Sur La Mer (our 31st Anniversary) Part 42: The Beach at Roads End

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I've alluded to Roads End before.

To recap, it's a community at the north end of Lincoln City; if you're leaving L.C. on the north side, Hwy 101 curves inland towards Neotsu, the Hwy 18 junction, Neskowin and points north. Just at that point where it curves away from the beach, a road, Logan Road, strikes northward further but into a cul-de-sac of a residential district where L.C.'s highest-numbered streets can be found. Blocked in by a headland literally just north of the city limits, one must turn around to get back out; ergo, road's end. 

It's a charming little neighborhood with a very accessible beach access. And that's where we went.

 It's also very very popular. Parking was easy to get to and hard to actually find. But we did, and had our reward thereupon.

The wind as mas macho this day and spray coated our glasses and we had to take time and wipe 'em; I nearly lost Birthday Hat for good, pretty close. There was a fellow there who did two things simultaneously that Oregonians do when they go to the beach: fly a kite and board the waves. The photo, back before this last one, shows him; he leapt and soared but came back down quickly each time, and looked quite exhilarated.

Actually, here, we came back. We were intending  to finally strike out for the Valley, and home, but after we got just past the Hwy 18 turnoff, the Girl turned round and we went back; north of that, 101 did its inland thing and we both wanted to see a bit more of the ocean, feel the breeze, hear the surf.

And why not? We could. That's the beauty of being grown ups. When you're kids on a trip to the coast, you're driving away from the beloved beach and you have to go along with that. But if you're a grown-up and you're behind the wheel, you want one more good look at the Pacific, then you get it. It's your call.

We got what we needed, in this grace-note last look. Stiff breeze, the smell of the sea, the roar of the surf, people enjoying the beach in that Oregon way (down jackets, kiteboarders, the freshness of the air), the clouds coming down to touch the water ... and we left when we were good and ready.

Adultness has its burdens, and life is finite in span and constrained in possibilities, but we do have this and, for the time being, it kind of makes it all worth it. 

I love Lincoln County. 

Sur La Mer (our 31st Anniversary) Part 41: Lincoln City Street Blades, In Passing

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As we came back through L.C., I got me some street blade pix. 

You know. How I do.

The street grid in Lincoln City holds endless fascination for me, as I've said before. I'm coming up with an article that I'll submit to a blog of a fellow I very much respect exploring it. For now, it's only necessary to know this: for directional prefixes, the city is quartered by US 101, L.C.'s main street, and the "D" River into NW, NE, SW and SE quadrants. 

The average L.C. city street blade looks more or less like this:

There are a few obvious observations that one can make from this, and they aren't outre at all. L.C. follows a standard and predictable design logic which renders an easily-understood design grammar: the directional and the specific are of a lesser size which cause the actual street name (or number in this case) to be the star of the design. The ordinal, in the case of the numbered street, is appropriately sized.

The blade that's very oblique in this view can be seen a bit clearer, though smaller, in the deep background, at the corner with NE 18th Pl. It simply says N HWY 101. South Hwy 101 is called out in identical style on the other side of the "D" River.

The fascination in L.C. isn't so much in the simplicity of of the design but it the way it's actually somewhat inconsistently applied. Not too far from this corner, we found this:

This gives a good view of the standard named blade in town, and a very oblique view again of another. Here one can see that the generic ST doesn't line up with the directional like on the top blade, rather, it's centered. The impression given, when compared with other L.C. street blades, is a bit of casual sloppiness. 

There are other blade sets which come off as kind of avant garde, such as this one:

Here the layout is followed faithfully, but the font jumps out at you. I'm pretty sure that that Helvetica-esque font isn't an MUTCD standard, it looks atypical for street blades and, except for the capital "I" in the street name Inlet, there are no majuscules anywhere, and it's used in a very consistent way on the blades. 

It's a bit of a wonder, really.

And that concludes our little tour of the street blades of Lincoln City. 

Sur La Mer (our 31st Anniversary) Part 17: A Piece Of Hwy 101 In L.C.

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This is US 101, the main street of Lincoln City, as you approach the D River Crossing at the middle of town:

Note that I said the middle, not the center. Lincoln City doesn't have a center. It has four or five of them. 

L.C. is a town of towns. In 1965, the communities of Oceanlake, Delake, Nelscott, Taft, and Cutler City, some organized towns and some not, decided they were stronger as a unit than they were separately so, like big stones on a bangle bracelet, they unified. Lincoln City was chosen by vote because it was seen as arrogant to name it after one of the larger towns. And so it became, a small town on the Oregon Coast that was scarely a mile wide ... but was about seven miles long.

And the string that holds those pearls together is US 101 (as a matter of fact, one of the rubrics for each urban center that strings together in L.C. is just that, pearls. They know what they have there, I guess).

Now this may seem a little daffy, but for me, for a visit to the beach, one of the simpler pleasures is watching the miles of L.C. roll by via a car window; watching the numbered streets count down from 40th Street in the north (at least that's where 101 joins the grid) to D River then up 69th Street in the south. 

And a picture of cars along 101 as you go through that gangly long town is one of the fondest memories I have.

Sur La Mer (our 31st Anniversarty) Part 16: The D River, If You Insist

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Lincoln City geography has this much in common with that of Portland, and it's this: a river divides it and forms the basis for how the numbered streets are determined.

