paul lang photography

The other day, I got a phone call from my good friend Brian. “If you want to come out here this year, you should come this weekend. Every other weekend is booked until I leave the island.” Brian works as a caretaker for a camp on Catalina Island and, with two days’ notice, realized that he had an empty weekend coming. Robin and I quickly booked out ferry tickets from Dana Point to Avalon and cleared our schedules for a few days.

Catalina Island is only twenty miles from the crowds, noise, and clutter of the coast of Southern California, but it might as well be halfway across the Pacific. The boat ride only takes an hour, but once you are on one of the island’s secluded beaches, it’s very easy to forget that there are millions of people just across the horizon. We arrived in Avalon on a Friday morning the week after Labor Day. Since Labor Day marks the symbolic end of summer for most people, the island was about to experience it’s first quiet weekend of the summer.

Catalina Island is almost completely undeveloped. There are two small towns, Avalon and Two Harbors. Two Harbors should really be called a village, as there cannot be more than 100 full time residents there. Avalon, which is were most people go when they travel to Catalina, looks like it belongs in the Mediterranean. Avalon is the big city on the island, but during the winter, you would be hard pressed to find 500 people living there. Avalon’s claim to fame is the fact that most residents travel around town in golf carts. The rest of the island is almost completely undeveloped, except for the many camps that are tucked into the protected coves along the island’s south east side.

My friend Brian is the caretaker for a place located about a fifteen to twenty minute boat ride from Avalon. His job is seasonal, keeping him on Catalina from March through October. Because of the relative lack of tourists, we met many people who live and work on the island full time. These people are almost instantly recognizable as full-timers once they begin talking. Winters on Catalina can be lonely, and there are only a few people to talk to, especially in the more isolated parts of the island. They all refer to the rest of California as “the mainland” and speak really fast, jumping from subject to subject without pausing. I think this happens whenever a full-time island resident meets a new person, as the next new person to talk to might not be around for some time. The big story everyone was talking about was the quiet weekend everyone was expecting. All the locals couldn’t wait for the tourists to be gone so everything would slow down, but now had a lonely winter to look forward to.

At Brian’s camp, we had the beach almost completely to ourselves and spent the weekend hiking, kayaking, and driving around the interior of the island. Being able to drive on the island is a special treat, as non golf-cart vehicles are hard to come by. You actually have to have keys to get past gates blocking the access to the interior of the island, and we just happened to be with someone who had those keys. Robin and I saw the far side of the island for the first time. The far side is almost completely deserted except for a few campers and a few boats anchored in the little coves here and there. We also came across some of the famous Catalina Island Buffalo, who are descendants of Buffalo brought to the island in the 1920s for a movie production.

The weekend went by in a hurry, so Brian dropped us off to catch our ferry and two hours later we were at home in San Diego. Being able to travel from an isolated place to a large city is such a shorts amount of time is almost confusing. Every day, people line up at LAX to take there shoes and belts off to get on planes so they can sit on a beach somewhere and relax. All they need to do is take an hour boat ride from their own coast.