Places | On the Road

In Travel Journalism, After Every Disaster Comes “the Perfect Time to Visit”

But what big little lies do we tell ourselves when PR companies spin a local disaster into a travel opportunity?

We had to hike through the forest to bypass the collapsed bridge. The bridge had collapsed because of the landslide, which had happened because of the wildfires. The fires had happened because of, well, global warming and poor land management, I guess. But the PR people weren’t going to mention that.

It was the late spring of 2017 and there were five of us hiking the narrow dirt trail: three lifestyle journalists and two PR specialists. The hike led through a section of California’s Big Sur that had been barricaded against all vehicular traffic by the collapse of Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge to the north and the Mud Creek landslide to the south. Volunteers had joined state employees in clearing this path through the pines of Pfeiffer State Park. Locals relied on the trail to buy groceries or get their kids to and from school. We were there to write about how tourists could take advantage of that.

On the other side of the half-mile hike was Post Ranch Inn, a dreamy coastal hotel known for its nightly rate (starting at $875 in the off-season). When we arrived, sweaty from the uphill trek, a man in a polo shirt from the hotel’s PR team greeted us. He took us around the verdant resort, unlocked the doors of luxury treehouses with big glass windows, and guided us to the cliffside farm-to-table restaurant. The group fell silent as we stared out onto the edge of America. Hundreds of feet below us, the ocean crashed more perfectly than any white noise machine.

“This is a great time to visit,” the PR man said. “Normally, you’d never have the place all to yourselves like this.”

It’s a common mantra in travel journalism that the best time to visit a destination is after a disaster. When tourists go away, vacations become a gesture of financial support. And we’re told that a tourism economy relishes every dollar that does come. (This strategy has been deployed by tourism campaigns everywhere from New Orleans to Nepal.) That summer, Big Sur’s tourism businesses beckoned with time-exclusive offers: stays at Post Ranch Inn included a complimentary helicopter ride from Monterey County Airport, which passed directly over the landslide. From the air, guests could gaze out the window to see the spilled rubble for themselves. Nonguests, such as us three journalists and two PR specialists, had to hike around it.

The polo shirt PR man took us to the resort’s organic Chef’s Garden, where a herd of electric bicycles with thick tires and fickle throttles was waiting for us. Another one of the hotel’s time-exclusive offers was an electric bike tour of a closed stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway. We put on helmets and rode to the highway, not a car in sight. The road remained still and silent as we turned onto the empty coastal highway.

The sun was brilliant in the clear sky and the Pacific was licking the cliffs below as we biked the two-lane highway. Nothing but asphalt and mountains and ocean and us. I thrilled the way I used to thrill riding a bicycle up Brooklyn streets at 4 a.m., when the city went abandoned for the night. But this wasn’t the thrill of living outside normal operating hours. I kept trying to remind myself that this impossible bike ride had only been made possible by a landslide. I kept trying to bore the gravity of the devastation into my mind. Kids have to hike to school to get around this, I thought. People have lost their jobs.

But it was difficult to keep a grin from my face. The road hugged staggering green mountains while a hundred feet below, sapphire ocean flashed in the sunlight. A salty breeze played with dried brush on the side of the road and the wheels of my bicycle flirted with the edge of the continent.

*

As a freelance travel journalist, you’re constantly pitching and emailing editors. These pitches detail why a particular destination should be covered through this particular angle at this particular moment (and why you should be the one to do it). You’re tying place to time, hoping to understand a location through the subjective experience a tourist can have there right now.

In return, your own inbox is flooded by PR representatives, telling you what destinations (by which I mean hotels or restaurants or new attractions or tourism boards) want to say about themselves. There is always a story to be told. And, in the spirit of journalism, each story must seem different from all the others that have come before. In short: It must be “newsworthy.”

It was a remarkable stroke of newsworthiness in early May of 2017 when I received an email from a Manhattan-based PR agency. The email offered a “story to promote the reopening” of Big Sur following a February landslide, if I joined the press trip. The invitation promised visits to the rugged coastline and “iconic spots . . . recently showcased in HBO’s Big Little Lies.” The pitch had all the makings of a headline travel story: recovery following a disaster and a tie-in to the most popular TV show of the time? I confirmed coverage. A few days later, on May 20, six million tons of rubble tumbled down from Mud Creek and buried a quarter mile of the Pacific Coast Highway. A few weeks after that, I boarded a plane to California.

*

Nepenthe, a cliffside veranda of a restaurant, typically served a thousand customers a day. We parked the electric bicycles then walked up a steep path to a sprawling restaurant where every wooden table and each plastic lawn chair sat abandoned.

“You are lucky,” the owner said, as he passed out menus. “Normally there’s a two-hour wait.”

