The White Line at Eric's
Freedom and Its Limits in a Hamburger-Hot Dog
There’s a thin white stripe of paint on the Green Pleasure Pier in Avalon, on Catalina Island. Sun-bleached and scuffed by flip-flops and fishing boots, you might not even notice it. But cross it with a beer in your hand and you’re suddenly on the wrong side of the law. Avalon makes its rules visible in a way most of life doesn’t. That stripe is quirky seriousness in paint. Stay inside and you’re free. Step out, and bad stuff happens.
Catalina has always been about boundaries and contradictions. The Banning brothers drew the first one in the late 1800s when they decided that the rocky island, twenty-six miles off Los Angeles, should become a resort. William Wrigley Jr. drew a bolder one in 1919 when he bought Catalina outright. Avalon became his personal playground. He brought the Chicago Cubs here for spring training. He built the Avalon Casino, which never had gambling. Catalina evolved as both untamed and tightly curated, a place where freedom was managed.
The Green Pleasure Pier is a wooden finger in the middle of the bay, and it’s a busy place. Shore Boats shuttle passengers to their moorings, tourists rent skiffs to putter around, and kids drop lines into the water. At the far end sits the Avalon Weigh Station, where hulking marlin, tuna, and seabass are hauled up on the crane, weighed, and photographed.
When I was a kid, the harbormaster would spot a sportfishing boat returning with its flags flying and fire a cannon. That boom sent me sprinting down to the pier to watch the fish lifted high.
At the foot of the pier near the beach, sits Eric’s, a walk-up spot that’s been around since 1923, serving burgers, burritos, and beer in plastic cups. Order at the screened window, lean against the counter, or grab a table near the famous painted boundary.
It could be anywhere, really. Just a flat griddle with old grease next to a humming deep fryer. But it isn’t anywhere. It’s in Avalon, a one-square-mile town where salt air, fried food, and cold beer have become their own kind of seawall, holding back the erosion of the past.
There are tables jammed between the counter and the edge of the white line. It’s a narrow space, maybe ten feet wide, and you have to breathe in deeply to slip between tables. Today, rope on posts defines the space where you can sit. But back then, there was only the painted stripe across the planks. I used to watch the old men in tank tops test it. Some rummy would wander past mid-fish story, then stumble back in a kind of drunken tango before the sheriff noticed.
My memories of Avalon started before I was born. In the 1950s, my maternal grandfather ran an Italian restaurant here. Pasta, red sauce, Chianti in straw-wrapped bottles. He served tourists who looked out at the Pacific and imagined it was Sorrento.
Growing up, the restaurant was already gone, but the island was still mine. My parents let me run barefoot through town, unsupervised and untracked.
There were hordes of us, interloping tourists staying ten days or two weeks a summer, all of us shirtless, shoeless, and blackened by the sun due to a generational disregard for sunscreen.
When we got out of the ocean, the sun would dry us off so quickly that a thick cake of salt stuck to our skin, thicker than lotion, a kind of warrior paint protecting us from harm and rules. Avalon was our playground, bound only by the ocean and the occasional scolding from a parent or store owner. My family owned a little bungalow in the flats, and we would roam the streets all day, into the night. The pier was our compass point, and Eric’s was the place where we hustled our parents for burgers and fries, even when lunch was already waiting back at the house.
I felt I had become an adult when I discovered the Rod’s Combo, now called the Harvey’s Combo. A cheeseburger with grilled onions and a split hot dog sprawled across the patty like a dare. It wasn’t just good, it was transcendent. The grease soaked into the bun just enough to make it collapse in your hands; the hot dog provided some resistance when you bit through, and the onions clung to the cheese as if they were one in communion. It was the personification of summer, the kind of food that made you forget whatever else was happening in your life. It felt indulgent not to be forced to choose between a hamburger and a hot dog. I could have both.
That burger taught me that rules could bend, that excess was its own kind of permission slip. Those days on the island were always about bending rules. There was little supervision, and if you kept your mouth shut long enough, you got pretty much everything you wanted. All that freedom made me think about the rules that did matter, like the protocol for pulling a boat into the harbor, the prohibition against jumping off the mole (the high pier where the ferries dock), and Eric’s painted boundary across the pier.
Years later, my friends and I burned a thousand bucks to chase that Combo. We loaded up the boat, blasted across the channel, docked, and staggered up the pier with the engine still warm. By the time the day was done, fuel and beer, maybe a t-shirt or two, and a tab at Eric’s that was way bigger than it should’ve been. All for a handful of burgers. This was not a good economic decision, but a worthwhile one. Sometimes, if you run the boat fast enough, you get back to where you came from.
The white stripe on the pier is practical. The city doesn’t want drunks wandering Crescent Avenue with open containers. But it’s also philosophy painted across the planks. Most of life’s boundaries you only notice after you’ve already crossed. I appreciate that Avalon spells it out in paint.
I think about those old men testing it, shifting one step forward, one back, as if they could bargain with gravity. And I realize that’s all of us. Negotiating with limits, flirting with freedom, trying not to wander too far off course before you get lost.
As always, life changes. My grandfather’s restaurant is long gone. Our house is gone, too. The barefoot roaming of my childhood would probably get Child Protective Services called today. Even the Rod’s Combo has a new name.
But the pier is still there. Eric’s is still slinging burgers. And that painted white line is still fading this across the planks, daring you to cross it.
It’s Avalon and life in a single stripe of paint. A reminder that freedom always has a boundary, and the good stuff happens right up against it.
Perfection 💚
The Croatian Hawaii, I love it!