An Island in the Mist

Sometimes you see her and sometimes you don’t, adding to the allure of a place so near and yet so far called Santa Catalina Island.

I think of her as a woman, even a woman in love, because I think of all islands that way, misty and beguiling. But when you get into the mountainous interior, the romanticized notions are dispelled.

You ride on roads so steep and narrow that all at once the island becomes an adventure rather than a tryst. Locals call them snake roads because they twist and turn like rattlers in the bush, through forested groves and across barren plains.

At the top of the island, you look down from Mt. Orizaba to a vista of land and ocean so dazzling it’s like seeing the world for the first time.

You understand for that moment, with a soft breeze touching your face and the Pacific shimmering with sunlight, why one of the island’s longest inhabitants, the barber Lolo Saldana, says flat out that, “What we’ve got here is paradise.”

A chunky, dark-haired man, he was born on the island 70 years ago of parents who had moved there 10 years earlier. When Lolo calls Catalina paradise, he speaks from the soul.

But paradise seems lost in Avalon, its only city, with an unsettling clutter of tourist-driven food and trinket shops along beachfront streets. Maybe paradise, like heaven, is best viewed from afar.

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About 1 million tourists a year crowd into Avalon, the island’s gateway. It occupies a scant 1.2 square miles on a southeastern corner, facing L.A.

Cars are limited, but there’s no escaping a sea of golf carts, motorcycles and bicycles used as a primary means of transportation for the city’s 3,000 inhabitants.

It’s only when you get into the interior that you begin to understand what Lolo means when he talks about paradise.

Avalon offers a kind of surreal entryway into what is otherwise an idyllic setting. It’s found in the 42,000 acres owned by the Catalina Island Conservancy. That’s most of the island’s 76 square miles. So if you can overlook the beachfront disarray, Bali Hai does seem to exist in the broad valleys, isolated coves, pristine beaches and lofty peaks.

My interest in paradise wasn’t just that fantasized lady in the mist, but her wild goats and pigs. The animals, according to the conservancy, are eating up the island, so to speak, and have to be dealt with.

The conservancy periodically killed them by shooting them from helicopters, which, as you can imagine, can turn an animal activist into a drooling, uncontrollable maniac.

But last year they came up with a plan to ship the goats to a place called Goats R Us near Oakland, where the animals are utilized in brush clearance fire prevention programs. The goats, I am told, are as happy as clams.

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I toured the island’s interior with Bill Bushing, who is vice president of the conservancy. He’s an outdoor guy with a PhD who loves animals but doesn’t want them turning Catalina into a desert.

He showed me places where goats and pigs have transformed a lush environment into a moonscape by eating the vegetation right down to its roots, and then eating the roots too. While he loathes the idea of shooting them, it’s what works.

There are still about 100 goats on the island and they’re suddenly reproducing like crazy, bearing twins and triplets. It’s nature’s way, Bushing says, of filling the population gap left when the other goats were shipped out.

Shooting, he says, eliminates so many animals so quickly it overcomes the rate of reproduction. It makes sense, I guess, in an odd, unsettling way.

Goat relocation was tried once before, but the mortality rate was so high it was abandoned until last year. This time around, says activist Debbie Avellana, “the first thing our guys did was jump out of their cars and kiss the goats. It calmed them. Goats are smart. They know if you’re hostile.”

Bushing was impressed with the operation, but he says the shooting is going to go on until only the island’s bison, deer and foxes are left. The 2,000 pigs that call Catalina home are also doomed. So far, no one has offered to save them. I guess no one wants to kiss a pig.

So even in the interior of Shangri-La there’s controversy. You’d never find gunfire and the clatter of helicopters in a real utopia.

But I’ll still think of Catalina as something distant and beguiling. When you stop to consider its open land and almost zero crime rate, you realize it’s about as close to paradise as L.A. is ever going to get.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.