The restaurant was designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, so it was built right into the landscape. Bright crimson floors and wooden beams were the only barriers against the mountains and the ocean. In the center of the floor was a Ping-Pong table. One of the other journalists picked up a paddle and began gently whacking a ball with one of the PR men.

“You are lucky,” the owner said, as he passed out menus. “Normally there’s a two-hour wait.”

A thin woman came out of the kitchen and sat down with us. She was the founder’s daughter (and current owner’s mother). She had grown up in the restaurant, she said, eyes following the Ping-Pong ball as it bounced across the table. “Henry Miller used to play here until four, five in the morning sometimes,” she said, eyes still tracking the ball. “I remember, one night, saying good night to him and going to bed, then waking up in the morning and he was still here at the Ping-Pong table. Still trying to beat my dad.”

People in Big Sur tend to bring up the town’s history quickly and often. The community claims about ninety miles of California coastline and much of its 1960s lore. During that storied decade, both Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac lived in town and wrote books about it. (Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch from Miller and, quite simply, Big Sur from Kerouac.) They came to Big Sur because it was supposed to be a retreat, just a few hundred hearty people in the coastal mountains.

In 1962, the Esalen Institute opened in Big Sur as “the epicenter of the Human Potential Movement.” (It’s the closing scene of Mad Men, where Don Draper meditates and finds either enlightenment or an idea for the best advertising campaign of the twentieth century.) Hunter S. Thompson patrolled the grounds with a rifle. Joni Mitchell put on concerts; Timothy Leary passed out acid. Anaïs Nin, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg . . . Big Sur’s guest book reads some of the most impressive name drops of the era.

That cultural relevance brought Big Sur to national and international attention as a landscape for freethinking, creative types. In 1978, the town welcomed 1.5 million tourists. Two years later, it doubled to three million. By 1988, the Los Angeles Times declared that Big Sur was “dramatic and congested.” About three decades later, in 2014, the annual tourism number dangled just below five million.

But in 2017, the landslide and the closure of twelve miles of the Pacific Coast Highway had caused an abrupt halt to tourism. The founder’s daughter said it reminded her of the past, when business was a curious trickle you could welcome and feed, then return to staring out at the ocean. The months after the landslide were the closest Big Sur could get to the story that drew visitors almost sixty years earlier. Once again, it had become a sleepy coastal retreat.

*

Legend has it there has only been one single year in the Pacific Coast Highway’s nearly ninety-year history when it was possible to drive the whole thing from head to tail every day. Closures due to landslides are common, whether caused by cliff erosion or the earth-breaking combination of fires and floods.

After five years of seemingly constant drought and wildfires, 2017 began as one of the wettest years in California in a century. So when the rain came, it came to charred, parched, and unstable land. That deluge created a pressure change in the earth that “could have destabilized the sliding surfaces below ground and triggered the collapse.” (That’s the official report from NASA’s Earth Observatory for the Mud Creek Slide in May 2017.) Big Sur locals would tell you that landslides had happened before, would probably happen again. This is, after all, California: a place where landslides are common enough to be given names.

If you try to nail down why this is happening, why the coast keeps sliding into the sea, answers splay. Some will say that coastal erosion is inevitable and natural. But most will point to the wildfires—which unleashes a different conversation with different factors to indict. The wildfires could be spreading so quickly because of unmanaged forests. Others blame invasive plant species. Some point to California’s policy of “Total Fire Suppression,” which banned strategic cultural burning, an Indigenous method of land management. No matter the root reason for California’s flammability, it’s undeniable that as global temperatures increase, the wildfires are getting bigger and happening with greater frequency.

And yet, in 2017, all of this went unmentioned in tourism circles. The Mud Creek Slide was simply positioned as tourism’s enemy, or its dark blessing. It was never seen as the way of the land nor the shape of the future.

*

As the sun sank closer to the Pacific, we left the coast and hiked back down the Pfeiffer State Park trail. At the foot of the path, there was a large wooden cabin with a hotel and a dining hall. We were eating dinner there, the PR people said.

Each place setting was decorated with fresh sprigs of greenery, picked from the garden. At the head of the table sat the manager of the lodge. She had thick blonde hair piled loosely atop her head like a bohemian Victorian. PR seemed unsure what to do with her. She was lively and laughed readily about a rowdy childhood in nearby Bixby Canyon. Her family had a pet donkey, and she’d often wander into the home of their neighbor down the road, the writer and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti. She told stories of being a teen in the ’60s and doing drugs on the coast. Things were fun, she said, until a friend drove drunk off the Pacific Coast Highway. Then she left Big Sur and sailed around the Caribbean aboard a schooner. She came home as an adult and started working with the tourists.

Around the table, we spoke only to beg for more stories. History came alive in her voice.

“It reminds me a bit of being a kid,” she said, “right now, with the bridge out. Everybody’s been coming together. You can walk the highway and hear the ocean. I’ll be happy when business starts back up again, but right now . . .”

