BUFFALO BURGERS IN PARADISE

AN ENGLISHMAN WALKS UP TO THE OUTDOOR BAR WHERE I shuttle drinks from bartenders in Hawaiian shirts to customers in Hawaiian shirts.

“Excuse me,” he says to no one in particular. “Am I still in California?”

This, I think, is a very good question, not in the category of the I-swear-truly-asked isthmus questions, including: “So is this entire island surrounded by water?” and “Which side is the Pacific Ocean?”

California, at least the mainland, is visible in the distance--an indistinct smudge, a scallop of gray between navy blue ocean and powder blue sky. Catalina Island is a different California, and the isthmus is an isolated realm unto itself. No geography whiz, I had to look up the word “isthmus”: the narrowest strip of land between two bodies of water. Santa Catalina’s is a half-mile wide. It’s as if the island is wearing a corset. At Isthmus Cove, the side facing L.A., beachfront development is pretty much limited to a shingle-roofed dive shop, a sprawl of colorful kayaks and a picture-book pier painted white and the blue of a Fisher-Price tugboat. On the other side, Cat Harbor is as still as a lake, the most protected cove on the island. The ocean breeze that whips up in the afternoons smells of wild licorice and barbecues on boats.

Two Harbors, the community on the isthmus, has two bars, one restaurant, one snack bar and one general store, all ringed by palm trees. It’s Gilligan’s Island with concessions. Everyone who lives on the isthmus works for Two Harbor Enterprises, with the exception of spouses, a few county employees and a multimillionaire retired skateboarder. (The day Rocco’s hot tub arrived dangling from a helicopter is a favorite isthmus memory.)

Two Harbors is so small that no one uses or even knows each other’s last names. There’s Dive Shop Dave, Harbor Patrol Rudy, So-and-So the Crazy One. “It’s like in Bible times: Jesus of Nazareth. John the Baptist,” says Restaurant Jeanine. Sabrina-From-Accounting has a theory that everyone who works on the isthmus is running from something. She recites the rumor that last summer the FBI led the breakfast cook away in handcuffs. A serial killer disguised as an amiable pancake flipper? Pumping her eyebrows as vigorously as Groucho Marx over a punch line, she asks: “Why are you really here?”

I’m not running from anything, I tell her. At the time, I think it’s true.

i’m diana-the-waitress, a scheme i stumbled upon when I was here as a writer on a working vacation. The exuberant girl with a high-pitched voice who served me $18 halibut said she was really a location manager for a movie studio! But between films she came over to the island and waited tables to stay sane! What with a cell phone and FedEx, no one even knew she had fled L.A.! And she made $200 a night to boot!

“Hey, maybe I’ll move to the isthmus and be a waitress,” I thought, envisioning a life as Island Girl. I’d trade in khakis for flowered sarongs. My skin would turn a golden brown. I’d make cash--no more heart-dropping peeks into the mailbox looking for a check. (What do you call a freelance writer? Overdrawn). I thought about these things in the way you plan in great detail for something you never expect to do.

But then my boyfriend and I-- well, to say we broke up imparts a drama that wasn’t there. One night I read him our compatibility rating from a Chinese restaurant place mat: “Rabbits seek harmony. But a rabbit-rabbit relationship may be too peaceful even for a rabbit.” He laughed the way people laugh at something precisely true. So there I was: a broke, boring bunny at loose ends. Why not an island isthmus? It seemed the perfect spot for a person adrift.

my rent is $100 a month. My greatest hope as I move into these company-owned quarters in mid-May is that the roommate who has yet to join me will be a lying, cheating, incompetent who gets fired immediately, leaving the one chest of drawers to me alone. Since the room is the size of a potting shed and the refrigerator is smaller than a stereo speaker, I don’t see how two people are going to fit, notwithstanding the bunk bed that will double-deck us.

But Leslie Hale, 21, is immediately likable. With huge, wide-set eyes and a long curve of eyelashes, her face follows Disney guidelines for sympathetic characters, be they mermaid, lion cub or princess. She is a straight-A valedictorian and fifth-generation native of McConnelsville, Ohio--population 2,000. But they tried to “de-valedictorianize” her after she got caught with marijuana in the school parking lot. “The evening news even had a logo with a marijuana leaf and handcuffs,” Leslie says. “That was the day my mother developed a sense of humor.”

I figure that anyone who at 17 faced down the ire of an entire town to give a graduation speech, and still made note of TV graphics and her mother’s personal growth, is a woman of spunk. We’re both amused that her boyfriend, a graduate student, is inbreeding oysters at a marine research center a cove away. (Inbred oysters? Do they produce dim pearls?) Meanwhile, my good friend Karman sends me an e-mail from El Dorado Hills. She’s bought plantation teak patio furniture. Very Martha Stewart, she writes, on the same day that Troy-the-New-Cook bolts chartreuse milk crates into the wall for Leslie and me to use as shelves for canned soups.

