Our Crumbling Shores
THIS SPRING, I found myself on a nature run in Junipero Serra Park, in San Bruno, a small town on the peninsula south of San Francisco. The park is a leafy-green oasis amid a crowded, affluent part of the Bay Area: shaded by coastal live oaks and Monterey pines, home to acorn woodpeckers, black-tailed deer, and, apparently, the occasional mountain lion who wanders out of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Earlier that day, I’d heard a news report that heavy storms and ensuing floods had washed out a portion of California Highway 1 leading to Big Sur, an iconic locale on the misty cliffs of the coast. Two lanes had partially collapsed, leaving a single lane undamaged but adding to closure woes from landslides of years past. The president of the Big Sur Chamber of Commerce told the San Francisco Chronicle that losses from the slide would amount to a million dollars a day. The news was a tough reminder of the ongoing erosion of the California coast, unremarkable on its own, but evidence too of an unstoppable, unrelenting force, of things adding up. I followed the trail to the top of a hillside covered in miner’s lettuce, where an opening in the trees offered a view of San Francisco International Airport (SFO), its runway just 10 feet or so above sea level. I stopped to take in the view — wondering, as I often do in the woods, how long humans can make a go of it. From up here, SFO looked like a model, a fragile airport in miniature, where miniature planes alighted, one after the other, in a constant, perpetual stream. How long, I wondered, will that airport remain? How long before the salt marsh returns, before this hilltop overlooks a ruin? From this vantage, I could easily imagine its destruction — and less so its salvation. Journal Associate Editor Brian Calvert tours the grinding catastrophe of erosion along California’s iconic coast in this essay from our summer print issue.
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