Island Life: Four Days on Catalina
Friends, family, readers—below is the first travel post on Kath Meets World! I wrote it about my trip to Catalina Island this spring, to get back into the habit about writing about my travels and to have an example of one of the types of posts I’ll be sharing here. For others, explore the categories above, and for my version of the ubiquitous travel blog, see below. 🙂
Getting to Catalina Island involved three trains, one plane, one cab, one ferry, one speedboat, and lots of walking. I caught my first glimpse of it from the ferry: lush green hills, palm trees like giant dandelions, little pockets of manmade structures hugging the coast and blending into the crags. I’ve never been to New Zealand, but it felt to me like California’s answer to the Kiwi nation, all exciting marine life and vegetation and beaches.
Catalina is the three times as big as Manhattan, the island I currently call home, which I couldn’t stop thinking about as the speedboat crashed through the waves on our way to our final dock. Three times as big! Yet Manhattan crams 390x as many people (1.6 million versus 4,096, per the last census) onto its much-smaller island. And while I love New York, in large part due to its incredible diversity of people and culture and thought and art, I was excited to visit a completely different type of island, one lush with vegetation and teeming with animal life. I saw a pod of dolphins slicing through whitecaps in my first minutes there, which is not something I see in the East River. The difference between the life I currently have and the life I’m planning to try on next year felt enormous.
I was on Catalina to visit Michelle, a good friend of mine who I met while we were both working on ResStaff in West Quad at Michigan. The people that self-select into applying for ResStaff tend to have certain traits in common, and I’d describe them in a few vectors: outgoing/fun; selfless/others-oriented; social justice focused. I think I score highly on the first and the third and mediocre on the middle; Michelle’s scores are probably high and even across all three. She’s always been fascinated with biology / the natural world, and she now works on Catalina running camps for school programs focused on marine biology and ecology.
A week before I arrived, Michelle messaged me with bad news: her camp had suffered a sewage problem due to the drought-breaking excessive rainfall California was experiencing, and everyone had to evacuate. She assured me it was still fine to come, and that we’d find a place to stay through Catalina kindness.
The weekend I visited, Michelle was staying in a neighboring camp that had an extra bunk for me. After Michelle tied up the speedboat she had borrowed to come pick me up from the ferry dock, I followed her up rocky paths to a cluster of wooden cabins, my wheeled luggage getting caught several times along the way. I realized, as we passed her fellow instructors’ open-door rooms, that I was probably the only person in the whole camp (perhaps the whole island?) with actual luggage. Everyone else, at that camp and on the ferry that brought me to Catalina, toted big backpacks accessorized by flippers and quick-try towels and visors and bedrolls and snorkel masks attached by a variety of hooks and straps and carabiners.
I was soon introduced, rapid-fire, to a team of tanned, Chaco-wearing and Patagonia-sporting outdoor enthusiasts: Michelle’s coworkers. I smiled, issued a blanket apology for any name-butchering I would later commit, and followed them to dinner at the mess hall.
Catalina doesn’t grow any of its own food; everything its residents consume is delivered by cargo ships, so fresh foods and vegetables are rarer than you’d imagine they’d be on a lush island paradise. I sat there, eating bland flatbread pizza, slightly out of place in my all-black outfit, thinking about how far I was from New York. I had witnessed only a slice of Catalina life—the communal evening meal, the unofficial uniforms, the daily hiking through unpaved paths—and I already felt viscerally how different my life was from life here.
In the city, my life is a wardrobe of black and navy and neutrals, a biweekly trip to my favorite manicurist, Broadway musicals and art shows and book readings, multi-course dinners with friends and lots and lots of ice cream. Plus work, of course—lots of hours on the bus to Connecticut, lots of hours in meetings and at my desk and with my teams. Those are all things I like and value and identify with and have structured my life to include. But who would I be without them? When the associations I’ve chosen—my neighborhood, my employer, my volunteer group—go away, what is left? How much of my personality, the good and the bad, is influenced by the people, the city, the experiences I’ve surrounded myself with? When those variables change, who will I be?
