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The (fake name, real place) Tall Oak isn't that unusual for an old restaurant. The food is cheap, filling, and unremarkable. The varnished knotty pine paneling, tongue-and-groove, is what they used Back Then. It's getting dark with the years, and has learned how to sag in a surprising number of directions, but it's still not too remarkable.
Nor is the fact that the place is a jumble of additions, until there's far more addition than anything else. By the looks of the fireplace masonry in the biggest room, the last addition went on in the mid 1960s.
What's remarkable is the amount of clutter that's accumulated. Miniature pine stump "hand carved toothpick holders," one dollar, no takers. Ditto the gaudy, beaded hair scrunchies, now going gray with dust. Photos of lumber camps and forest fires long gone. A lithograph of Jesus, 30 stories tall, knocking on the side of the United Nations Building. Jezilla!
And then there's the dead stuff. Plasticized fishes swimming forever tacked to driftwood branches. There's a whole wall of display cases in the big room, probably for the fruits of the taxidermist's art, but only a beaver and a weasel (why would anybody stuff a weasel?) made it in there before Ceramic Santa and the crooked, forgotten plastic Christmas Bush from some long-past year took up residence in there. So there they sit, forgotten animals, forgotten Christmas, in front of a painted backdrop of trees, a river, and soaring eagles which is actually pretty nice, in a billboard-painter sort of way.
What really got to me was the two mounted deer heads. Whitetail bucks with fine antlers, they favored me with their glass-eyed, dust-filmed stare as I ate my hot meatloaf sandwich.
I couldn't appreciate the drama and pathos of their lives and deaths because it looked as if the taxidermist had stretched their skins over forms he'd hacked out of a hemlock stump with a dull hatchet-- as might, indeed, be the case. The poor shaping of these taxidermy forms, and the drying and shrinking of the skins over the years, had given each buck a smile that was distinctly creepy.
But if the collection of dead stuff creeps you out too much, you can go to the Taco Bell a couple of miles closer to the freeway.
Nor is the fact that the place is a jumble of additions, until there's far more addition than anything else. By the looks of the fireplace masonry in the biggest room, the last addition went on in the mid 1960s.
What's remarkable is the amount of clutter that's accumulated. Miniature pine stump "hand carved toothpick holders," one dollar, no takers. Ditto the gaudy, beaded hair scrunchies, now going gray with dust. Photos of lumber camps and forest fires long gone. A lithograph of Jesus, 30 stories tall, knocking on the side of the United Nations Building. Jezilla!
And then there's the dead stuff. Plasticized fishes swimming forever tacked to driftwood branches. There's a whole wall of display cases in the big room, probably for the fruits of the taxidermist's art, but only a beaver and a weasel (why would anybody stuff a weasel?) made it in there before Ceramic Santa and the crooked, forgotten plastic Christmas Bush from some long-past year took up residence in there. So there they sit, forgotten animals, forgotten Christmas, in front of a painted backdrop of trees, a river, and soaring eagles which is actually pretty nice, in a billboard-painter sort of way.
What really got to me was the two mounted deer heads. Whitetail bucks with fine antlers, they favored me with their glass-eyed, dust-filmed stare as I ate my hot meatloaf sandwich.
I couldn't appreciate the drama and pathos of their lives and deaths because it looked as if the taxidermist had stretched their skins over forms he'd hacked out of a hemlock stump with a dull hatchet-- as might, indeed, be the case. The poor shaping of these taxidermy forms, and the drying and shrinking of the skins over the years, had given each buck a smile that was distinctly creepy.
But if the collection of dead stuff creeps you out too much, you can go to the Taco Bell a couple of miles closer to the freeway.
