Adventure #25 - Day Six - Catalina Island to Pasadena, CA
Adventure #25 - Road Trip to LA and Martin Wheeler Systema Seminar Planned By - Both Heather and Marty
DAY SIX - From Catalina Island to Pasadena, CA
Description: Wherein Heather and Marty continue their VERY LONG road trip to LA (it takes 6 hours to drive LA, they are going to do it in 5 days!) and have finally arrived! They left the lonesome isle of Catalina and arrived in Pasadena to stay with Matt and Diemha and will begin their Systema seminar tomorrow!
(Marty's Report):
Duck at Pancake Cottage
Tourism is a very strange thing. Like I wrote about Big Sur, it’s like a signifier without a clear signified. It points at something desirable, consumable, life-enhancing, but when you arrive to desire, consume, and be enhanced by the supposed representation it points to, you can’t find that which is represented. The objects themselves are there; the trees and waterfall and beach town are all there, but the perspective, there in person, feels off, chalky compared to the image. Unlike the processed and packaged tourist signifier, the signified has to actually be lived. It doesn’t wrap you up in swaddling, feed you like a baby bird with nutritional and tasty morsels. Instead, you have to do your life tasks within an environment which keeps trying to be a reproduction of the image.
I had strong dreams, which I haven’t had on this trip. Unsettled, travel-confused dreams, lost. So I dozed again till about 10a, then rousted Heather and we deposited our bags with the office woman, who had that standard-issue demeanor of workers in areas laden with tourists, a little rough in their politeness. Still, she agreed to hold our bags for the day, till our boat later in the day (“Just make sure you’re back here by quarter till four.” “Yes, got it, quarter till four. Thanks.”) Then we headed out into the warm-to-hot morning, with its near perfectly clear blue sky (which still often strikes me as an absurd color for a sky, though I haven’t a good alternative), and landed at the Pancake Cottage. The sugar and simple starch breakfast pulled to me like a gaggle of sirens who specialize in carbo-loading, but I resisted and went for the oatmeal. Plus, when I start feeling dislocated, or displaced, I get more conservative, so I was aware of the money we are spending on food and “went small.” That said, it was the right choice because it’s so hot today that I would have been wiped out by a heavier meal. So, fear and neuroticism occasionally works.
Duck points out Casino.
Then, without plan or path, we decided on the glass bottom boat, which then morphed into a tip on the half-sub, a ship with windows in its hold to allow for fish viewing. We had time to kill (Thoreau would not be happy), so we walked down to the old Casino, now a movie theater and events site. It’s a beautiful old art deco or Beau Arts building, from back in the day here on the Island. Then we hustled back to the boat, where Captain Lorenzo and his genial sidekick Toni (I can’t remember his real name, so my default naming system will have to do) took us out to Lover’s Cove to watch the various cold water fishes swarm around the fish food impregnated environs around the ship. It was cool. Heather saw a turtle that’s been haunting the area, though I missed it.
Fish always feel old, at a certain level not alive or dead, existing in a different realm. Maybe there’s no sense of self, so it’s just the body that resists dying (mostly, as getting eaten). You get a sense of presence, but not of individuality, certainly not of self-reflectivity. So all this life was swarming outside, looking, perceiving, but at a certain level, neither-caring-nor-not-caring. Strange phenomenon for us mammals.
We had a shaved ice at the stand on the dock, “cherry” in name but “cancer red” in chemistry. Still, it tasted nice, and the coarse-grained ice (like Indian sugar) was fun to crunch. That finished, we were again left with time to kill before our boat, so Heather quietly, and passively, relented to a walk up-country, meaning away from the water up into the canyon. It quickly got “local”, with a Radio Shack and a mechanic, though the houses remained demonstrably cute. We walked up along the golf course, finding the old “Bird House,” which used to be the largest aviary in America, and now houses a preschool for humans. Heather wasn’t game for the push up to the Wrigley Botanical Garden, and instead agreed on collecting our bags and settling into a café for the duration. The woman at the hotel (let’s call her Toni) seemed a bit warmer, and we wished each other well, and she gave us recommendations for cafes. A few minutes walk and we settled our bags and computers at the Catalina Island Brew House, a beer and focaccia coffee house, where we’ve been for the last two hours.
This configuration is one of the most comfortable places for us, the café-ness, the working on our own business side-by-side, the caffeine, and the near-to-but-not-completely-engaged with humanity. Both our nervous systems are deeply soothed by access to our stuff, and our stuff these days is predominantly in the digital realm. Wandering around a strange town, especially a tourist town, impacts our systems with a heavily analog vibe.
We finished the day with a boat ride directly back to San Pedro, during which I played “Grim Fandango,” one of the early graphic point-and-click adventure games, which recently got remastered. It really is a brilliant mashup of satire, loving homage, and brilliant strangeness, following the adventures of Manny Calavera, a grim reaper who is on a quest to find a woman who he didn’t serve on her journey through the underworld. Where I am now, he’s a Bogart-like character who owns Calavera’s, and is trying to figure out how to get out of town on a boat, which requires a series of puzzle solutions, in good adventure game fashion. But the style with which it does it is the point, as the characters are wonderfully drawn in broad but richly human caricature. In other words, they are types, but they are very nuanced and individualized versions of that type. It’s delightful. And hard. I’m not sure what the hell I’m supposed to be doing at this point.
