The Wild Ocean

I've been on the road for I'm-not-sure-how- long. . . five or six hours at least.

The Pacific Ocean has been at my elbow for the last several hours. I had forgotten what it was like. The biggest water I've seen for several years has been Puget Sound -- not the same thing at all. I've stopped at lookouts several times, including one isolated little beach where I was completely alone. I took my shoes off and went out on the sand to just watch the breakers.

This was the right decision. The drive has been utterly gorgeous. Before I reached the coast highway, I followed a couple of rural highways that wound through mountains and farmland and along rivers. Sometimes the trees almost touched over the road. I saw buffalo and elk.

This has been good for my self-respect (traveling an unfamiliar route alone) and my soul. I realized an hour or so ago that this is the first time in ages I've had the freedom to travel wholly at my own pace.

It hasn't been lonely, but I have wished more than once that I had someone with me to share the beauty of the journey.



And now the tv in the restaurant is reporting the death of Michael Jackson. . .

Restaurant Revisionism - The Tiger Won

When I was growing up in the Pacific Northwest, there was a chain of family restaurants (about the same level as Denny's) called Sambo's. They were based on the story "Little Black Sambo" about an African boy who tangled with a tiger (I forget how it happened), and outsmarted him. He tricked the tiger into running around and around a tree so many times that the tiger melted down into butter, which Little Black Sambo put on his pancakes.

Sometime in the early 1980's the chain was shut down due to protests and boycotting because of the supposedly offensive story. Personally I never understood it. It's been a long time, so I may be forgetting an important detail or two, but the story never seemed offensive to me. Sambo was clever, did not speak in pidgin, and triumphed over the tiger.

Last night, for reasons too convoluted to go into here, oakmouse and I ended up talking about tigers melting into butter and Sambo's restaurants. As far as we both knew, the chain was defunct.

Today, in Lincoln City, Oregon, I found a Sambo's restaurant -- but if it's a leftover from the old chain, they survived by eliminating Sambo himself. The restaurant I was in was a celebration of tigers. There were tigers on the menu, tigers for sale in various forms in kitschy gift shop, tigers painted on the walls. Unless someone knew the old story, they would have no clue as to why the restaurant was called Sambo's at all.

But I had to laugh -- actually, I had to use my cameraphone to take a picture of the menu and email it to oakmouse -- given the weird synchronicity of the conversation and finding the restaurant.