After the last dessert plate was cleared away, one of the other journalists brought up Big Little Lies. She couldn’t stop thinking about the show while she was there, and she asked the manager if she had seen it.

“Me? No.” The manager pursed her lips. “But I suppose it must be pretty good. People keep coming because of it.”

I felt instantly self-conscious and, for the first time, hotly aware that I was just one of the people who passed through Big Sur, people who had followed their screens somewhere. The manager seemed to live a life uninfluenced by where other people went or were going. She simply had the luck to have been born into a family that lived just up a dirt road from one of America’s most famous Beat poets. But, then again, her parents had bought the land because they knew who else was buying property nearby. I suppose you could argue it’s a different version of the same thing. Perhaps we all chase the slipstream of culture and feel more relevant in its wake.

Perhaps we all chase the slipstream of culture and feel more relevant in its wake.

*

The last morning was nothing but a ride back to Monterey County Airport. At first, the day was sunny and the skies were clear. After five minutes of driving, it started to rain. “California microclimates,” the PR man announced at the wheel of the car. Another five minutes up the road, the rain settled into a low, gray fog and the famous shape of Bixby Creek Bridge began to emerge, held like a tension rod between two green mountain peaks.

As we drove through the fog toward the landmark, the PR man turned on the stereo and the Big Little Lies theme song began to play through the rental-car speakers. The bridge dangled between the mountains in the fog ahead and we smiled, nodding our heads to the beat. I felt closer to what I had seen on TV. That seemed important. Somehow.

When I returned home to Brooklyn, I filed my article, writing: “With some major attractions remaining closed, Big Sur is currently operating under capacity—which may be why, against all apparent logic, it’s the perfect time to visit.” I wrote about the unique moment of quiet and urged people to see it for themselves. Then I sent the piece to my editor, never thinking about the machinery behind press trips or what the coverage meant. Big Sur really had been beautiful and I really did feel lucky to have wandered an empty five-star resort, to have biked down an empty Highway 1, to have sat in an empty restaurant near the ocean.

But a few years later, images of California’s fires and floods blazed and slid too furiously across my screen to ignore. Only then did I begin to reflect upon what had happened on the Pacific Coast Highway that summer. In travel media, Big Sur’s post-slide reopening was positioned as a “comeback story,” an adventure that’s “endearingly, enduringly wild,” and the “world’s most exclusive idyll.”

These stories, mine included, refused to acknowledge one simple fact: This exclusivity was caused by a natural disaster, which was caused by increasingly severe weather, which was caused by climate change. The news in Monterey County that year wasn’t the eerie, unfamiliar quiet of Highway 1. It was how quickly we ignored the trend of extreme weather and sliding land to reposition Big Sur in familiar territory (as a destination for tourists). The PR team had spun a natural disaster into a reason to visit. And I had played along. Many journalists did. Mention of wildfires didn’t enter the travel coverage. Not once.

Today, Big Sur has almost fully recovered from its landslide- (and Covid-) induced tourism slump. But now, in addition to changing climate and crumbling land, the area faces the threat of overtourism. As locals have watched their landscape return from its temporary idyll, some have started to rally against the flood of visitors. Thanks to a local-led initiative, the government may soon implement a day-pass system or start educating tourists on how to behave at natural landmarks. But combatting overtourism by creating “better tourists” does nothing to stop climate change. And it certainly won’t keep the land from sliding.

The idea that we can help a place by bringing it our money is deeply set in the cultural psyche. In 2019, after Hurricane Maria, The New York Times declared Puerto Rico its destination of the year and quoted the CEO of a Los Angeles–based travel agency: “Everybody understands that the best way to help Puerto Rico is to book there and help the local economy.” But as more of the world changes, crumbles, bleaches, and burns, I wonder who “everybody” is—and how they came to hold this belief.

Combatting overtourism by creating “better tourists” does nothing to stop climate change.

On particularly cynical days, when severe weather rips through landmarks and the damage is measured in dollars and tourists lost, I fear that “everybody” understands the world primarily as a sphere of destinations to visit. And I reckon that travel journalists have to acknowledge their (our, my) complicity in sculpting this mindset. News-based travel coverage warps a reader’s sense of time, making them forget that places and local communities existed long before coastal hotels and HBO shows.

When place is conflated with currency (in all senses of the word), we forget that tourism changes an area. And tourism that refuses to acknowledge its own impact on the land (and the heating of the globe) mortgages its future for the temporary warmth of lit “No Vacancy” signs. And after all, what promises salvation seldom provides it. At least not without a few strings attached.

That twelve-mile stretch of Highway 1 remained closed for fourteen months. Rebuilding efforts totalled around $54 million. During those months, the Monterey County Visitors Bureau recorded losses of $320,000 every day. It was the perfect time to visit.