How About the Troops Coming to Fix the Broken Highway at Devil’s Slide?

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Bring the troops here to fix Devil’s Slide

Yesterday, I left home in El Granada at 9:50 a.m.: it’s only four miles to Half Moon Bay but forty minutes later found me mired in traffic on two-lane Hwy 92 about a mile east of Half Moon Bay.

It was confirmed that there had been an accident–a big, locally owned commercial truck hit head-on and the traffic was impossibly backed up. As I crawled up the mountain I saw quite a few cars strewn on the side of the road, with steam spewing out of their overheated engines.

It took me 1 & 1/2 hours to drive from El Granada to 280 in San Mateo, a ride that used to take 20 minutes. The stagecoach in the 19th century did better.

(There was one benefit: at this very slow pace I enjoyed the beautiful coastside scenery that I hadn’t noticed in years when whizzing by—what a terrific opportunity to practice patience and meditation—-unfortunately, the meditation led to drowsiness and I realized, with lids growing heavy, that I better stay alert or I’d fall asleep at the wheel).

Later, on the way home (you’d better make your return early, or you hit the commute traffic and you’re back bumper-to-bumper) I shopped at the Half Moon Bay Safeway. Another “victimâ€? standing in the checkout line was calculating the cost of driving “over the hillâ€? and back–$20 was his calculaltion. He was numbed by his own mathematics.

It’s incomprehensible that there is no solution, even temporary, to reopening the breathtaking stretch of Highway 1 known as Devil’s Slide.

It’s alleged by some that “the U.S. military can build a road anywhere in the world in about two hours”. Hey, how about bringing the troops to Devil’s Slide? It would give these young men and women a healthy and useful project to work on.

If getting the army to Devil’s Slide isn’t possible, remember we’re just a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley and Stanford, the birthplace of high tech– and we ‘re drowning in Nobel Prize winners. Surely someone can come up with a solution to get Devil’s Slide re-opened.

In the grand scale of things, a broken road is a very small deal…but what if one day we had a real disaster like an earthquake or a tsunami…I shudder at the thought….