Following are some excerpts from Breakfast at the Exit Cafe:

Merilyn, from Seattle:

Fifty years ago, when John Steinbeck approached Seattle after decades living away from the Pacific, what he called his ‘home ocean,’ wrote that he “remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage—a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off to  make level warrens for the rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land.”

The highway is twelve lanes wide now, and we can hardly see the earth for houses. (read more…)

Wayne, from the Grand Canyon:

The canyon follows a fault line where two vast chunks of North America came together (Niagara Falls is on another). The silt-laden Colorado River cut down through the fault like sandpaper through balsawood. Each layer on the canyon walls represents the bottom of an ancient ocean; when there was no ocean, and therefore no accumulation of sediment, there is no rock. This absence of rock is called a nonconformity. We are living in a nonconformity now, since the top of the canyon is a limestone slab that is already 230 million years old and has nothing on it but a tsunami of tourists with their requisite hotels and restaurants. (read more…)

Merilyn, from Las Cruces, New Mexico

The Double Eagle Restaurant is in an old colonial house, each of its rooms now a private dining area for a family or group of friends. Michael finds us a table in the courtyard by the fountain; it’s not cleared yet so he suggests we wait in the bar, a pillared and mirrored affair that the bartender tells us once graced the luxurious Drake Hotel in Chicago, where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe carved their initials into one of the hotel’s ornate well-polished bars, unfortunately not this one. (read more…)

Wayne, from Athens, Georgia:

In 1820, when 6 out of every 10 people living in Georgia were slaves, an Athens gentleman named Colonel William Henry Jackson became particularly fond of a venerable white oak that had been growing on his property for as long as he could remember. It was a beautiful tree, perfectly formed, solid and stately as a Georgian day. Colonel Jackson worried about what would happen to his tree if anything should happen to him.  (read more…)