The King by the River
In the landscape of my childhood, fast food had presence, but not proximity. To get it, we had to go elsewhere, and “elsewhere” meant Burger King in a neighboring town, near the edge of a river. It was one of those old blue-top Burger Kings with the classic sign and logo.
My dad rarely ate fast food because he was health-conscious, but my mom and my siblings definitely did. Depending on the day, we’d go through the drive-thru, eat inside, or bring the food home, though I suspect a lot of those meals were mostly gone by the time we pulled into the driveway.
That Burger King sat on ground that naturally sloped down toward the riverbank. When they built it, they leveled the building but not the parking lot. The drive-thru lane, which wrapped around three sides of the building, was elevated. Cars had to go up a ramp, navigate two ninety-degree corners, and then go down another ramp to exit. Even as a kid, it felt like an unnecessarily dramatic way to buy a burger. It was a civil engineering project disguised as a fast-food restaurant.
A guardrail protected the elevated lane except for the off-ramp. That section had once been protected too, but the rail had rusted away. What remained was the kind of thing that seemed benign until the day it very much wasn’t.
In 1982, my mom drove me and my siblings there for an after-school treat. I usually ordered the fish sandwich, which at that time came on a long sub-style bun. My older brother used to get a Whopper Jr. with extra pickles, but no patty.
My mom placed the order, reached the window, paid, and collected the food. Then she saw what she later called “the perfect spot” to park while we ate—where the white car is positioned in the image below.
Maybe she was distracted by us kids, or by the complexity of sorting and distributing the food, or by the angle of the afternoon sun. Or maybe she was just nuts. Whatever the reason, she failed to realize we were not on level ground. She steered toward the spot and drove right off the side of the ramp.
There was a brief sensation of weightlessness, then a loud bang, and suddenly the car was hanging there with its front tires suspended in midair. It was the classic car-on-the-edge-of-a-cliff scenario, just one tiny bird landing on the hood away from catastrophe.
There was no easy escape for the cars trapped behind us. The manager came out and directed them, one by one, through the turns in reverse. Eventually they parked and went inside to order again.
From my seat, I barely noticed the idling engines and angry complaints. I couldn’t comprehend the gravity of the situation. I was just a preschooler. I had my sandwich. My brother had his bun full of pickles. The danger, the embarrassment, the whole spectacle of it—none of it registered. As far as I was concerned, it was just a normal afternoon.
After clearing the lane, the manager called for a tow truck. When it arrived, it was used like a crane, lifting our car off the edge and placing it back onto the ramp.
Amazingly, once all four tires were back on the ground, our car functioned as if nothing had happened. My mom was able to drive us home. And Burger King covered the towing cost.
I can’t be sure if my mom was the only person to ever drive off that ramp. But I suspect she was, because a month later they installed a yellow post at its corner to serve as a visual warning. It’s still there to this day. The guardrail never came back.
That incident wasn’t the only memorable thing about that Burger King. For decades, the inside had that classic ’70s fast-food aesthetic: wood grain fixtures and built-in planters with live plants. It even had framed artwork hanging on the walls, projecting a measure of cultivated taste.
One piece of artwork fascinated me more than anything else in the restaurant: an overhead shot of a plate flanked by a fork and knife on a table. On the plate were eggs, still in their shells. But these were not the eggs I knew. They were speckled. Up until then, I had only seen supermarket eggs with solid white shells, so the picture already seemed exotic. But what really grabbed me was the implied act of eating. How was this meal supposed to work? I pick up the utensils and do what? Were those hardboiled eggs? Soft-boiled? Raw? What did they look like inside? Spotted yolks? This wasn’t just restaurant decor. It was a riddle.
Above is an AI-generated reproduction of the picture I loved, as best as I can recall it. Every time we went to the restaurant, I deliberately sat near that image. I treated it like a painting in a gallery that deserved to be visited and studied. I have no idea if it came from Burger King corporate or if the franchisee discovered it at a thrift store. Whatever the case, I became obsessed with it.
