Beautiful Coastal Road

During my visit to Los Angeles, I took a drive with my youngest daughter from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles along Highway 101 and Highway 1. For the two hours or so we drove, one side was the deep blue Pacific Ocean, which made my heart feel wide open. Seeing that, I was reminded of the beautiful scenery I saw as a child when I would occasionally take a bus out of town and the deep blue sea continued on one side of the winding, precarious cliffside road.

 

On the other side, there were only occasional desert plants, and the landscape was generally barren, but there were deep valleys that caught my eye, and it looked like it could have been a filming location for many Western movies or films like "Thelma and Louise." It felt like cowboys, stagecoaches, and Indians from Western movies could appear at any moment from somewhere on the mountainside.

 

I thought of the final scene of "Thelma and Louise," where Thelma and Louise, cornered at the edge of the Grand Canyon after a police chase, shout, "Listen to me. Let's not get caught. Keep going," and race to the edge of the Grand Canyon. When I told my daughter about it, she said she had once worked as a studio guide when Geena Davis, who played Thelma, visited her company. We talked about the movie for a while, and then, looking back at the sea, it felt like somewhere along the coast we were passing could have been the setting for In-ho Choi's novel "Deep Blue Night." (The plot of the film of the same name is very different from the novel.) Where could it be that the protagonist, after driving at full speed from San Francisco to Los Angeles, crashed his car into a steel railing, got out to the beach, knelt down, and sat on a rock?

 

In my childhood, when cars were not common, I would rarely take a bus and wish I could "ride the bus all day" because I didn't want to get off. At that time, the roads were only slightly wider than country roads, so if two buses met, one bus had to back up to a wider spot to pass. It was about 100 kilometers from Samcheok to Gangneung, and the whole road was unpaved, so it took about three hours to get there. The blue Pacific Ocean on one side of the road was so close that I could see the sea all the way along the drive, so it was like my eyes were having a rare treat in the world. On the mountains on the other side of the sea, there were only common acacia trees, covered in white dust, and there were no proper trees, so the mountain scenery was bleak.

 

When I went back to see the sea in my hometown 10 years ago, I found that the road along the sea was very different from what I remembered as a child. Countless cars were running smoothly on the East Sea Expressway, which had been newly opened next to the old road (National Highway 7), and National Highway 7, which I had deliberately taken, had been expanded refreshingly, and the trees that had grown enormously around the road were also impressive. The roads were all clean and wide wherever we went. The distance that used to take three hours to cover was now less than an hour.

 

The state of New Jersey, where I live, borders the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and if I feel like it, I can be at the beach from my house in 30 minutes. However, there is no road where you can drive along the sea like the coastal roads in California or my hometown. The road that runs parallel to the sea is so far from the sea that you can't see the sea even if you drive along the 130-mile (208 km) coastline. The beach is so low that it can be easily flooded by storm surges, so you can't see the picturesque scenery of the sea on one side and the mountains on the other. It's just a flat landscape with nothing to see, so much so that I've never taken my guests from Korea to see the sea.

 

This morning, I looked up the East Coast coastal road on a map of Korea and found that National Highway 7 runs from Gangwon Province to North Gyeongsang Province. I haven't driven the whole route, but the scenery along this road is incomparable to the New Jersey coastal road and must be much more beautiful than the California coastal road. I would love to drive along National Highway 7 to North Gyeongsang Province and enjoy the beautiful scenery someday when I visit Korea.

 

(June 20, 2018)