From the book Lives on Board... 60 Miles On The Lost Coast By Gary Fluitt In September 1982, waters off Ecuador began to superheat in what was to become one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded. Warm Pacific storms brewed, gathered eastward momentum and slammed into California. Those of us who living there missed our usual California sunshine for what was the longest winter I remember. While the surf was good and big, the land was saturated and failing under the pressure of constant downpours. One day that winter a giant section of Julia Pfeiffer State Park near Big Sur calved off into the ocean, taking a large chunk of Highway 1 with it. The destruction of the highway was so devastating that CalTrans closed the highway for more than a year and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on repairs. During this closed period, much of Highway 1 south of Julia Pfeiffer State Park was repaved. While the “McWay Slide” project (so named because the slide occurred near the scenic McWay Rocks) was underway, the rest of Highway 1 sat fallow. Businesses closed down. The local economy went into an extended dormancy. Jack Smith knew that Highway 1 is one of the most beautiful stretches of highway in the world, so he convinced Paul Dunn and me that we should skate it. We would later convince my girlfriend, Nicole, to drive us the 90+ miles north to the slide location and drop us off, and we would skate back home on unfettered blacktop. The predawn launch from Morro Bay had us huddled under sleeping bags in the back of Nicole’s Subaru Brat. Sometime early in that morning, the Subaru lurched to a halt at the McWay Slide. The slide was massive, and difficult to take in. We quickly turned our attention south and started pushing for San Simeon, with no idea if we would make it or seize up in the process. Jack had done this before, a long-distance skate. In 1976, he and some buddies made the first transcontinental push from Oregon to Virginia, on short boards and first-generation urethane wheels, in little more than a month. The legend of this trek was well known among our crew, and we all thought about doing it on our longboards and big, resilient Kryptonics, skating through the hinterlands of our country. The Big Sur ride would be the catalyst for that adventure, as it turned out. The first uphill was a wakeup call. One can push with one’s regular push leg only so far. The only uphill skating I’d ever done was purely by mistake, so adapting to the necessary switch push felt awkward and unnatural. The switch push was accompanied by a few wheel bites and end-overs, but after 20 miles or so, I got it wired and was pushing uncomfortably with alternating legs: regular for five, mongo for three, regular for five... By noon we’d cruised some 30 miles. It was weird to see just one car the entire time. The weather was ridiculously gorgeous. We had one of the world’s most spectacular stretches of roadway all to ourselves. Skating over Bixby Bridge, and through an occasional redwood grove on an inside curve, is something I’ll never forget. What we didn’t realize was that there was a lot of uphill in the final fourth of this ride. Legs started to cramp. Shirts came off in the rare heat of this spring day, and we suffered along, wondering if this was as stupid an exercise as it might have seemed. But when we made our last push and pulled off the highway into the San Simeon grocery store parking lot, that pain evaporated. We’d covered 63 miles in just six hours. It was an amazingly efficient skate, and I felt pretty good, considering. In that post-skate stoke, we hatched a plan to go across the country. If we could knock off 63 miles in a morning with no training, skating across the country ought to be cake, went the logic (and naïveté). About three months later we were in Newport, Oregon, dipping the tails of our Madrid longboards into the Pacific, preparing for one of the longest journeys of my life. Our 1984 push across the U.S. will always be a significant benchmark in my life, but that day skating the Big Sur coastline, having Highway 1 all to ourselves, will stand out as one of the best days ever, on board or off.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 05:00:46 +0000
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