Had smartphones existed back then, I would have simply taken a picture. Instead, one day after coming home from that Burger King, I picked up a pencil and a sheet of paper and did my best to sketch it from memory. I shared the drawing with my parents and siblings. My mom, being my mom, suggested we should bring it to Burger King and show the owner.
That night we drove back, only to find the restaurant closed. But we saw movement inside. We knocked on the door and someone actually let us in. My mom explained to a guy behind the counter what I had drawn and why. I don’t think he was the owner. More likely he was just some kid hired to do the end-of-day cleanup, suddenly finding himself in the middle of an art presentation. I stood there silently the entire time while my mom did the talking. I was a shy little kid.
Much to my annoyance, the man turned my drawing over and started scribbling on the back. He wrote down my mom’s explanation, along with our contact info. I remember being bothered not just because he was using my drawing like scrap paper, but because I knew the pressure of the pen would leave indentations and probably show through the thin sheet. He was damaging my art. We left the drawing with him and walked back out into the night.
No one ever followed up with us. Whatever became of my artwork remains a mystery to this day. Maybe it got laughed at and went straight into the trash. Maybe it sat in some drawer. Maybe it was pinned up in the kitchen or in the manager’s office. Or maybe, for one brief moment, somebody inside that Burger King understood that a kid had been so captivated by one of their weird wall pictures that he went home and tried to recreate it by hand.
The artwork wasn’t the only thing that fascinated me. The register did too. Cash was the norm in those days, and it was too inefficient and error-prone to rely on the kid behind the counter to sort out the correct change. Instead, after the order was rung up, coins automatically rolled out of the machine, down a grooved channel, and spun around an ashtray-sized bowl before settling. It was mesmerizing to watch and hear: ka-ching, followed by the bright metallic sound of coins rolling, rattling, and finally coming to rest.
The ashtray-sized bowl felt especially fitting because customers could still smoke inside back then. Every table had a Burger King ashtray on it. They were those thin, stamped-metal ones with the classic logo pressed into them, probably made that way because people would steal them. The ’80s were an in-between period: people were becoming more health-conscious, but not yet so health-conscious that they wouldn’t smoke in a restaurant full of children.
Next door to that Burger King stood an electrical substation, a vast parcel dense with wires, insulators, transformers, and metal frames. This mattered to me because, as a kid, few movies scared me more than Return of the Living Dead Part II. The movie ends with the zombies being electrocuted at a similar substation. Every time I visited that Burger King, I would look over at it and think: good. If there is ever a zombie apocalypse, this is where I’m coming. I will defeat the zombies with that electrical infrastructure and then reward myself with a fish sandwich. It was a flawless plan.
My stint with fast food turned out to be brief. By the time I was a teenager, I had become more health-conscious, like my dad. That Burger King drifted out of my life, much the way indoor smoking disappeared. Fast food itself began to lose some of its magic. The world changed, and so did I.
Still, the relationship wasn’t entirely over. After college, when I started working in the early 2000s, I occasionally returned to that Burger King after work for their veggie burger. By then, the place felt less like part of my everyday life and more like a surviving fragment of an earlier world.
Eventually I moved to another state. Then, in 2024, they refurbished that Burger King. I never got to go back for one last visit before they turned it into one of those sterile shoebox designs. Its only redeeming quality is the return of the classic signage and logo. As for the drive-thru, the yellow post is still there. And the missing guardrail is still missing. Somehow, that feels right.
Maybe that is all nostalgia really is: not a longing for Burger King, which is still around, or even for the fish sandwich, which now comes on a different bun, but for the whole odd little world that came with it—the wood grain, the ashtrays, the change chute, the enigmatic egg picture, the electrical substation next door, and, of course, that suspenseful cliff-edge off-ramp. For a place built around forgettable meals served fast, that restaurant by the river lodged itself in my memory with remarkable permanence. There it remains: a little blue-roofed kingdom filled with the aroma of fish sandwiches and a hint of cigarette smoke, and ruled by childhood logic.