Sur’s Up

On Nepenthe’s sun-drenched patio, tourists are sipping pink lemonade and admiring the unmatched ocean view for the first time in nearly four months. At the Ventana Inn, Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs are once again pulling into the parking lot, and guests are lounging on the clothing-optional sun deck. At the Big Sur Lodge, the phone is ringing nonstop with families booking cabins.

“It is just so great to see people coming back,” said Tom Birmingham, manager of Nepenthe restaurant, happily surveying his customers. “We shined the tables and made repairs, but we missed the people.”

A whole season after winter storms felled redwoods here as though they were matchsticks, gouged out hundreds of feet of scenic California 1 and forced helicopter evacuations of visitors and residents, Big Sur is coming back to life. And that is good news all along California’s Central Coast.

Big Sur’s isolation had a ripple effect to the south, where San Luis Obispo County saw tourism plunge, and to the north, where Monterey County recorded a $41-million loss in tourist business in February and March.

“Highway 1 is known the world over as a one-of-a-kind experience,” said Jim Allen, spokesman for Hearst Castle near Cambria, south of Big Sur. “The public’s perception that the road was closed and that the weather was bad have been devastating.”

Today, just in time for Memorial Day weekend, the Big Sur coast, all 70 miles of California 1, will be open for the first time since Feb. 2.

On Wednesday, there were still long delays driving down from Carmel or up from Cambria as state Department of Transportation crews moved heavy equipment and finished repainting and signing miles of road. For months to come, motorists will have to dodge road crews spreading asphalt and shoring up bridges.

But by 5 p.m. today, people will once again be able to drive the length of the state’s best-known highway, said Caltrans spokeswoman Val Houdyshell.

The repairs so far have cost more than $20 million and kept a small army of contractors working night and day for months.

For Big Sur business owners who have been getting by on loans and optimism, and for workers who have been collecting unemployment and eating at local soup kitchens, the road’s reopening comes not a moment too soon.

In Big Sur alone, the Chamber of Commerce estimated losses at $9 million. Even after the northern stretch of California 1 opened between Big Sur and Carmel on April 24, visitors only trickled in, said Laura Moran, manager of Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn.

“We’ve been a cul-de-sac,” Moran said. “Until it is a through road, we’re not going to have the business we usually do.”

Moran noted proudly that none of this tiny community’s two dozen businesses--all dependent on tourism--called it quits during one of the longest closures anyone can remember on a coast accustomed to hardship every winter. Surprisingly, she said, even most of the workers laid off during the closure have returned to their old jobs.

“It is going to require the rest of the year to make up for the losses, but there is a good feeling in the air, a sense that everybody made it,” Moran said.

Selena Perez, a receptionist at the Big Sur Lodge who has lived and worked here for seven years, said she never considered leaving, even when she was reduced to working part time and felt cabin fever closing in.

“I love it here,” Perez said. “I just thought of it as a quiet time.”

The lodge, built in a forested state park, smells of fresh paint--as do most of the businesses here. Cabins sport new roofs, and the grounds are manicured. The lodge’s mini-market--used as a food bank during the crisis--is back to selling supplies to campers. The blackboards are gone from the pool room, which had been used as a temporary classroom for 40 students who were cut off from schools in Carmel for months.

Lodge Manager Dan Priano figures his losses at roughly $500,000.

But he said he is just grateful that he kept his staff together and that the road is fully reopened in time for Memorial Day weekend, traditional kickoff for the high summer season.

“It’s going to be tough, but we’re going to make it,” he said.

Big Sur residents call their four months of enforced isolation “The Great Inconvenience.”

They breezily dismiss raging winter storms, crumbling lifelines to the outside world, and power outages that last days at a time as the price of living in paradise.

“I’ve lived in Big Sur for 28 years, and this is the 19th major closure I’ve lived through,” said Ken Wright, owner of the tiny Glen Oaks motel.

Wright came to the Central Coast as a highway patrolman, fell in love with Big Sur and never left.

“This is the most incredible place in the world. It is a privilege to live here, to be a caretaker of the land,” he said. “I am not trying to get touchy-feely on you, but I draw strength from this place. I never think: This is too hard.”

Watching Caltrans workers toiling on the highway Wednesday, Don Harlan guffawed when asked if he would head out when the southern end of the highway reopened.

“What would I do in town?” said Harlan, 73, who lives on the Big Sur ranch his grandfather homesteaded in 1884.

Harlan said he ventured off the coast just a half dozen times after the road closed this year. Mostly he lived on canned vegetables and food stored in his solar-powered deep freeze. He talked to his creaky terrier, Spotty, and tended his herd of black Angus cattle.

“People talk about this as the worst closure ever,” he said. “But in ‘41, we got 65 inches of rain. In the ‘60s, the road closed one time in the winter and didn’t open until August. I’ve seen places in the road sink 50 feet. This time, they only sank 5.

“It’s all part of the joy of living here.”