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 traged