Looking for a reason
By Patrick May
Mercury News
There's a lot of lonely and a little bit of loony to this zip code in the sky. High above Los Gatos off Summit Road, up where the fog loiters and the curves are all blind, hilltop folks with unlisted numbers and unmarked driveways jealously guard their 20 acres of peace and quiet.
Lately, though, the peace is strained and things are a little too quiet.
Springtime afternoons along Loma Chiquita Road would normally include the muffled din of dirt bikes that locals race along trails and unpaved roads. But ever since Bob Barnes nearly lost his head as he drove his bike past Ed Anderson's house down the road, the only racket comes from the restless junk-yard dog.
Barnes and some buddies were returning to his mountaintop home from an afternoon of dirt-biking when he was caught by something strung across the road near Anderson's gate.
Cops say it was a rope. Barnes says it felt more like a steel bar.
Several days and 500 stitches later, Barnes, 46, was released from the hospital, only to find his $8,000 orange KTM 300 MXC bike missing from his barn.
Police arrested Anderson, 48, his live-in girlfriend Donna Olsen, 46, and their neighbor Donald Byrant, 62, all booked on felony assault charges. Police said the three hid in the bushes as the biker was snared by their trap.
They're not talking -- none of the three returned phone calls Saturday -- and Anderson's front gate was locked up tight.
So Barnes and his family and neighbors are left to figure out what might have set Anderson and the others off. Was it the years of dirt-bike noise that finally got to his neighbors?
``They'd never said anything about us riding,'' Barnes said Saturday outside his ridge-top home, his lips swollen like purple grapes, lisping from a shattered palate. ``A lot of people up here ride; we're a family of dirt bikers. This is dirt-bike heaven; it's one of the reasons people move up here.''
Perhaps it's something they'd said? Barnes' wife, Wendy, thinks not: ``Don Bryant and I communicate all the time by e-mail, and he's always joking around, usually saying things like `Go Bush,' because we both like Bush. There was never any warning. We don't get it. Did they all just snap that day?''
Barnes can't say for sure what might have inspired such a heinous act. But he has a hunch the bad blood may have started years ago, when he and Anderson got mixed up in a road-paving deal gone bad.
The two men's motives were honorable -- get the 150 or so residents in this unincorporated piece of Santa Clara County to pitch in and pay for the paving and improvement of the winding stretch of Loma Chiquita that serves as their umbilical cord to the rest of civilization.
But things got messy. Some residents balked at paying. Expenses got out of control. Various sides made legal noises. Bad vibes took root. In late 2001, the road improvement project hit a dead end.
``They ran out of money and there was some lingering tension because of a civil matter over the funding of the road,'' said Scott Webster, 45, a land surveyor and a friend and neighbor of Barnes. ``Everybody got lawyers.''
The irony here is lost on neither Barnes nor Webster: The one thing that may now have neighbor fighting neighbor could turn out to be the one thing that, like it or not, keeps the Loma Chiquita Road community joined at the hip -- the road.
``There's always some controversy with the mountain folk with people riding on their roads,'' Santa Clara sheriff's deputy Sgt. Dean Baker told the Mercury News last week. ``They didn't like motorcycles going down their road, but what are they going to do?''
On the evening of May 6, as he returned home from his sundown ride, Barnes says he saw Bryant ``standing by the side of the road in front of Anderson's place, looking at me. Next thing I know, I see something clip me in the face. I fell off the bike, I think. I saw Donna. And I saw Ed running away.''
One woman who lives in the area, and who didn't want her name used in this story, said neighbors have long had mixed feelings about Anderson. She said he was a wannabe mayor of the neighborhood, a big imposing guy who was also handy with a wrench and was considered the locals' mechanic, a sought-after trade up here at 2,800 feet elevation and miles from the nearest store.
``But now we know they're just bad apples,'' she said of the three arrested. ``Everyone is hoping they'll finally get kicked out of here.''
But for now, things are simply quiet and tense. Barnes is in a justice-seeking mood. He's grouchy from the discomfort and the hassle of using a cane to get around. And he wants his stolen dirt bike back.
After all, out there on Loma Chiquita's dusty trails and hairpin turns full of a vultures' all-you-can-eat roadkill smorgasbord, there's a lot of riding left to do.
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