18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY May 30-june 5, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com “There are these really beautiful glimmers of magic that can only happen when it’s quiet like this,” says Diana Ballantyne, general manager of Fernwood Campground & Resort. But there is pressure: She laid off 40 of 44 employees. She expected 1,500 campground nights in April. Instead, she sold just two campground nights. “I am making sure as kind of the mother hen of this place that all of my chicks are warm and fed and taken care of, and all the ducklings are afloat,” she says. One of those ducklings is Zeeek Kim, who lives in employee housing on the property. “In the beginning when I heard we were going to be furloughed and there was no definite timeline, that did make me worried,” he says. “But within a few weeks, I realized I was going to be OK.” While he was not working, he got to soak up the quiet, riding his bike on Highway 1 and looking at wildflowers. “I was able to watch spring actually happen,” he says. Jackson Kownchuck works the front of the house at the Big Sur Lodge, where he’s been furloughed for weeks. His busiest day in six weeks is Sunday, May 12, when he says one person came in to eat. The job comes with housing, and work is easy. “I’ve been enjoying the privacy,” Kownchuck says. He’s still waiting on an unemployment check, but qualified easily for $500 in relief from the nonprofit Community Association of Big Sur, which distributed cash relief to 542 of 600 applicants during the closure. “People have been looking out for one another,” Kownchuck says. “People are getting by and doing good.” Kownchuck and Kim both say they’ve barely bought groceries thanks to The Big Share, another nonprofit. They’ve relied on a grassroots network of community support that exists to help people through times like these, so that hopefully, they get to appreciate some of the magic of the solitude instead of stressing. On Monday afternoon, May 13, kids are playing on a lush lawn. It looks and feels more like a community festival than a food bank distribution. But inside, there are piles of canned vegetables, bags of rice and jars of peanut butter that people are here for. There’s no eligibility criteria, no limit on what you can take— nothing to make it feel institutional. Jolinda Matthews has baked cupcakes to share to celebrate her 51st birthday; cut flowers are available in a jar of water. Stewart Gardner from MEarth (located at Carmel Middle School) harvested 125 heads of lettuce and armloads of scallions and Swiss chard on Sunday—what should be his day off—to deliver via the 7am convoy. This is as much a gathering place as it is a food distribution site. The idea of The Big Share is simple: People in the community know what their neighbors need, and they can get it to them directly, a case study in mutual aid. The group’s motto is “We believe there is plenty for everyone.” “Our whole point is getting out of the scarcity mindset,” says Helen Handshy, one of the creators of The Big Share. She farms on the five-acre Pfeiffer Ridge property where she moved to help care for her 94-year-old grandmother, Clovis Harrod. During the pandemic, the idea to launch something uniquely Big Sur originated. It is more than a food pantry, although it does distribute food from the Food Bank for Monterey County—it’s also an invitation to gather, and not just to take, but to offer. “It’s evolved, but it’s always going to make sense to share food, whether it’s due to Covid or a disaster or just as a place in a remote community for people to gather,” Handshy says. “The way everyone supports each other here is phenomenal.” With hospitality paychecks suddenly reduced or eliminated, there was a surge in participation. They added a second weekly site, and have been serving about 250 people per week. What was usually plenty of eggs—three cases—turned out not to be enough, and they were grabbed up quickly. So Handshy worked to get more (seven cases, of 150 eggs each). “That changed everything,” she says. No more rush. Handshy has a dream of growing the Share with local food. She has calculated they’ll need 225 laying hens to meet the demand for eggs, that critical item. (The target is to have 225 hens by 2025.) She dreams of getting a grant for a walk-in of their own. “If we have just eggs and produce, we could live on that for a couple of weeks,” she says. That might sound like prepper type thinking. But in a remote place like Big Sur, it’s sensible. Highway 1 is the only paved artery that connects the coast to services to the north and south. Slides and slip-outs and flood and fires resulting in road closures are normal. They always have been. A 2001 report prepared by JRP Historical Consulting Services for Caltrans is titled, “A History of Road Closures Along Highway 1.” It reveals that ever since the highway opened in 1937, it’s been perilous to keep open. There were closures in 1938, 1940, 1941, 1952, 1955 and so on. The report documented more than 50 closures, some for as little as a few hours, some lasting many months. Highway 1 in Big Sur is an attraction unto itself, a major tourist draw—but the same features that make the highway an attraction make it fundamentally unstable. “The Big Sur coast is understood to be a geologically active area,” Caltrans spokesperson Kevin Drabinski says. “That has certainly been the case since the highway opened in the 1930s. You have a combination of steep cliffs leading down to the ocean, and steep cliffs leading up to the Santa Lucia Mountains. It poses a challenge for maintaining the roadway. Rain makes the dirt heavier and lubricated, and it wants to find the lowest level. That is one of the reasons we predictably see slide activity on the Big Sur coast.” The slip-out just south of Rocky Creek occurred on March 30, when a chunk of pavement collapsed down the cliff after the earth below it gave way. Drabinski says it was due to a combination of rain (from above) and heavy swells and high tides (impacting the cliff below). Meanwhile, Caltrans contractors continue to work on three slides on the South Coast. Work is underway at the northernmost of those slides at Dolan Point, which Caltrans recently reported was expected to be cleared by midMay, a target that has come and gone. (The latest estimate is “early summer.”) Two miles south of there, work at the steep and complex Regent’s Slide— which is still active—is also underway. The southernmost slide is Paul’s Slide, where the highway has been closed for a year-and-a-half. When Regent’s and Dolan slides happened in March, they trapped people for a 12-mile stretch between slides, so Caltrans started running a convoy (for local traffic only) to help people get out to the south—making access to the north through Rocky Creek especially important. (For residents south of the Dolan Point, who can travel in and out via convoy, a trip from Lucia to Monterey is now roughly four hours.) Paul’s Slide is expected to reopen in late summer this year. But work at Regent’s Slide has just begun, and will take longer; in mid-May, construction crews had to take a five-day break as it was still moving. Caltrans projects Regent’s Slide will be cleared and stabilized by late fall That means the best-case scenario that Caltrans is now projecting is to Helen Handshy was grateful to find her own way of contributing to the community during the pandemic by launching The Big Share to distribute food and other essentials. The concept has grown and become permanent. “It is never going to not make sense to share food,” she says. Sara Rubin “Now the experience is to look at parked cars, not the scenery.”
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