Heather drove us to Matt’s, leaving the dock about 6:30p and getting to their house in maybe an hour, driving the 710 through South Central, which is curious but meaningless from the vantage point of the freeway.
We hung with Matt and Diemha and the girls here for a few hours, though Matt had to run off to fetch Corey, who was at a soccer game. We caught up, and I lounged with Lola and Sam, the dogs. We all crashed rather early, me reading a little more in “The Scar” and Heather staying downstairs working on this blog.
Even though I’m only reading little sips of Miéville’s book, it remains so enveloping in its complex textures, like a fog whose temperatures and densities change as you move through it. It’s an immense act of world and culture building, and a rich topography of minds, some of which are in center focus, most of which are opaque.
We slept in the girls’ room, with Heather on the top bunk, me below. They are such sweet, well adjusted kids. Strange to be around the securely attached.
(Heather's Report):
Up we rose, at some point. I think Marty crawled back into bed at some point in his early rising, which is unusual so I snuggled in, which is my usual if he returns to bed. Then we eventually got up and packed. I was worried about our bags. Marty apparently was on top of that shit and had already found out that we could keep our bags in the front office while we wandered around doing stuff before the ferry boat came for us. I tend to get anxious around logistics. Oddly enough, during our travels through Egypt, Marty being the far more experienced traveler in third world settings, we found that he was far better at dealing with the logistics and amazingly enough, I was far better at dealing with the social interactions. Go figure. Of course, this might be my penchant for languages and basically butting my head straight into a language and man, the Egyptians practically fell all over me, eager to teach me and engage with me through that (plus, it's an incredibly beautiful language and they are pretty friendly people!) So, he does logistics usually.
Marty contemplates Duck Existence.
Marty gets Heather to smile.
I had seen the, literally named, Pancake Cottage when we arrived so I wanted french toast (my favorite carby thingie if gonna take the simple carb attack plunge). Off we went. Expensive, of course. Because, well, island with no internal resources. We used our Special Phones of Wonder to look up things to do in our immediate vicinity and off we went to find the glass bottom boat but ended up doing the semi-submersible. We did our morning check in videos and duck photos but for some reason Marty's Special Phone of Wonder was having trouble focusing so some of our vids were blurry. And of course, we couldn't use mine because... uhm, digital packrat. We killed some time by walking over to the huge casino building which was vaguely art deco and also apparently where the singular island movie theater resides. Then off into the cool interior of the "sub". Where I could swear the captain smelled faintly of alcohol. But we did not crash into the reef, so that all worked out. There were only two other people with us, an elderly couple who I could totally see us being in the future, taking our boat ride as a sweet old couple, only with more violence.
Sebastes, Garibaldi, Opaleye
We watched the fish and they swarmed around the windows due to the crew (all two of them) throwing food into the water. I think that's cheating but okay. They are probably so used to it, like the squirrels you're not supposed to feed in the botanical gardens but everyone does it anyway. We saw Garibaldi (the orange ones), all types of Sebastes (the genus name "rock fish"), Opaleye and others. No sheephead. I keep an eye out for the really ugly scorpionfish but they are really hard to spot due to their camouflaging abilities. The genial sidekick (The one Marty calls Toni) told us there was a turtle somewhere in "Lover's Cove" and I was keeping a very peeled eye out for that. And I did see him, I was the only one, so you know the scuba divers' thing "Pics or it didn't happen!" But really, I did see it, hanging out on the rocks at the bottom right under the boat as it passed over. The whole thing made me miss diving, although the not getting wet, cold and weighed down was a bonus.
The crazy expensive boats.
We returned to the dock and got some "shaved ice" with "cherry", or as Marty put it "cancer red". It was kind of like really granular, gritty chunks of ice, making me yearn for the really smooth "shave ice" we had in Hawaii. But we gamely crunched our ice and looked out over the probably insanely expensive water conveyances (boats) and then started our slog around Avalon. It was hot, my feet hurt (these shoes suck) and I tend to get quiet, tuck my head down and trudge when I get into "I don't want to do this physical thing." But I survived. Barely. And the barely existent fauna didn't eat us. But I drew the line at walking all the way up to the Botanical Gardens. And because we were here during off season, the apparently free trolley that serves as a bus was not running. We saw plenty of people zipping up the road in their little golf carts though. Finally I turned us around and we headed back to find comfort in a cafe. I took a photo of Marty next to the trolley pick up sign because it reminded me of a game I play called Borderlands where you can "Catch a ride!!!!" from the redneck mechanic, Scooter.
Catch a Riiiiiide!!!!
This is really really long, a string of Scooter dialogue, but the first few moments has his famous "Catch a Ride!!" clip.
Then we ensconced ourselves in a cafe until the boat came in and off we went to the mainland. I snoozed on the way back again rousing as we pulled back into San Pedro Harbor, marveling at the disgustingly huge "Star Princess", a monolithic luxury cruise liner. We both agreed that we would rather have burning bamboo splints shoved under our fingernails than "vacation" in one of these beasts. And we both agreed it looked a like a spaceship. I was reminded of the huge space cruise liner in the movie "The Fifth Element".
I drove us, fortunately a short drive up to Pasadena and we thought it would be a lot longer, because, Los Angeles. But it was only an hour. Plus we make sure to listen to the Goddess Waze, with whom we were first acquainted the last time we were in LA. We were so impressed at the time, it has made its way into our phones as a permanent structure. So Goddess Waze lead us safely and we arrived.
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