Cambria, Calif.
The commonplace joke of California sliding into the Pacific Ocean, either from seismic activity or an overaccumulation of New Age weirdness, has achieved some semblance of reality this year. It’s long been said that California’s climate comprises just two periods: mudslide season and fire season. This year’s record rainfall, which followed years of predictions that climate change had mired the state in permanent drought, brought forth the usual winter floods and mudslides, followed by a springtime super-bloom of grass and brush that have made for an early and severe start to the summer fire season.
California is used to mudslides in predictable areas, chiefly where major highways run along cliffs or hillsides, most notoriously Malibu, Ventura, Big Sur, and the far northern coast. Most slides are cleared within hours, a few days at most. The main exception is Highway 1 through Big Sur, just north of where I live. This legendary stretch has been closed more than 60 times by slides in its 80-year history and is presently closed for an undetermined length of time after a recent round of landslides cut the road in three places.
The 100-mile stretch of Highway 1 between San Simeon and Monterey is one of the world’s great coastal drives and a marvel of civil engineering. Construction began by the state of California in the 1920s using convicts paid 35 cents a day along with a sentence reduction, but the road didn’t get very far until it was adopted as a public works program in the New Deal, finally opening as a through route in 1937. The road features several concrete span bridges that are still considered architectural and engineering marvels, especially the Bixby Creek Bridge, which most Americans have seen in numerous TV car commercials over the years. The Bixby Creek Bridge is a reminder that America used to be able to build major public works at a reasonable price; Bixby cost about $200,000, or about $3.5 million adjusted for inflation. Today that figure wouldn’t even cover preliminary environmental and engineering reviews. Completing the highway opened Big Sur to generations of tourists.
The road would never be built if proposed de novo today. Never mind the whining environmentalists; budget-conscious legislators or bureaucrats would stop it. (Though I suppose if someone proposed to build high-speed rail through that stretch . . . ) Road engineers probably like the challenge of the extremely expensive fixes required to keep patching up this inherently unstable roadbed. Though it doesn’t have huge overall traffic numbers, its twists and turns make a slow trip, especially when you get caught behind a Winnebago with Kansas plates, so it is usually crowded. There is no shoulder most of the way, few turnouts, and no passing lanes.
When a slide hits the Big Sur road, it will sometimes be months before the road can be repaired. In 1983, one of the biggest El Niño rain years on record, a massive slide estimated at 2.7 million cubic yards of earth at a spot called Sycamore Draw near the Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park required over a year to be repaired in what California’s Department of Transportation says was the largest earth-moving project in its history. (For perspective, that volume of earth would fill more than 200,000 dump trucks.) One construction worker, Ernest “Skinner” Pierce, was killed when a secondary slide occurred during rebuilding, burying him and his skip loader under so much debris that his body was never recovered. More than 30 years later, the massive gash left in the cliff by the repair work is still obvious driving by.
Although there have been the predictable editorials wondering if Highway 1 should be abandoned, it is inconceivable because the road and its environs are too much a part of California’s culture, as well as the locale for some of California’s toniest boutique resorts, like the Post Ranch Inn. Ocean-view rooms at Post Ranch start around $1,500 a night, but expect to add $300 for dinner for two at its premier Sierra Mar restaurant. The Post Ranch Inn is cut off to car traffic right now, but remains open by flying in guests and supplies by helicopter. A two-night stay with the helicopter trip will set you back $4,291. I’m sure it’s buying carbon offsets. Meanwhile, its fleet of Lexus Hybrids that normally ferry customers from the distant parking lot up to the guest suites is sitting idle. The high-end boutique resort just across the road from Post Ranch, Ventana, is closed until road access is restored from the north, which will take at least until September.
A little further down the socioeconomic food chain, and the highway, is the rustic cliffside residence once owned by Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles that was converted in 1949 into the Nepenthe restaurant. The food is terrific (I recommend the Ambrosia burger with Cheddar), but I always try to harsh the happy hippie vibe by talking about the greatness of Richard Nixon at the bar. Nepenthe remains open at reduced capacity for the handful of local residents who can make it there. Maybe the most obscure cultural fact, however, is that Big Sur was the location for the only Hollywood movie done in Esperanto, the 1966 cult horror film Incubus, starring William Shatner. Given that Shatner also spoke Klingon in one of the Star Trek films, he is perhaps the only actor ever to speak two made-up languages on the big screen.
Did I say Big Sur was an integral part of California’s culture? It would be more accurate to say it is an integral part of California’s counterculture, as the opening of the road made it a favorite destination for a who’s who of avant-garde writers, artists, and philosophers, and later a prime destination for hitchhiking hippies. There’s a tiny library dedicated to Henry Miller and the Beat writers who liked to retreat to the redwood groves, but the crown jewel of the Big Sur countercultural scene has to be the Esalen Institute, headquarters of the New Age “human potential” movement founded back in the 1960s. Esalen was supposedly the setting for the penultimate scene of the final episode of Mad Men, in which Don Draper is depicted in a meditation circle on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, getting the inspiration for the famous Coca-Cola TV spot “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” Esalen wouldn’t allow the show to shoot the scenes on its grounds—the production trucks and equipment would have been too disruptive to the morning yoga circles, group meditations, and naked sunbathers—so they were shot elsewhere.