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After dinner, we headed out on a nighttime hike to a neighboring camp whose instructors had somehow procured a keg (I’m still not sure how they got it there—bribed one of the cargo ships?) and were hosting a beach party. Upon arrival, our hosts poured us cups of foamy beer and handed us Sharpies and blank nametags. Everyone introduced themselves, someone put on Shakira, and soon the deck—which was damp and salt-encrusted from years’ worth of rinsing off wetsuits with buckets of seawater—was reverberating with the stomping feet of two dozen young people dancing in the dark.
A group of guys started a fire in the pit on the beach, piling brush on top of a few monster logs.
There were no electric lights to be seen—just the light of the fire, and the stars, plentiful and heavy in the sky, and then, to my delight, the colorful pulse of LED-lined hula hoops. I dusted off my Hooping 101 (an actual 10-week course our gym offered my sophomore year that I of course took and crushed) skills and shoulder hooped with my new friends, attempting to match my rhythm to the music.
It was beautiful, clean, simple. Sweatshirts and bare feet, sunburns and laughs. After a couple hours, though, I asked Michelle if we could head back. It was selfish of me, I later realized, to take her away from such a social scene—I hadn’t realized how isolated her life was on the island and how special it was to meet a few dozen new people, but I was grumpy and couldn’t see past my own exhaustion. We hiked back silently, sweeping the thin path with our phones’ flashlights.
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The next morning, we ate breakfast on the picnic tables outside and climbed into the camp truck to drive to Two Harbors, where we were spending the next few nights with Michelle’s friend James.
Catalina has two main towns, Avalon and Two Harbors. Avalon is the tourist hub—if you’ve heard of the Catalina Wine Mixer, it’s held there (it’s now an actual real event, inspired by the Stepbrothers scene!)—and Two Harbors is the next biggest town, but it’s way smaller than Avalon. It boasts a welcome center-slash-scuba-and-kayak rental shop, a general store with four aisles and two big freezers of food, a coffee-shop-slash-bar serving pretty decent fish and chips and the town’s famous drink—Buffalo Milk, made with creme de cocoa, kalua, creme de banana, and vodka—a bed-and-breakfast, and a few dozen houses, including the one that James lived in with his sister.
It’s hard to get to Two Harbors by land. The road connecting the camps, on one end of the island, and Avalon, on the other, with Two Habors in the middle, is packed dirt punctuated by boulders and pits, only wide enough for one car at a time. Michelle looked incredible in the driver’s seat of the flatbed truck, navigating adroitly, including through a nail-biting maneuver that had us reversing down a cliff and into a small glade in order to let a contractor’s truck pass us on its way to work on the camp sewage system.
I made Michelle stop every half mile or so I could get out and gawk at the vistas (see photos below), and we were driving so slowly that I got a free botanical tour of the island as we went. Michelle pointed out California poppies, bright orange and only seen when there’s enough rainfall; Catalina never-die, a native succulent that grew in between the crags; prickly pear cactuses, an actual plant and not just the name of a Mexican restaurant in Ann Arbor. The island was in full bloom in a way it hadn’t been in years, explained Meesh, because of the rainfall after many years of drought. I felt lucky to experience it.
Eventually, we got to the town and to James’s. He very chivalrously let Michelle and I take over his bedroom, and then introduced us to his dog, Annabelle. I absolutely love when dogs have human names, and this was an especially great case of the phenomenon, as Annabelle’s personality was at complete odds with the docility implied by her name.
Post a good fetch session with Annabelle, Michelle and I headed to the beach to snorkel.
My experience with oceans has been pretty limited. Up until age 20, when I interned in Connecticut and experienced the soul-balming effects of evening dips in the Long Island Sound, I’d really only ever swum in lakes and rivers. Even now, after 4 years and many trips to the oceanfronts along Delaware, New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, I still get little blips of cognitive dissonance when I’m swimming in the ocean and first taste the salt in the water.
