Basque Country

 Not to dwell on the benefits of Triple A, but did I mention that they have a great magazine that comes out every couple of months?  It is full of articles about places in your region that you may not have thought of visiting...until that AAA magazine showed up in your mailbox.  This magazine makes everything sound like an adventure.  It's like taking my personality and putting it in print.  So probably nobody was surprised when they heard the familiar battle cry, "Who wants to go to...fill in the blank?!"  This time it was Elko, Nevada, to see the National Basque Festival.  Because, you know, shiny pictures, convincing copy, mysterious cultures, road trips...  How could we not go?

My dad answered the battle cry and Ari, Freestone, Ptolemy, Trajan and Micaela joined in.  (Scott was going to go, but stayed home with the other kids.)  Dad was actually excited about following I-80 west, the route his family traveled so many times during his childhood to reach the San Francisco Bay area.  They stopped in the hot, dry watering holes along the way:  Wendover, Wells, Elko, Winnemucca, Reno, and finally on into the high Sierras.  As much as some of us would have loved to floor it and drive all the way to San Francisco, this trip was about Elko.

It was also about more than Elko, of course.  It was about the Basque festival.  Scott and I, as well as Dad and Trajan, have been to the Basque country in Spain and France.  A little bit of history:  the Basque people are unique and separate from the Spanish, with their own language that is unrelated to any other language on earth.  They have four "counties" in Spain and three in France, situated on the Bay of Biscay, in the Pyrenees mountains.  This people has been there since time immemorial, and they still resent not having their own country.  For centuries they fought off invaders, until countries were just created around them.  They are fiercely nationalistic, so much so that they still honor their culture and language very strongly, even in the western United States, where there are many of them.  In Spain, ETA, the Basque terrorist group, still bombs buses and trains in an attempt to promote their separatist agenda.  Fortunately, no such thing happens among the Basques of the Nevada desert, but you don't want to ask them how they feel about Spain, because the reply might be, "Do you want to get strangled?"

And this is our friend who asked me if I wanted to get strangled.  Aside from that, he has a heart of absolute gold.  As luck would have it, we drove into Elko and immediately hit the Basque parade.  We hadn't planned to go to it, but there it was!  In five minutes, the kids raked in a whole bag of candy from dance groups and insurance agencies.  Meanwhile, we talked to our new, murderous friend, Bob Echeverria.  We just happened to be in his front yard, and he just happened to be the group leader for 2 dozen Basque youth down from Boise for a two-week culture camp.  He knew everyone.

Here he is hollering at literally everyone who marched by in the parade.  He took the time to go inside and get a book that he helped write, documenting the Basque diaspora, from 1848 to 1970, when Basque sheepherders flocked (no pun intended, tee hee) to the Sierra Nevadas and the high desert.

The parade raised our core body temperatures to an unbearable high, so we checked into the Marriott and cooled off in the pool. "Look, Mom!  I'm floating!"  Ptolemy is hilarious in his enthusiasm.  (The next day at breakfast, Ptolemy sang out, with a mouth full of waffles, "I love this party!"  You definitely want him on your road trip.)

Hours later, he was still as enthusiastic as ever as we arrived at the famous Star Hotel, which is actually a restaurant.  Not surprisingly, Elko is known for its Basque restaurants, this one being the most renowned.  In fact, we had heard that we would have to arrive at least a half-hour before the dining room opened for dinner, which we did.  Trajan looked at the empty dining room and quipped, "Gee, it's a good thing we got here early."  But within minutes, all the people at the bar had migrated to a very long line which swelled with newcomers pouring in from the heat.  This place is legendary.  Dad remembers dining here 40 years ago!

We were the very first table seated, and were pleased to see a big bowl of cabbage soup already on the table, along with Basque bread.  A big bowl of salad followed the soup, and then heaping plates of fries, spaghetti, green beans, Basque beans, and finally our steaks.  Dad and I shared a T-bone, which I proclaimed - accurately, I think - to be the most delicious steak I have ever eaten.

Cheesecake and lava cake topped off the feast, and we rolled out of there with no less than four full to-go boxes.  What an experience!  Just a no-frills, no nonsense, family-style feast, the type that would stick to a sheepherder's ribs.  To make it truly authentic, we would have had to drink the traditional Basque drink of red wine and Coke.  When prohibition came around in Nevada, the Basque declared it ridiculous and went right on living the way they had for centuries, with wine at mealtimes.  Maybe they had to dilute it with Coke to make the illegal stash last longer!

Star Hotel window, the Basque cross.

