Twenty-Six Miles Across the Sea . . .

On page four of the May 7, 1992, edition of the Avalon Bay News--stacked behind reports of a snake bite seminar, new public showers and a speech by a plastic surgeon to the women’s club--a sixtysomething man in a V-neck sweater is pictured with two women at what appears to be a cocktail party.

“Carl Zeiner Pays Us a Visit,” declares the headline. A caption below explains that Zeiner, a former Avalon resident, arrived from Carmel the previous Saturday. The trip, it notes in passing, was accomplished “in record time because the freeways, due to the riots on the mainland, were empty.”

And there it is: the solitary reference in the entire newspaper to the madness just then winding down in Los Angeles. A year later, the editor is mystified how even this offhand mention slipped into her coverage: “We very rarely write anything about what is going on over there. No one wants to hear about it!”

Ah yes, the island life.

*

This is an interesting time to visit Avalon. It is interesting not because of anything special happening here--this is a town that sets long before the sun each night--but because of the perspective it provides on what has been happening 26 miles across the sea, as the ditty goes, in the metropolis that people here refer to, in vaguely ominous tones, as “over there.”

Avalon, a quaint-looking harbor town of 3,000 people and almost as many T-shirt shops, revels in its ability to ignore the rest of Los Angeles County. “This is just a whole different world from over there,” said George Scott, a former mayor. The riots of last year did not touch Avalon--in either a physical or, it would seem, spiritual sense. Someone did set a trash can afire, but the detectives suspect this was the work not of a social revolutionary but “someone with a sense of humor.”

Listen now to one Avalon resident tell her riot story, and trust me when I tell you the tone is not at all extraordinary: “We watched it on television over at the Comedy Club. We found it sort of amusing. I remember we were laughing at those ladies looting Payless Shoes. If I’m going to raid anyplace, it is not going to be a place that sells shoes for $5 a pair. Go to I. Magnin’s!

“You know what I mean?”

I’m certain there are people across the L.A. Basin who know exactly what she means. Santa Catalina is not the only island in Los Angeles County. It is only the most perfect island. If isolation is the goal, if the idea is to be able to laugh off the rough stuff and pretend none of it matters, then there are other ways to skin the cat. Real estate values and gated communities, secessionist politics and simple demographics--these familiar tools can construct artificially what comes naturally here. Until Rodney King, I am sure, there were plenty of communities on the mainland that felt just as detached as Avalon from the rest of the city. I doubt they feel as detached today.

*

No one can live in all of Los Angeles. The city simply is too huge to embrace the whole. So we live, as a native once explained to me, “in the enclaves.” We keep to familiar rounds, familiar faces, and it will always be so. Still, the last two years have taught us something. They have taught us that a failure to pay attention to what goes on beyond our own islands can have consequences.

People talk of a “Balkanization” that has occurred as a result of the King affair. Just the opposite is true. We are talking to one another, shouting at one another and sometimes even listening. In fact, one danger facing Los Angeles now--as the city celebrates its ability to accept a court judgment without a general pillage; a rather dubious achievement, I’d say--is the temptation to revert to old ways, to paddle back to familiar shores for a long, needed rest. You say there’s still trouble, over there? Well, let Ueberroth handle it. We’re out of here.

The old island mentality. It is our most dangerous instinct. It permits politicians to play one part of the city against another. It sends to police an unspoken command: Maintain a thin blue line between “us” and “them,” whatever it takes, no holds barred. It allows us to turn the newspaper page, to turn our back.

Los Angeles can’t afford islands anymore. Except, perhaps, this one. Which, incidentally, is a terrific place, to visit. You know what I mean?