Other than Leslie, I don’t tell anyone I’m 36. The lines around my eyes should give people a clue, but I wear sunglasses a lot. Young Louisiana-Jason shouts “laissez les bons temps rouler!” while he whips up the vodka-based chocolate-and-banana milkshakes people here call Buffalo Milk. His nickname for me is “26-plus.” I come to realize that this is the oldest he can imagine anyone being who doesn’t act like his parents. I am a decade beyond Jason’s outside estimate of youth.

here’s the thing about the isthmus. it’s not enough that it’s set apart from Avalon by a rugged interior where buffalo roam, and from the rest of the world by the Pacific. People want to further define the place as another time, another reality.

“Here’s the thing about the isthmus,” says Dancing Chris. “People here are more than what they appear. I’m a garbage man, but I’m so much more than a garbage man. I’m a father, a Christian, a lover, a swing-dance aficionado. Indeed, faced with a dearth of dance partners, Chris, an unflappingly cheerful man in his 40s, decides to teach a weekly swing class. Hence, more women to choose from when the DJ ferries over on Friday and Saturday nights.

“Here’s the thing about the isthmus,” says Mike Daniels, a retired CBS news producer who has a mooring but does not work at the isthmus, hence his real name. “I am friends with people here who on the mainland I’d never come in contact with. You share a beer. Everyone’s wearing shorts. It doesn’t matter what someone does for a living; you can talk about the current or a boat or a fish someone caught. There’s connection.”

A large yacht is anchored at the mouth of Cat Harbor. People say it’s Johnny Carson’s. Is that him reading the paper and drinking coffee? I meet an artist who’s moored in Cat Harbor. He’s painting pictures of other people’s boats to earn money for food. His small boat is Norwegian with rows of tiny stained-glass windows. “You could say I traded a couch for it,” he says. “I got a job painting scenery in Hollywood that paid $800 for two days’ work. Then the person whose couch I was sleeping on said, ‘Heck, I’ll give you $800 to find somewhere else to sleep.’ Next day I walked by this boat for sale for $1,500 and bought it.” He doesn’t have to be at work, but then again, he does look hungry. Does it always come down to this: freedom only for the very wealthy or the very destitute?

Here’s the thing about the isthmus for me, in the early days of summer when I’m still in love with it. Every afternoon the pelicans at Cat Harbor divebomb for fish. They copy each other’s spins and reverse spirals in a way that has to be as much about fun as dinner. At sunset, Two Harbors’ general manager--I think of him as “Island King”--races his bright yellow Quadrunner up the steepest hill and out the farthest ridge and looks over the wild, unprotected side of the island where the waves break. Every dawn Jimmy Walker, 70, water skis. (He’s partial to orange, as exhibited by his orange swimming suit and orange-trimmed boat.) Someone spears an enormous sea bass. Someone tells a funny story. And because the isthmus is only so big and there are only so many people, I stumble upon it all.

One morning Leslie goes to work and there is a buffalo in front of the time clock. “The thing about the isthmus,” she says, “is you bump into a buffalo and think, ‘But, of course.’ ”

some people are nuts. despite this seeming disadvantage, some of these people manage to own big yachts, motor to Two Harbors and go out to dinner. It is one of the busiest nights in the restaurant. A lawyer asks for a beer glass. I run out another table’s hot food first. When I return, the man says, “My lips have never touched the neck of a beer bottle and they never will.” I laugh, thinking he’s trying to be funny. “Don’t you understand,” he shouts, causing heads to turn, “that to set this bottle here without a glass was to taunt me?”

All complaints are prefaced with the amount of time a customer has been coming to Two Harbors. The man whose tempura batter on his shrimp is not the same as four years ago has been coming here 16 years. And this batter! It’s different! He is disgusted! No, he doesn’t want something else. He wants shrimp--shrimp made exactly the way he had it four years ago. Spittle is beginning to form at the corners of his mouth and his hands are twitching. I try to imagine him in another setting, perhaps opening Christmas presents with his children. I’m supposed to say something. What? I search my mind for some servile assurance, but I’m like an actress who’s gone up on her lines. We stare at each other a good while. “Dessert?” I ask.

Waiting tables is a linchpin of social democracy, a volunteer version of Robin Hood’s system. Instead of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, the rich, after a nice dinner and a bottle or two of robust Cabernet, over-tip the server, who tips other struggling workers. It’s not easy money, but it’s fast money. There’s a manic energy in a restaurant on a busy night, like playing basketball, only it involves hot food.

