26 miles across the sea

It's well into the month following the one where I waved goodbye to my island, but the blog must go on. As my lifestyle does not (yet?) afford wandering to scenic outposts on a monthly basis, we'll have to wander back into the travel archives. I knew we would when I set up this pesky thing--the little bits of places I've collected are buzzing to be let out of the jar.

While wintering in the middle of the ocean, I read two books. One was Whose Names Are Unknown, by Sonora Babb, which my husband bought me after he learned from Ken Burns' dustbowl documentary that it was the pre-curser to (and less cloying version of) The Grapes of Wrath. I know if I spent any significant time in a Midwest outpost, even if it wasn't blighted by cataclysmic drought while I was there, I would still be itching to move west. Even though the California that the dust-bowlers found was a better place only in theory, boy that theory was persistent, remains pervasive, and has goaded me for twenty years. Hence the other vacation read, When The Killing's Done, by TC Boyle, which I bought after a friend, in the midst of our Christmas shopping, raved about the author and rebuked me for not having discovered him yet. She was a fan of Boyle's pulpy eco-criticism; I was sold by his California settings. The one I chose was a romp through the Channel Islands.  

Prior to Kauai, the last island I slept on was the best known of those Channels: Santa Catalina, only a marathon's distance across the Pacific from LA, as The Four Preps sang in 1958. You might recognize it from the movie Chinatown, or from a host of other movies presumed to be set on another side of the country or another continent altogether, including Jaws and Ben Hur. Even when they weren't filming there, 20th Century stars flocked to this arid, somehow exotic oasis, and many a juicy scandal was conceived in the shadows of its cliffs and palms.   

 

I went to Catalina with my oldest friend, Kriste, for a long weekend in September. We've previously spent our semi-annual long weekends together in either Vegas or one of our current northwest home towns; but our friendship began at a Pasadena junior high school locker, and the only time either of us had been to Catalina Island we were together, on a class trip, and twelve years old. It suddenly seemed like a fine time to go back.

When I disembarked my plane in Long Beach on a pink Thursday evening, I took a deep wistful breath of what some would consider repugnant air. The air I was raised to subsist on, sweet electric smog. But no member of my family lived here any more, and inconceivably, six years had slipped by since I'd breathed this air. Something had changed. The gulp did not bring me all the way home. I didn't know how to admit this yet, though, so I sighed the longing sigh I'd planned to, and pretended not to care that I had no bearings on the way from the airport to dinner at the beach. I lingered on a park bench at the sand's edge, searching for the scent of Jacaranda or Eucalyptus, for the buoyant teenager I once was in this place.

 

After a restless night in an airport motel, I convened with Kriste on Friday morning at the Catalina Express ferry terminal. We stood in line with our duffle bags on the shade-less dock for a half hour, and then climbed to the top of the three-story boat and found seats amidst the crowd. I tried to get us cocktails in the galley, but the line was too long and the rocking boat's interior too stuffy to confidently keep down my breakfast donut. I resolved to simply relax in the penthouse seat, and once we got into open water, I felt comfortable, grateful even, for the anchor of my old friend and whatever new views the weekend might offer.  

 

The first great thing about Catalina's main port of Avalon is that it's one of those walking destinations. Almost everyone strolls right off the ferry down the front street--Crescent Avenue--to their various hotels. There are no cars in sight, nor any space for them; just seemingly hundreds of golf carts, and one little red trolley. Our own super cute hotel was no more than four blocks from anything we needed (including the ferry) so we never used wheels during our 48-hours on the island. Once our room was inspected and t-shirts changed, drinks were in short order. We started at Luau Larry's street/beach-facing bar with margaritas, chips and salsa. It was good to be far from home and work, in the sun, in the southland. Something about it all felt more like Mexico to me than California, and that was just fine.

When we came on our 7th grade class trip, we must have landed on another side of the island, hidden from Avalon or any other civilization. We spent the week in cabins, with campfires, swimming and canoeing in some secret bay, hiking through scrubby trails, and eating buffalo burgers in a mess hall. Surely the camp had a name but I don't remember it. I remember only the fruits of my immaturity: losing both my camera and my Wayfarers to the bay, the blisters that covered my feet after hiking in topsiders, and the shocking limerick carved into the wood above my cabin cot.