Ugh.  Are you serious?  The Star Hotel is right next to the red light district.  Surprise!  That night, we checked out the dance at the Basque Center, but didn't go in because we're not party animals.  The band, from Boise, was singing "Roll Out the Barrel" in Basque, accompanied by accordion.  You don't hear that every day!

Sunday breakfast...

...and tunes.

As we ate in the hotel lobby, a family who was clearly Mormon (White shirts, ties, mom with a t-shirt under her sundress) was getting ready to go.  We decided to go, too.  Why not?  It was fast Sunday, testimony meeting, and each testimony borne was heartfelt and eloquent.  The thing that struck me the most was that, here are these saints, literally surrounded by blatant evils; gambling and prostitution are legal, and in their faces right outside the church doors.  Yet not one person who spoke fretted about any of that.  No mention about "the evils of the world."  Just gratitude for what they have in the gospel.  The meeting also took on a theme of not judging a book by its cover, as several people gave examples of times they had done so.  Here where I live, it is very easy to judge a book, period, because of the homogeneity of our community.  It is also easy to become fearful of "the world" because we are somewhat insulated from other cultures here, and we don't see beyond our own experience.  We forget that "the world" is actually an incredible place, because we are afraid of the unknown.  I truly believe that "the world," meaning outside ideas at large, is not our enemy.  Our battle is internal.  I tire of hearing cautionary tales about "evil," so it was refreshing and astonishing to sit in a rough-and-tumble town like Elko and hear nothing but light and love coming from the saints there.  They have made their peace with the secular world, and they are not afraid.

After church, we...went to church.  This time, Catholic mass at the Basque community center.  It took place outside, the Basque faithful sitting at picnic tables as an Irish priest blessed the sacrament.  Meanwhile, under our picnic table, Ptolemy unwrapped a tampon from my purse and used it as a gun, making soft shooting noises.  All I can say is, ETA would have been proud of his militant leanings.

My new Basque book makes the statement, "The Basque were Catholic, and while not necessarily devout, they never became anything else after they emigrated!"  In keeping with that statement, mass was more of a lovely formality than anything else, a precursor to the main event, a gigantic, meat-centric meal!  Nonetheless, it was a heartfelt and beautiful mass, complete with two men in full Basque regalia performing a sacramental dance with handkerchiefs and swords.  See, Ptolemy and his weapon weren't out of place...much.

And of course, there was the Budweiser truck, just like at Sacrament meeting in Kaysville.

Mass was preceded by a dutch-oven bread making contest, and followed by some impromptu rehearsals for the dance contest to take place later, after the bread was auctioned off.

Ari and I were excited to see the vendors with Basque "stuff" for sale.  We got some t-shirts, and Freestone picked out a spoon.  You know, those collector spoons?  Yeah.

Micaela bought espadrilles.

Every Basque has to have a licence plate proclaiming their heritage, right?!  Or at least a bumper sticker, of which there were many in the parking lot.  We said good-bye to our Basque friends, including Bob, who was still clapping people on the back and complimenting them on their dutch oven bread as he shouted out various instructions to different dance groups.  Then we visited the California Trail Interactive Museum.

This statue of the mother and papoosed baby struck me, as I tried to imagine what it would be like to protect your family from unfamiliar invaders, as so many Native American mothers and fathers tried to do.  What I took away from the museum was a strong gratitude for the ability to protect my children.  Inside, we watched a diorama/movie about the Donner Party.  The narrator said, "They finally had to eat their pet dogs."  Ptolemy looked at me with a gasp and wide eyes.  I thought, "Wait, kid.  It gets worse."  I am thankful it wasn't my lot in life to ward off intruders to my village, or to send my sons from our homeland to a foreign country, or to travel across barren stretches of dessert, hoping against hope for survival.  The trek across this high desert claimed many, many pioneer lives, leaving only the luckiest to see the Pacific Ocean.  Now we can drive it in a day.

None of us would have made very good pioneers!  We're weak!

We had taken a dip in the pool just prior to leaving the hotel, so we could be wet in the car.  It was that hot.  So  Ptolemy and I were still in our swimsuits.  Ari is fancier, though, and changed into her hew shirt.

We sat through a dutch oven demonstration in the blazing heat, where I could feel my feet getting sunburned, and then the putz in the pioneer garb doing the demo announced that he wasn't allowed to give us a taste of the biscuits we had made!  Betrayal!  We had to go to KFC for lunch, just to get biscuits.

Waiting for a biscuit...

Still waiting...

Dad and I decided that the drive home was actually more majestic than ugly, more breathtaking than soul-sucking.  We were just glad we didn't have to do it on foot while eating dog meat.