Elephant seals

SAN SIMEON, Calif. - I had dinner tonight at the Sunset Grill.

Not the one from the Don Henley song. The one attached to the San Simeon Motel 6. The food is overpriced and the service is so indifferent as to cause me to omit the tip. I ate there because I was too lazy to get on the bike and go find decent food at a reasonable price. Serves me right.

I spent most of my time there poring over The Cambrian, the local paper published in Cambria and serving the north coast of San Luis Obispo County.

It reads like any other local weekly paper. Except they have an Elephant Seal News column.

Elephant seals are a big deal here. They haul out on the beaches and tourists flock to stare at them. Maria and I spent part of an afternoon photographing them back in July of 2002.

Columnist Joan Crowder is a volunteer docent for Central Coast Friends of the Elephant Seal and she devotes about 12 column inches this week to a gaffe committed by some hack writing for an airline magazine. The writer opined that a tourist traveling down California Highway 1 might want to “finish the day by communing with walruses at the Hearst Castle.”

Well, as any halfway bright person knows, there are no walruses here. Those big animals on the beach are elephant seals. And there is no way in hell any of them are going to haul their 3 ton bodies five miles inland and up the 1,600 foot high hill where newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst built his absurdly lavish mansion that was the inspiration for Citizen Kane’s Xanadu.

I hope the airline magazine didn’t pay much for that piece of fluff.