From our location now in town, we could look up into the scrubby hills and sense that camp back there somewhere, but in every way that mattered, we were in new territory. Small territory, contained by the sea and the hills. So we wandered through the eight square blocks available; Kriste purchased post cards and I booked a massage for the next day, and then we went to dinner at Antonio's Pizzeria and Cabaret. There was no cabaret, but sunset on the deck was truly lovely. We got drunk and hit the arcade for some miniature skeeball-like bowling. At an early bedtime--one of my favorite things about vacation, as you know--Kriste presented me with a journal full of daily short-answer prompts, with five entry spaces for each prompt, a five year journal. She had gotten one for herself, too. A daily glimpse at a tablula rasa future, and a promise to look only as far back from that future as today. It was (and remains) a perfect gift.

 

Saturday we went to The Cottage for breakfast and then parted ways. Kriste wandered, napped and postcarded. I lolled on the postcard-sized beach, watching kayakers negotiate the congested marina and reading A Diamond as Big as The Ritz. I got my quick massage, next door to a coffee and churros shop I ended up patronizing three times. In the afternoon we met up and got some culture at the museum under the iconic casino building. In addition to a bazillion photos of movie stars and a cool collection of pottery, tiles and other excavated artifacts, the featured exhibit was A Democratic Dream: William Wrigley, Jr. and Catalina Island.

I already knew that Mr. Wrigley had bequeathed his favorite winter mansion into the Pasadena Tournament of Roses House, where so many of my friends had preened through the trials vying to be a princess in the West Coast's most famous parade. What I didn't know was that Wrigley's transformation of Catalina into the "people's paradise" rivaled his renowned investment in the Chicago Cubs; in fact the Cubs did their spring training here. In the '20's he sponsored a marathon swim across the channel, with a specific prize reserved for the woman who finished first. Sadly the only finisher--with a time of 15+ hours--was a man, but Wrigley awarded $2500 each to the two women who came closest. We also learned about the casino, first built as the Sugarloaf Casino to serve as both a ballroom and a high school, but razed by Wrigley (along with Sugarloaf Rock itself) to make room for a grander structure that would accommodate the first movies with sound, a 3,000-person dance-floor, and today, a civil defense shelter with enough room to keep Catalina's entire year-round population fed, watered and safe from the zombie apocalypse.   

We were turned away at the door of the casino by tuxedoed bouncers of an obviously very upper-crust wedding. So we went to dinner at some tex-mex place up in the trees, whose name I probably can't remember because the service was abominable, but the conversation was great. We talked for hours about dream jobs and Kickstart and the special challenge of raising teenager daughters who were not our own. Then Kriste bought us nostalgic Bartles and James wine coolers at the market and we took them to our hotel balcony, again up in the trees, and talked about high school.

After Sunday breakfast at the counter of Original Jack's Country Kitchen, we trudged back to the ferry dock, and this time got to wait in the shade. With us was a gaggle of twelve-year-olds wearing matching t-shirts and half-listening to their camp counselor lay out the rules for the final hours before their ferry departed. We wanted to be looking in a mirror, but that was not our class trip, they were not us. It was clear that we shouldn't, as well as couldn't, go back to that home.

For all of Wrigley and Hollywood's efforts, for all the energy I recognized to reflect Avalon as a lavish sanctuary, a playground for the rich and discerning, I still related more to Catalina as the setting of Scott O'Dell's 1961 Newberry Award-winner, Island of the Blue Dolphins. A native adolescent girl is left behind, to come-of-age among the birds, whale bones and feral dogs. Though a serious and scary story, it becomes a fantasy to the young girls who read it. A dream that we read over and over again, and then leave in the dusty mess of our little girl room and can't get back to once we have ourselves come of age.

Kriste and I milked our long weekend for one more novel experience in our own former backyard: a night spent on the supposedly haunted Queen Mary. We checked out her museums and shops, had dinner at the stern in a retirement home sort of restaurant, and nightcaps on the bow in a beautiful old lounge with a peppy young lounge singer. We retired to our splendid stateroom, became addicted to the absurd show "Breaking Amish," and slept like proverbial babies, not a ghost in sight. On Monday we got a local's tour of Long Beach from a brand new friend of Kriste's, and I felt just as estranged from the place as I had on Thursday night. It was so big and intimidating in its sprawl, so choked with haze that I couldn't even see the San Gabriel foothills. The In'n'Out burgers were heavenly as ever, but instead of some elusive home, stirred in me a longing for Las Vegas. Whoa. The tectonic plate had shifted away, leaving me straddled with a foot on each. I pulled my other foot over.