I’ve been waiting a long time to get my hands on this week’s book, Sweet Promised Land by Robert Laxalt, in which Laxalt writes a memoir of his Basque father.
The Basques, as we knew them in my childhood, were a people that came to America from their old homeland on the border between Spain and France. Their surnames were a mouthful of syllables and they were all hopelessly, enviably handsome. Once in America, they often became sheepherders in the most deserted parts of Idaho, Oregon and Nevada. The front yard of my childhood home evidently laid on the route between their mountain feeding grounds and . . . and wherever they were going next. There we’d be, having a boring day when, all of a sudden, a few hundred sheep cut across our corner lawn, their little sheep ears bouncing as they trotted along.
And then they, their sheepdogs and their herders were gone. Nothing left behind but the, um, evidence.
Laxalt’s father spent practically his whole married life away from home. The family would try to get him to come home, but he preferred the sheep camp. It was an orderly home to him, his gear organized just so, his cookstove just outside his tent where he could reach out and start the morning fire without crawling out of bed.
The father always talked of returning to the homeland, yet put it off year after year. “The sheep need me.” But finally, the family went ahead and bought the plane tickets, packing Pop off to France. Robert traveled with him. Pop, unacquainted with riding in steel tubes, looked on in amazement as people actually relaxed, reading magazines, napping.
“It wasn’t until we had passed the hump of the Sierra and were over Nevada that he would venture even an angled glance through the window. But when he did, something caught his eye immediately and his brow furrowed. ‘I know that peak,’ he said, pointing to mountain whose top had a strange indentation on one side, as if something has taken a bite out of it. ‘I made my camp in that funny hollow one night. There’s a pretty little spring ow water in it, you know.’. . .
“Then, in rapid succession, he saw other ranges and deserts, each of which seemed to call up a time out of the past. There was a narrow canyon where the sheep had been trapped by an early snow so deep that it covered the entire band.”
Now, who among us has shared a cramped airline seat with a passenger this interesting?
In other news, my website designer just delivered the logo that will appear in my hard-copy books:
And if this post it a little jumbled, well so is the glorious mac ‘n cheese we ate the other night, mixed in with a few extra ingredients.
And no, those are not hot dogs. They’re little smokies, which are a few steps above the humble frank. Anyway, this is the way I like my mac ‘n cheese—wet and gummy.
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