Rights of Passage

Johnny King is that man. He's a deeply committed iconoclast; a man who has invented from whole cloth every component of his life and describes himself as "clinically eccentric."

On the drive toward Las Trampas Road, he takes time to patiently explain the safety flares, rear-window police flashers, and high-powered searchlight that adorn the inside of his 1987 RX-7.

"I often find myself to be the first on the scene at traffic accidents," he says with such a flat, matter-of-fact tone that it's hard to imagine things otherwise. "So helping people at accidents is one of the things I do." He has repainted his car with a roller brush -- "It cuts down on glare." And as for the searchlight, "I can't believe everybody doesn't have a searchlight. I use it all the time."

He rents a Lafayette duplex with a garage, yet for 17 years has slept in the Orinda hills in his parked van, because he prefers van life. And he lives in the fetters of a court restraining order resulting from a series of gate-damaging incidents unrelated to the Las Trampas Road affair. He once held vigil in Art Agnos' City Hall parking spot to protest an S.F. ordinance banning horse traffic.

King's painstakingly crafted originality seems to have been custom-machined for his current quest against the Las Trampas gate. Some environmentalists, trail activists, and horse enthusiasts say his brand of extremism can be counterproductive, and King has, indeed, threatened to destroy the gate.

"You see those bolts there at the pivots? All I would have to do is remove them," King explains.

He has also made veiled threats of violence to the security company hired by the property owners, and waged a letter-writing battle with the development's lawyers.

"The claims of the 'graciousness' and 'neighborliness' of the Alamo Ridge homeowners being offended by 'people like me' are absurd and not worthy of response," reads one such correspondence. "I will consider any unlawful physical contact with my person while I am exercising my lawful right to travel on Las Trampas Road to be a criminal battery."

After a motor tour through the Las Trampas Road subdivision, Johnny King heads home to his duplex, where he switches automobiles and picks up a T-shirt and sunglasses, which he will put over his head as a disguise -- something to do with his restraining order.

He pulls onto the freeway and heads toward his rented land above Orinda. "I drive fast. It's not making you nervous, is it?" he says.

He peels off the freeway and onto a narrow lane leading toward the grass on the east side of the Oakland hills. As he nears his school-bus-sized horse corral, which is on a field occupying an acre or two, strange signs appear. Signs one wouldn't exactly expect to see in the domain of Johnny King. Some say, "No Trespassing." Others enumerate, in list form, conditions under which King will shoot trespassers.

While King was gone, it seems, someone has driven his car over the back part of the lot, where a former friend is keeping his trailer house. This infuriates King, and he becomes so agitated he loses all focus.

"Those people have ruined my fucking life. This is where I would go for solitude. For a little peace," he says.

Though they don't use exactly the same language, the signs on King's property say the same thing the Las Trampas homeowners are saying: Keep off my land.

Perhaps it's proper to view King with the same eyes that modern scholars view Jefferson, whose ideas about founding a democratic republic remain unsullied by the fact that he was a slave owner and a rake. King, a complex, irascible, irritable eccentric, says that fighting for historical easements over private land to reach public land is tantamount to defending one of our most basic freedoms: our right to travel.