That's where the similarity ends.

Another few words about Lincoln City geography: It's a long, slender city. Along its northeastern side is a body of water called Devil's Lake (attributed to indigenous legend which may or may not have been misremembered by those who displaced those indigenous people ... provided it wasn't made up entirely). At its south end, Devil's Lake turns a point toward the Pacific and, from that point, issues an outlet.

It's about 400-some feet long, and it drains Devil's Lake directly to the ocean. Most of the time, though, it hardly seems much of a stream at all.

This, then, is the "D River", a vast majority of the time anyone crossing the bridge over it on Hwy 101 in the middle of Lincoln City is likely to see it. Prepare to be awed.

It was documented by the Guinness Book of World Records as world's-shortest for a very long time and the State's road signs at the time exalted it as such as it does today.

However, in 1989, Guinness changed that after a group of school children in Great Falls, Montana, had the channel that allows Giant Springs to drain to the Missouri River, having rendered a result of 201 feet. L.C. boosters countered by arguing that the D was 120 feet long at 'extreme high tide', a claim seeming to try too hard even if you love Oregon having the most remarkable of everything (as I do - my Oregon chauvinism is second to nobody's, as anyone who knows me will tell you).

Faced with having to adjudicate between a group of Oregon Coast boosters on one side and Montana schoolchildren on the other, Guinness took the utterly Solomanic approach of fully recusing itself from further authority, never to declare the world's shortest river ever again, and removing the category from their famous compendium altogether. 

While rolling up the court and going home on the Guinness part is something of a downer, it does mean that we can continue to insist it's the world's shortest river, and there isn't a thing anyone can do to contradict us about it.

And the sign still exists at the 101 bridge: D RIVER -- WORLDS SHORTEST.

Sur La Mer (our 31st Anniversary) part 15: Breakfast At Lil' Sambos

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This is both just a restaurant and more like a landmark. It also comes with a bit of controversy in the world of today, an interesting history, a certain misconception, and no small amount of affection.

After waking in Tillamook and driving south down 101 to Lincoln City, we decided it was well past time for a real breakfast. Like legions of people who grew up in the mid-Willamette Valley the place we usually found ourselves larking of to to see the beach was the central coast, and that meant Lincoln County, and that meant, for starters, Lincoln City.

I'm old enough that I dined as a kid at what was then called Lil' Black Sambo's, a family restaurant whose brand was taken from Scottish writer and illustrator Helen Bannerman's 1899 children's tale of a clever Indian boy who escaped being bullied by tigers by convincing them to chase tail 'round a tree until they melted down into ghee, which was then enjoyed on pancakes by the protagonist's family. And the old restaurant would serve us kids pancakes with a side of 'tiger butter'. 

Latterly, it has evolved slightly. It's now simply Lil' Sambo's, the protagonist being elided in favor of the tigers, and has lived through a fire that destroyed the building in 2004 and the 2019-now pandemic. Located at 3262 NE Hwy 101 in the Oceanlake district, it has a spiffy, more modern building built on the footprint of the old ... and a proud tiger with his stolen shorts and parasol marching on top of the sign out front. 

The interior has mementos from its now-64-year history of being in the main drag in L.C., and the decor is all about the tiger.

There is also a trinket-filled gift shop part of the restaurant, because selling such things is what you do when you've been a landmark as long as that.

The history of the business is pure 20th Century Oregon Coast. It actually exists because the Pixie Kitchen did. The Pixie Kitchen is a coastal legend that existed from 1953 to 1985 in the same area of L.C. and was the place for families with kids to stop at through the 50s and 60s (I still have fond memories of the funhouse mirrors they used to have near the dining room entry). They didn't serve breakfasts, though, so in 1957 two of their cooks opened a spot called "Pixie Pancakes" a little ways down 101. 

The restaurant history does not mention when they decided to brand as "Lil' Black Sambos" or when they decided to omit the word black from the name. 

There's another misapprehension about the name, in as much as there was once a national 24-hour diner chain called Sambo's. The name similarity tends to suggest to people that Lil' Sambos was once part of this, but that never has been, indeed, the national chain's name was derived from its two founders, Sam Battistone Jr and Newell Bohnett, and not from the children's story (though that didn't prevent them from also trading on the images from Little Black Sambo for a while). 

I really ought to mention the food, because that is, indeed why we stopped, but a place with this much history and modern issues generates more than its share of digressions, I suppose; the breakfast here is not to be missed. I had the closest thing I could find to a taco omelette on the menu, the Spanish omelette, combining salsa, sour cream, seasoned meat, olives and cheese, and it was superb. The Brown Eyed Girl treated herself to her bliss, basted eggs. 

They know how to put on a good breakfast. It was worth the trip.

The name and the heritage behind it is an issue that'll have to be resolved and it's being approached quite slowly, as any BIPOC resident of Oregon presumably might not be surprised to hear. As recently as 2020, as Willamette Week reports, there are current calls for the restaurant to retire the old and problematical brand. And the current owners are, if slow to rise to it, not wholly unaware: the WW quotes the current general manager as acknowledging that change is in the air, but is reluctant to say when. 

I don't know about anyone else, but I think they had a winner in the name "Pixie Pancakes". 

After all, pixies still ride seahorses on the outside of the building. Maybe they should embrace that.