I had never snorkeled before, and I didn’t know what to expect; I was surprised at how nervous I was. I think in my head, I see myself as a brave, spontaneous, adventurous person, and I regularly forget how truly uncomfortable it makes me to not be in control. Michelle was teaching me how to breathe through the snorkel—slowly, evenly, with the plastic bit in your mouth—and there were several moments I thought I might actually suffocate. I was grinding the mouthpiece so hard I could hear the plastic squelch between my molars.
I stood there, the waves lapping my thighs, covered in neoprene and struggling to get enough oxygen into my body, trying and failing to keep my head clear of all the times the ocean had wronged me (though couldn’t shake the vision of when an undertow had slammed me into the shore at Rehoboth).
At some point, my better self won out and I committed. I dove in and felt the pressure of the water everywhere—pressing my goggles to my face, pushing the air bubbles out of my wetsuit, keeping me buoyant. It felt incredible. Ten minutes later, I was only forgetting to breathe every six minutes or so, fully distracted by how insanely cool the ocean is.
There are a thousand different colors between blue and green. There’s a whole new spectrum down there. You know that Pretenders line, “you split like light refracted?” A thousand splittings were happening a thousand times before my eyes every second, on the algae and the seaweed and the iridescent grey-green shimmer of tiny fish.
Beyond sight—the ocean makes so much noise. I suppose I thought I’d hear the waves, but under the water was a veritable symphony of sounds: the whoosh of my flippers, or Michelle’s, paddling back and forth, the pops and cracks of friction from the sand and reefs moving against each other. I had always imagined the ocean floor as the bottom of a snowglobe—immaculate, unmoving as currents caressed it—and was a delight to see it as dynamic as the world above.
Michelle swam ahead of me, her fingers tucked under her armpits to keep warm in the chilly water, and I copied her, kicking hard to catch up. She was my own private tour guide—she brought me a sea cucumber (we both kissed it for good luck!) and pointed out the bright-orange and highly territorial gibralters, showing me them in every stage of life from tiny blue adolescent to gaping, cheetoh-orange adult male. We collected shells, pet anemones, and gestured at each other wildly from across the giant sting ray I discovered during the brief part of the trip where I swam ahead.
After a couple hours of swimming in the frigid April water, we swam back to the beach. Michelle taught me how to waggle my flippers carefully before stepping on the ocean floor in order to scare away any sting rays nestled into the sand, and via this one-legged hopping motion, we got safely to shore. We stripped off our masks and flippers and headed back through town, our suits squeaking and our hair dripping.
That’s why you do new things, why you run blindly out of your comfort zone, why you never let an opportunity to have a unique experience pass you by—that exact feeling I had walking barefoot on my way back to James’s. Some glorious alloy of gratitude, adrenaline, and accomplishment, precious and fleeting. In that moment, it felt a vocation—I needed to keep seeking out that feeling.
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The rest of my time in Catalina was relaxing and lovely. The day before I left, Michelle and I hiked part of the Trans Catalina Trail. We hiked slowly, stopping often so Michelle could teach me about a plant or I could catch my breath (I thought my rapid subway-stair-climbing meant I was in shape; I quickly found out sprinting up 5 flights of stairs and maintaining a steady pace up a mountain for 4 hours require completely different versions of stamina). When we looped around Cherry Cove, Michelle’s camp, we stopped and she pointed out camp landmarks while we chewed on sourgrass (aka Bermuda buttercup aka nature’s own Sour Patch Kids aka a toxic poison when imbibed in large quantities). The end of the day had us descending back through the second of the two harbors that gives the city its name; I was exhausted, despite the fact that we had only done a few hours’ worth of hiking with only one daypack between us, and realized I had a long way to go not just mentally but physically, too, until I’d be prepared for the hiking I want to do in South America.
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I left Catalina without coming to an answer of how much of my identity is shaped by my surroundings. It’s a hard question, and one I didn’t really expect to resolve in my four days there. I did, however, recognize some things I want my identity to grow to include: more efficient and empathetic conflict resolution, a deeper appreciation for new experiences and an even stronger bias to lean into them, and lots of time spent out of doors.
Can’t wait for the travel ahead.
Kath