Island Time

Keeping progress at bay on Balboa Island

By Terence Loose

S

tanding at the corner of Marine and Park Avenues on Balboa Island, in Southern California, I watch a sleek new black Mercedes S-class pull up and park across the street, in front of the cottage-like Wilma’s Patio restaurant. The two images seem at odds, icons from different times forced together in silent confrontation. But the scene reminds me of why I came to the island on this quiet winter’s morning: to discover how much has changed and how much remains the same, if anything, since I said my final goodbye as an island resident over fifteen years ago at age 20.

I am standing in front of 67-year-old Hershey’s Market. Stretched out in front of me is a humble display of fruits and vegetables, the same sight that greeted me every Saturday morning as a kid when I’d fly around the corner, usually in skates or on a skateboard, on my way from my Grand Canal home to the Post Office to check our box. I look across the street, beyond the Mercedes, and see not Wilma’s Patio but the Jolly Roger, where my father handed me a hundred frothy root beer floats on a hundred sunny summer afternoons. Then there’s the Village Inn, recalling the smell of thick pre-health-conscious take-out burgers. The memories are vivid and bring with them not feelings of nostalgia or yearning, but an odd mix of joy and pride for a place that seems to have fought off the mad blitz of progress so obvious in the surrounding hills on the other side of the bridge.

The slamming of the Mercedes’ door snaps me into the present and, paradoxically, the big car has forced my day’s venture into a different study: the appreciation of that mystical thing called “island time.”

Whether you ask a salty Southern California surfer or an oak desk-riding CEO to define island time, they’ll give you roughly the same answer: slow, inefficient, lazy, relaxed. They may even wax romantic with vague terms like dreamy and breezy. And yes, island time is all those things, but anyone who has spent any time on an island will tell you those are merely its superficial rewards. The greatest gift of an island—any island—is that it is the purest form of oasis; its geographical limits give boundless freedoms. An island is at once universally attractive and infinitely safe from the tolls of society’s frantic clock.

But is it merely the fact that Balboa Island is buffered on all sides by water, offering up calm and the impossibility of urban sprawl, that has kept exploitation at bay? I doubt it, since Balboa Island is arguably less isolated than our most urban neighborhoods—everyone visits. It is like living in one of those quaint eastern seaboard fishing villages named Crabtree Cove or Appleton, with a general store and jolly mayor so stereotypical that Main Street is overrun with movie crews 300 days a year. No one knows how it carries on, how the mayor stays jolly, but somehow the charm survives.

I’m struggling with these thoughts when, as if on cue, a slightly rounding man in a fading red baseball cap catches my eye from the bench in front of Hershey’s. One look tells me that this—sitting on this bench and watching his corner—is a major part of his life. He introduces himself as John Cassidy and tells me he’s lived on Balboa Island for over 50 years. We fall into an easy conversation about the island, ostensibly about the way it was but in fact about the way it is. “The quality of life and the pace is the same today as when I was young,” he finally tells me.

Together we share names and experiences. It’s nice to be able to talk about a place where we both grew up—him twenty years earlier than I—without regret or disdain about time’s marks.

I tell him about growing up on Grand Canal, in a home fronted with all glass, floor to ceiling. Every night, in summer, as our family sat around the dinner table we were greeted by curious tourists, licking dripping Balboa Bars and pointing at our fireplace or couch, or us. Sometimes, they’d stay for a while, deciding the bench on our tiny dock was a nice resting spot. Sometimes they’d leave souvenirs such as used Balboa Bar sticks in the barbecue. We were no more real to them than a Crabtree Cove mayor is to the movie crew. I can’t say we ever got used to being on display, but we accepted it as the price of our island happiness and took it as a reminder of how lucky we were.

Besides, we wouldn’t take out that sidewalk for anything. It became our skating racetrack on weekend nights. Last one around the one-point-nine-mile boardwalk was last in line at Dad’s for a frozen banana (the real islander favorite). Balboa Island, Little Island included, remains the county’s—the coast’s?—only island with a boardwalk completely ringing it; a roll around that stretch today is virtually the same as two decades ago, although most now don roller blades. There is the “whale house” on South Bay Front, the island’s first solar home and provider of months of vigorous dinner-table debate while it was built. On North Bay Front, between Ruby and Diamond, stands the “fake lighthouse” house whose four-story turret began its life decades ago as a lighthouse double.

My Grand Canal house is dull compared to these, but it is an undeniable part of the island’s fabric and as such has also resisted change. The same is true of much of island life, I suspect, simply due to the defining traits of an island. For instance, replacing our boat’s dilapidated stern mooring anchor. This had to be done on the lowest tide of the year so we could get it as far from the dock as possible. I can still remember standing in cold and slimy ankle-deep Grand Canal mud at three-thirty in the morning, holding a flashlight while my father, a musical composer who had a hard time hanging a picture, dug a two and a half-foot-square ditch to bury an old car wheel. From this we could anchor a line and float which, when attached to our runabout’s stern, kept her safe from the hazards of dock and seawall.

But it had to be done then as now. That canal was our front yard, complete with fishing hole and swimming pool. And it was the gateway to the thing that has defined my life: the ocean. I learned to drive the family boat before a car. And since no license was needed I was free to explore alone, or with friends. We’d take the little open-hulled craft on fishing expeditions down the Corona del Mar coast, tying up to the kelp beds that are now just a memory. We learned to respect the power and grace of the ocean, it’s quiet patience in the face of the frenzied pace of shore life. On our return, we’d always take a final turn around Balboa Island, around our neighborhood, our world. It was a world that seemed more part of the sea than land. It was simple and unaffected, its boundaries of sand disappearing into water so clearly defined, and therefore safe, permanent.

I’m certain the island seems that way to its residents today, no matter how many visitors roll or walk over the bridge, or are ferried on from the peninsula, to gawk and stroll and point. Sure, there is a bit more stucco now—on the small church which seems to have adopted a tiny mission style; forming the Starbucks Coffee in the next block; and further down, covering the grand, if little, fire station. But even a Starbucks, modern society’s caffeine-addled poster child, can’t detract from the charm of Balboa’s easy island spirit. It’s an assurance that corporate America has failed to invade the island, and in fact has been held in check, that the monolith holds no power here. It’s an illusion which, if held up by enough people, becomes reality. And it is why Balboa Island feels the same to resident and day-tripper alike.

I see that the Mercedes has moved on now and that I have burdened John with enough of my memories. I could tell him so many more, but I’m sure he already knows them all, so I tell him I’ve got to get going, back across the bridge and on with my day, my other, more feverish life. He just smiles and gives me a gentle wave from his bench, as if to say, “Don’t worry, whenever you return, I’ll be here. After all, I’m living on island time.”þ

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