Esalen is perched on a cliff at a natural hot springs, where seminars begin with a moment of meditation, the kitchen staff chants “ohmmmm” in a circle before bringing out the gluten-free fare, and guests are encouraged to experience the hot spring baths au naturel. (I declined the opportunity at an Esalen conference I once attended, but am reliably informed that Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann went in for the authentic experience. Yet they say Republicans are crude.) Another time in the late 1980s, I was cruising up Highway 1 on the summer day of the “Harmonic Convergence” (don’t ask) and tried to crash the Esalen Institute to see what wackiness they might be up to. I was told at the gate that the Convergence was being observed in a low-key “communitarian” way, but that since I didn’t have a reservation I could not go in. My response: “Well, could I astral-project myself, or would that be cheating?”
Esalen played a vital role in ending the Cold War with the Soviet Union—just ask them. In a reverse Potemkin Village, Esalen started the “Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program” that convened gatherings of Soviet citizens and Americans starting in the early 1980s for “dialogues.” Esalen sponsored the first visit of alternative energy guru Amory Lovins to the Soviet Union, which a less senescent country might have regarded as a hostile act.
Weekend workshops at Esalen start at $420—if you want to stay in your sleeping bag. Actual rooms for the weekend start at $1,505 for a single, $2,310 for double occupancy. Like everything else in coastal California, New Age reflection and meditation has gone upscale. But you’ll have to wait a while. Esalen is shut right now too and has laid off a large portion of its staff because of the road closure.
This year, the Big Sur road is cut in three places. The Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge near the hamlet of Big Sur washed out in February and has to be completely replaced. Just south of Lucia, near the midpoint of the Big Sur highway, is Paul’s Slide (yes—like wildfires, landslides here get their own names), over which a temporary one-lane dirt road was intermittently available only for local residents and businesses until repairs reopened part of that section to general traffic on July 19. But the notable slide this year occurred on May 20 on the south end of the road, more than a month after the last significant rain, when more than five million cubic yards of earth (no one really can say how much) slid into the Pacific near Mud Creek, visibly changing the coastline. The slide is so massive and unstable that Caltrans can’t offer an estimate for when it might be repaired.
Right now, you can access a 12-mile segment of the middle of Highway 1 between Paul’s Slide and the Mud Creek slide by means of the narrow and terrifying Nacimiento-Fergusson Road that comes over the high coastal mountains from the interior of Monterey County. It is a road with many blind hairpin corners and no guardrails on its many sheer cliffs. It drops down from a 2,780-foot summit to the sea in about seven miles that seem much longer. Naturally, I’ve made the harrowing trip twice in recent weeks, unable to resist taking in the eerie sensation of driving down an empty road. At the hamlet of Gorda (where gasoline is still available for a mere $6.60 a gallon for regular, $7.39 for supreme), the road is closed to further traffic, which doesn’t bar anyone with walking shoes, however.
Walking a couple miles down the yellow line of the closed portions of the highway feels like being in a zombie apocalypse movie. I’ve pulled off many times over the years to take a view, but you don’t appreciate how noisy the normal traffic is until there isn’t any. As astounding as the scenery is from a motorcar, a solitary walk along the cliffs summons to mind all the clichés about transcendence and authenticity. And then you round a corner to see the Mud Creek slide. . .
The slide can’t actually be seen in its entirety from the north, and news reports of its instability appeared to be true on my first visit in May, when wind gusts started small but visible secondary slides. But the most notable feature of the slide is the large tongue of debris jutting out into the ocean that has altered the coastline so dramatically that maps will need to be changed. Caltrans has installed a special radar detection system to track movement in the slide while it begins work on trying to clear a dirt road through it, which was underway on my recent second visit. There is no estimate of when the highway might be restored to normal traffic, but it will probably be more than a year—longer if significant rains come again this winter.
The Mud Creek slide is the largest ever to hit the highway, and maybe it is a metaphor for California’s larger defects: This beautiful, often magical place is nonetheless sliding away from our long-running efforts to subdue it for our pleasure, requiring ever more strenuous repairs affordable only because of the prodigious wealth the state nonetheless overspends anyway. And it is a reminder of California’s growing class divide, too. The road engineers and construction workers who patch up this unstable route are probably not customers of Esalen or the Post Ranch Inn, most of whom seldom give a thought to Ernest Pierce, entombed forever at the site of the Sycamore Draw slide.
At least Caltrans has a sense of humor. Where the road disappears, there’s a sign that fits California right now: “Rough road.” And getting rougher all the time.
Steven F. Hayward is a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author, most recently, of Patriotism Is Not Enough
