Outrigger canoes avert rollovers and are perfect for those urban warriors who think getting wet involves olives. I paddle along the river and allow myself to, well, play, like I really didn't do much as a kid, just wasn't, uh, safe to. But now I just kinda slip into it, I am one of them early explorers, and it is easy to imagine this, if I ignore my Adidas sneakers and whatnot, 'cause this is the only major undeveloped navigable estuary remaining in Northern California. I raise my make-believe rifle and aim it at a playful otter swimming alongside me, "Gonna make me a pelt coat!" I tell my imaginary pioneer friend as I fire with my finger. The otter gives me a horrified look, and I try to explain, "I was just playing, I am a vegetarian!" But he has seen the look in my eye, the look of a boy who has learned how to be cruel and can summon it up, even in play. "You're safe!" I shout out as the otter dives under.

"You're safe here " Jeff assures me, after my thinly veiled queries about tidal waves. We are feasting on a sumptuous dinner of seapalm strudel and futomaki rolls in the pine dining room, which allows everyone to gaze out at the skyline. With his chiseled Viking genes, his graceful, purposeful movements, and his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge, it feels okay to trust Jeff. Like there is a net that would never let me drop, a feeling I never felt before. A place to let myself be safe.

A magical shelter is what Jeff, Joan, and now their two grown children have created. Jeff pays his employees more than anyone else in the area, pays for psychiatric care if they should need it, has a profit-sharing program. Heck, he even feeds the raccoons. I hide my talisman of a raccoon penis bone under my shirt as he tells me this. He gets involved in his workers' lives if they come to him. If a kid needs help dealing with an alcoholic parent and the trouble that has wrought, it is Jeff and Joan who go to the meetings. Joan volunteers at the local school, offering a class for kids entering teenhood, the curriculum geared to keeping their quickly eroding self-esteem intact. It is a class I wish to enroll in, even though I am now settling into adulthood.

I head into the greenhouse-enclosed swimming pool, and stare up at the ceiling dripping with ferns and exotic orchids. I once found my best friend floating in the tub. I always thought, "That's the way I would do it." A perfectly manicured couple enter and b egin loudly discussing astronomical stock options. I know they see a lush four-star inn that pampers them in all the ways they expect: spa, massage, gourmet organic food. I sink beneath the water and lay very still, till their voices are a fuzzy burble. I tune into the pulse, of the ley line or my heart, or to the last beating sound my friend's heart made when he drowned himself. And when my lungs are about to burst, I push up to the surface of the water and take a huge gasp. I wipe the water off my eyes and smile at the folks dipping their toes in.

"We were getting worried about you," the woman says disinterestedly, sprinkling water on her tanned thigh.

"Oh, I'm okay. I'm safe."