Catalina Spring Break
I was struggling with some ugly thoughts on the ride up to
the Catalina airport. Sue was driving us
to the top of the island, some 2,000 feet above Avalon for breakfast at the
restaurant she’d taken over several decades ago. It had all started out innocently enough, a seemingly
tame one-lane road with hardly any traffic but as we continued to climb the
severity of the drop off from the edge of the all too narrow road began to grab
my full attention. It wasn’t just at an
occasional spot where one became alarmed, every inch of the road was poised
atop a deadly chasm – the sort of terrain where rope bridges are deployed.
Having travelled this route thousands of times, Sue was of
course annoyingly nonchalant, spinning entertaining tales about the old days,
the details of which I am unable to recall.
Despite my polite acknowledgements at the time (“really”, “you don’t
say”) I could only focus on what I feared would be featured on the news that
evening as a family vacation tragedy.
One of the most unnerving things about the road is that there are no
guard rails, anywhere, none. Mind you
the road itself is probably the proper width for a go cart so when it came time
to squeeze by a trash truck at one point, I almost soiled myself. For the last half of the ride, the views
looking down to the Pacific Ocean were akin to those I had only seen previously
from an airplane.
Earlier in the week I had walked from town up this same road
looking for a vantage point where I could sit down and do some sketches of the
harbor. I found a good spot a half mile
up the hill and sat on the edge of the road unaware that it was also a popular
stop for island tour vehicles. While
seated there, every 5 minutes one of a wide variety of vehicles pulled up with
a fender a few inches from the back of my neck at which point I was treated to
a tour guide’s description of the highlights in the distance, shouting to be
heard over the noise of the engine and accompanied by a chorus of “gosh” and “golly”
from people that prior to the tour evidently were unaware there are places on
the earth where dry land and water meet.
When we finally arrived at the airport, I felt I now shared
the type of insights that are typically only afforded to people with near death
experiences. When Sue began taking everybody’s
breakfast order, I realized I had no
appetite. I was still locked into the
lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – survival. I eventually calmed down enough to where I
felt I could handle a bagel. Sitting on
the patio one begins to appreciate the setting of the restaurant. Beautiful views, surrounded by silence and
the rolling hills that form the plateau where the airport rests.
This is about the time when I begin to wonder about
Sue. Yes, I do remember being in my
twenties and some of the decisions I made.
As naïve and clueless as I may have been, the notion of taking on a
restaurant at this location would have never come to the surface. To the west, the nearest customer is 5,000
miles away. Other than a few hikers
there’s no one to the north. To the
south there are 3,700 people lining in Avalon but they are 10 miles away and
have to risk their lives to get there.
To the east, there are 20 million people 26 miles away who also face
risk in flying one of those tacky little planes that crash every day and come
down on one of the trickiest landing strips in the United States. The restaurant can only operate in the
daytime, as flying is restricted to daylight and only the criminally insane
would be on that road after dark. It
makes one wonder what Sue would have done if the Manaus Opera House built in
1897 in the dead center of the Amazon jungle had become available.
After breakfast we rode down to Shark Harbor on the back
side of the island. We were the only
humans there and other than the concrete block restroom, there’s not a single
sign that anyone else has ever been there.
After having lived in Southern California for any length of time one
can’t help but get a glimpse of what it must have been like for Lewis and Clark
when they finally reached the Pacific.
On the way back to Avalon we took a different route in the
hopes that the kids could get to see one of the buffalo that roam the
island. Fortunately, we did find one who
was grazing alongside the road and we stopped to check it out. I realize I am going out on a limb here using
“it” but I know little about these creatures including their pronoun
preference. They are odd looking and
it’s difficult to speculate as to what two or more species were complicit in
spawning these animals. Their legs are
obviously too short for the rest of their body and seem completely impractical
for stampeding. The legs in fact
resemble those of a hyena. Then there’s
the torso which slants down from front to back so radically that one can’t
imagine they could run downhill without doing a face plant. The difference between the front and the rear
of the beast is the most unsettling thing about them. Whereas the massive head, neck and shoulders
may have come from a mastodon, the hind quarters bring to mind Mickey Rooney.
