Jesse Daniel, Love Creek and the mysteries and secrets of the San Lorenzo Valley

A bit more than a mile from the parking lot of Ben Lomond Market in the center of town, up a typically serpentine and redwood-shrouded San Lorenzo Valley road, you’ll see it — but only if you’re really looking for it. I found it only after passing by it in the car twice and then setting out on foot. 

It’s a roadside memorial, not official in any way, but well-known locally. It marks one of the most infamous tragedies in Santa Cruz County’s history. Sometime in the early morning hours of Jan. 5, 1982, a massive forested hillside, saturated by 48 hours of continuous rainfall, collapsed, burying a number of homes along Love Creek in 17 million cubic feet of mud and debris. Ten people were killed in that mudslide, two of them children.

The memorial is a wooden toy box, painted red, greatly degraded by exposure to the elements. Inside the toy box is a heap of toys, mostly stuffed animals and figurines. And above the toy box, stenciled on a handmade sign, are these heartbreaking words: “Somewhere in this area are my two grandsons, Taylor, 7, and Kelly, 5. Please don’t dump any trash, Grandma Olson.”

Over the years, Love Creek has become a big part of the San Lorenzo Valley’s tragic mystique, a terrifying example of the potential cost of living in these hills, and a reflection of the people who do live here.

Jesse Daniel was born more than a decade after the Love Creek tragedy. But he grew up in these parts. And, as a promising young country singer looking to cut a swath through Nashville, he’s adopted the SLV as his calling card, most specifically in his brand-new album, “Son of the San Lorenzo.” On Saturday, Daniel returns to perform as the headliner at the annual Redwood Mountain Faire at Roaring Camp in Felton. 

A showcase song on the new album is called “The Ballad of Love Creek.” It makes mention of the tragedy of 1982, but only in the context of other historical legends that have grown in the area like lush ferns, from the weird origin story of the creek’s name to people driven to madness and murder. The song has a vibe, equal parts menace and wonder, that makes it a kind of Highway 9 version of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

“It’s partly truth and partly fiction,” said Daniel, 32, of the song that will be released with the rest of his new album June 6. 

The song introduces Love Creek as a stream “that leads straight to hell,” but Daniel has idyllic memories of the place as a kid. “There was a dammed-up part of it that we used to swim in,” he said, “and I played for hours and hours and hours down there. It was like a wonderland in the redwoods, especially growing up. But as I got older, I started to realize there was some crazy history up there, and I always felt a weird kind of energy to that place.”

In 2011, when Daniel was a teenager, a young woman and her unborn child were murdered along Love Creek Road, which has occasioned yet another roadside memorial.

Love Creek is not named for the universal emotion of affection and everyone’s favorite English word. It was, in fact, named for 19th-century bounty hunter and Mexican War veteran Harry Love, a native New Englander who eventually became the head of the California Rangers, the first statewide law-enforcement agency. Love was most famous for his long pursuit of the legendary California outlaw Joaquin Murrieta. He retired in the San Lorenzo Valley near the creek that now bears his name. 

In his youth, Daniel lived about a mile up the canyon from the Love Creek neighborhood destroyed by the landslide, and as a kid he would often walk among the eerily abandoned houses and cars: “It was all pretty scary and was really fuel for my imagination.”

As much as Daniel is a product of the SLV, he is also distinctly a son of Santa Cruz as well. Though he grew up in Ben Lomond, as a young man, Daniel was drawn to the surf/skate culture of Santa Cruz and, instead of Nashville country, his first flirtation with music was as a drummer in punk bands. His origin story, in fact, is steeped in criminality and addiction, and, considering his trajectory as a teen, he very well could have ended up as a dark lyric in someone else’s country song about Love Creek. 

Another song on the new album, titled “Crankster,” is a ride-along with a troubled character “runnin’ like a devil from a mangled past.” The “crankster,” Daniel explained, is his take on a uniquely California character forged in criminal excess and prison culture.

“Yeah, I’ve definitely been the ‘crankster,’” he said, “and I grew up around a lot of these people as well.”

For several years now, Daniel has been pursuing a career in country music in Nashville, Austin and other places, touring constantly. The kind of country music that Daniel aspires to pays close heed to roots and authenticity, which means he has constantly had to draw from his background and upbringing to explain his niche in the country music arena. But almost no one outside Northern California knows anything about the unique culture of the Santa Cruz Mountains or the San Lorenzo Valley. “California” is too broad a category to be meaningful in any specific way, and even claiming Santa Cruz as home brings with it certain associations and connotations that are not part of Daniel’s sound today.

“Son of the San Lorenzo” — the title track of the new album has been part of his set for years; he includes it on the new album re-recorded — is not only Daniel’s “Where I’m From” statement, it’s his “Who I Am” statement as well.

“I’ve been to Appalachia,” he said. “I’ve been to those little towns in Kentucky. And Boulder Creek/Ben Lomond is right up there with all of them, as far as I’m concerned, with the types of people who live and work there. It’s very similar in a lot of ways, like every other mountain town in the country. So, yeah, that’s my little slice of the world. And it makes me proud to represent it.”

As for “The Ballad of Love Creek,” even Daniel himself said that the song should not be mistaken for local history. Lisa Robinson, the curator at the San Lorenzo Valley Museum, looked a bit askance at the song’s claim that the banks of Love Creek are “cursed.” She also takes a bit of starch out of Harry Love’s reputation as the ornery lawman who killed Murrieta, which is probably a tall tale.

“He was a farmer,” she said of Love. “He grew crops. You can read in old clips from the Santa Cruz Sentinel about him being a gracious host to people going to see him, showing them the best trout-fishing spots, for example.”

Still, the valley at large carries a mystique born of how tough the geography has made it for people to live there. “There have been lots of lives lost in this valley,” Robinson said, “to all kinds of accidents from rainfall and earthquakes and accidental drownings in the river. There are many real ghost stories here. You don’t have to make things up.”

That mystique of the thickly forested mountains, the lush redwoods and the remote mountain roads has in turn attracted people more comfortable in places out of reach of urban convenience or suburban comfort. 

“You go to places like Lompico or Zayante,” said Daniel, “or way up beyond Boulder Creek, you’ll find people that don’t want to be found. A lot of them, they’re just people who want to be left alone and live more or less lawlessly. I don’t know what it’s like now, but growing up, that’s kinda what was up there. I remember going up beyond Boulder Creek, up on some dirt road and you get up there and you’ll see hand-painted signs that say, ‘Do not go any further.’ And beyond there lies full-on Anarchy Town.”

Sounds like the germ of a song for the next album. 

Jesse Daniel headlines the Saturday entertainment lineup of the Redwood Mountain Faire, at 6:45 p.m. on the Meadow Stage at Roaring Camp in Felton.

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