一号公路Highway 1

In the spring of 2017, the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge on Highway 1 broke. For the rest of that year, the world’s most famous coastal road no longer went all the way through Big Sur. That same spring, on the other side of the Pacific, This Is Not What I Expected came out, with Cheer Chen singing its closing song:

说一号公路上 那座桥断了 我们还去吗
要不再说呢 会修一年吧
一年能等吗 你还去吗 你喜欢吗

They say the bridge on Highway 1 is down. Do we still go?
Or maybe some other time. It will take a year to fix.
Can we wait a year? Would you still go? Do you like it?

The bridge reopened eight months later, for once beating the song’s estimate. But Highway 1 kept breaking. Fix the bridge, then a hillside gives way. It took until January this year to reopen the last stretch. For the first time in three years, you could drive Highway 1 from end to end again.

Do we still go#

Go? Of course. We went in late January.

Late January isn’t Highway 1’s best season, but it is the California coast’s secret spring. After the rains, the hills turn a green that won’t survive June, and the tour buses haven’t figured this out yet. Good views, few people, plenty of chances to pull over and climb onto the rocks.

Highway 1 is a long way from home. Drive a little farther and it is often dusk. The road gets emptier, and a bare tree against the last pink in the sky is your cue to turn around. On the way back, you get stuck behind other sightseers with the same idea of fun, or small-town working stiffs just off their shifts. Either way, two hours of taillights.

Then home#

While Highway 1 was being repaired, we moved (what does that have to do with anything?). That was in the fall. By the weekend the clocks went back an hour, the place was put together and the pumpkins were out.

Sure enough, Highway 1 closed again in February. When it breaks, wait; when it’s fixed, go again. Anyway, I have a comfortable home to wait in.