In the kitchen, Cook Jason and Cook Steve move with frenzied grace, like the drum majors they were in high school. Servers quickly calculate the difference between a pile of cash and the bill total and screech, “Sweet!” I now have split shifts, showing up for breakfast at 6 a.m. after a late dinner shift. Or working lunch through dinner with an hour in between. Or hostessing all day. Or working the snack bar, running out plastic trays of food and hollering, “Number 32!” I had this notion I would be the Peter Mayle of Catalina, writing warm-hearted accounts of slow-paced island life: secret coves, quirky characters. But by late July my greatest fantasy is a long nap.

Holly, Louisiana-Jason’s wife, has an accent as deep as a bayou. Every early, misty breakfast shift she announces: “I Hate Mornings! I Hate Breakfast! I Hate People!” imbuing the word “hate” with the two syllables such a big word ought to have. Tromping to work as the sun paints orange and red stripes over the Pacific, I try to respond to the beauty, but it’s a no-go. The one good thing about rising at an hour that makes me feel seasick, and facing plate after plate of greasy American breakfast food, is Jimmy Walker. He’s always the first customer, ambling up in fur-lined boots after his early-morning ski. He croons bits of American standards and Frank Sinatra, telling me, “You don’t know this one, of course.” Every time I fill his coffee cup, he says, “Ahh, there’s a place for you in heaven.”

He’s tan, with short, silver bristle-brush hair. He’s in good shape. He looks, perhaps, grizzled, but not old in a way that suggests frailty. His reputation precedes him. Jimmy Walker is as much a part of this place as Shipwreck Rock, which marks the entrance to the cove. He used to drive a shore boat on the weekends, taking drunks back to their moorings on the midnight shift, while he was still the mayor of Manhattan Beach. They called him “Walker the Night Stalker.” This spring he learned to fly helicopters. He plays the ukulele. Jimmy invites me water skiing. Jimmy invites everyone water skiing. “Tuesdays is for beginners and the rusty,” he says. “Just show up at 6 a.m. on the dock any Tuesday and I promise I’ll get you up.” I work the next week. But I like knowing the promise is there. One of these Tuesdays I’m going water skiing.

leslie is working in the snack bar. Inexplicably, whenever someone has a complaint, it is not enough for her to offer to correct the problem. They insist she touch the offending fried food: “This fish is dry, here, feel!” She is desperate for waitress shifts; she needs the money. I’m desperate for time off; I need to meet some deadlines. Besides, customers seem unnerved having the same waitress for breakfast and dinner. Startled, they keep saying, “It’s you. You’re wearing a different shirt”--as if they’ve caught a spy behind enemy lines.

I go to the restaurant manager, an agreeable if sometimes-frazzled fellow (faced with a party of 10 the previous night, he banged his head against a pole). I should have read those books about negotiating. I’m reduced to ceaseless begging. Jeff Super Waiter, who comes earlier, works faster and stays longer than anyone else, told me earlier in the summer, “I love the very act of work.” He is searingly disapproving, butting in as I maneuver for days off. “This is your job. Your reason for being here,” he lectures. I stomp out, find Leslie and vent. Then I slowly realize that Super Waiter’s right. I’m not working hard enough.

There are reasons I’m more carpe diem than Calvinistic. I’m the daughter of two people who slaved away their whole lives, never got a break from scrambling and died young. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been running from the unavoidable compromises between money, work and freedom. But my father, a steel-plant worker, and my mother, who got suckered into overpriced home-study courses in real estate, idolized anyone who had a job they loved. The message was never “avoid work.” The message was “if you’re smart enough and lucky enough and work hard enough, maybe you can nab the privilege and luxury of work that is part of your reason for being here.” So why am I not happy serving buffalo burgers in paradise?

I call my wise best friend, expecting comfort. She can’t stop laughing.

i walk into the empty restaurant. Time to set up for another night of serving Captain Morgan and Coke, prime rib and salads with bleu cheese dressing. On one of the corner tables there’s a large bouquet of beautiful orange flowers. That seems odd. Then I see the orange card: “In memory of our dear friend Jimmy Walker . . . .”

He’d heard about a Harley motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D., and decided it would be fun. Somewhere in the California high desert, he pulled over, parked his bike and collapsed. Not many 70-year-olds die wearing black motorcycle leather. I bow my head in respect. Jimmy Walker was at one time or another a policeman, fireman, realtor, mayor. But he always carried within him an endless, invincible summer.

I’ve been looking at the historical photographs hanging on the restaurant’s walls. In one I’ve noticed a waitress wearing a uniform with apron and sensible shoes, standing on the patio restaurant, looking out at the ocean. The other waitresses are conferring. You can almost hear them saying, “Party of five, we could put them over here.” But this one, she’s staring at the ocean. At first I decide she has a swimming suit under her uniform and is counting the minutes until she gets off work. Now I’m pretty sure she’s about to make a run for it. Untie her apron and never look back. Maybe she spent too much time watching the pelicans swoop and dive. Maybe she still hopes she’ll find a way to fly free while fishing for dinner.