Highway 17 trek a hazardous trade-off
When I came to the Mercury News in the late 1970s, I worked in our Mountain View bureau with a smart and delightful reporter who made a 75-mile round-trip trek every day from Felton.
With a bicyclist’s sense of moral superiority, I chided her about the gas she was wasting on her commute.
Then I saw her place — a refurbished cabin perched in a gorgeous, tree-shaded glen — and I understood why she battled the mountain highways every day. She touched nature daily in a way I could never hope to in my apartment complex.
That memory strikes me when I ponder the pain that Highway 17 commuters are undergoing now after a massive landslide closed the highway to two lanes only near Vine Hill Road. It leaves them with an unpalatable choice — an impossibly long crossing or a detour that could add 50 miles to their trip.
At lunch the other day, a friend of mine was outraged at how long it took him to traverse Highway 17. He insisted that he himself could quickly open traffic to two lanes in each direction. “All it takes is moving some cones,” he told me.
He might well have a point — though with a death of a worker earlier this month, repairs were delayed.
But there is a larger point beyond the logistics of this winter’s slide. Put simply, it is this: The people who live in Santa Cruz and work in the valley have made a conscious choice. They’ve agreed to live close to the coast in exchange for negotiating a dangerous mountain road plagued by landslides, earthquakes and accidents.
“It’s similar to the way people in Minnesota accept minus-30-degree winters or move away,” says a friend of mine who makes the commute from Santa Cruz. “There’s no point in complaining. Like they say in ‘The Godfather,’ ‘this is the business we have chosen.’ ”
Years of drought have blinded us to the reality that Highway 17 has always been a step or two away from calamity, big or small. It happened in 1982-83. It happened in 1989. It happened in 1997-98. In the mountains, it rains furiously. And the earth moves capriciously. And yes, enormous work has been done to shore up the sides of the highway: Parts of Highway 17 remind me of the rock-climbing walls that overpriced universities use to attract new students. (Forget the professors! Check out that edge!)
Unfortunately, those reinforcements did not stop the slide near Vine Hill Road.
Everywhere in California — not just in the Santa Cruz Mountains — we rely on a thin ribbon of infrastructure that cannot really match a determined nature.
A recent letter-writer to the Mercury News suggested that the real answer for Santa Cruz was to bring jobs to the coast, not to continue to have people traverse the mountains in long lines. He called Highway 17’s long commute a political problem masquerading as a traffic problem.
The writer had it half-right. It is a political problem. But it does not follow that people want to change things as they are. A big influx of jobs would alter the nature of Santa Cruz County irrevocably. It would no longer be the relaxed or laid-back place it is.
Strange as it seems, the people who choose the coast have a stake in keeping a treacherous road to and from the valley.
If Highway 17 were a freeway shielded from mudslides and natural disaster, Santa Cruz would draw even more people. The purgatory of the road preserves the paradise at its end.