Trip of the Tongue (24 page)

In lieu of the running of the bulls, the festival opened with a kickoff celebration behind the Stockmen's Hotel and Casino. I arrived early, expecting a crowd, but the street was still mostly deserted. A few people had set up lawn chairs on the sidewalk, and just outside the door to the casino I watched as an older man in a red beret struggled to set up an amplifier. Otherwise there was little sign of activity. I decided I was in no real danger of losing my place on the sidewalk, and so I took a walk around to see if anything else was going on.

To be perfectly honest, Elko's immediate landscape is easier to appreciate in the winter. When the world around you is covered with a thick layer of snow, it may as well be blanketed in potential. Who can say what Arcadian splendors might lurk beneath that wintry veil? But come summer there's no hiding the fact that it's just a heap of sagebrush and dust and heat and haze. I have to imagine that springtime is a real letdown in this part of the world. But, curiously, it is the very lack of scenery that makes the view so striking. Out here, the sky is indescribably vast, more so even than out on the prairie or the ocean. The mountains, though not so very far in the distance, seem trivial, like the scale drawing of a human in a museum picture of an apatosaurus.

With the notable exception of Stockmen's (which has been tarted up a bit for tourists), most of the buildings in downtown Elko are physically unremarkable, short, squat, and built in a no-nonsense style that could date to the 1890s or to the 1990s. The Basque influence, however, is marked. In the space of two blocks, you can find the Biltoki Basque-American Dinner House, the Nevada Dinner House (which advertises Basque and Italian cuisine), and the Star Hotel and Restaurant. Arguably Elko's most popular Basque eatery, the Star has been around since 1910 and is the oldest continuously operating Basque hotel in Nevada. That evening, the sidewalk in front of the Star was swarming with dancers dressed in red and white, the first signs I had found so far of the festivities to come. The dancers were, I was soon to discover, the festival's opening act.

I returned to Stockmen's to find that a sizable crowd had gathered in my absence, tripods and lawn chairs vying for space with tight clusters of family members, many of whom sported traditional berets and kerchiefs. As I found a space near the back of the crowd, I noticed that the man in the red beret was still fighting with the AV equipment. To his right sat a small band consisting of a tambourine, a clarinet, and a diatonic button accordion called a
trikitixa
. The ensemble entertained the audience with the bright, vigorous melodies of the Basque countryside while we waited for the main performance to begin.

After a few false starts, and several minutes behind schedule, organizers finally got the microphone working and declared the festival officially open. Then, at last, the Elko Ariñak Basque Dancers took the stage. With more than seventy dancers, the Ariñak troupe has been participating in the festival for over forty years, and it doesn't take an aficionado to understand their enduring appeal: many of the dancers are adorable little children. The dancers begin instruction at age four, and for performances they wear traditional Basque clothing. Boys wear white shirts and red berets, kerchiefs, and belts; girls wear red skirts and white shirts under black vests and cover their hair with white scarves.

The older children and adolescents were undeniably skilled and enthusiastically received as they performed a number of short folk dances, but it was clear from the response of the crowd that the youngest dancers were the stars of the show. It also became clear that almost everyone in that crowd knew each other—and each other's children, grandchildren, nephews, and nieces. Each child was cheered by name. It felt less like a festival than a family reunion.

Later, a pickup truck pulled up in front of the casino for the evening's weightlifting and woodcutting exhibitions. One of the woodcutters was a young woman who, despite being about half the size of her companion cutter, chopped her way through a demonstration trunk in no time flat. Her name, I learned, was Stephanie Braña, and she had learned the sport at age thirteen from her father, Juan. She was also a total badass.

A student at the University of Nevada–Reno, Stephanie frequently traveled with her father to Basque festivals throughout the United States to participate in woodcutting competitions, and she had been doing so long enough that in Elko she was something of a minor celebrity. Every time she stepped up onto the trunk, the crowd surged and shouted, “Come on, Stephanie!” Today she is one of the top competitive woodcutters on the West Coast.

After the exhibition I watched a pack of girls and boys in Basque garb swarm frantically over the pavement to collect slivers of wood that had flown off the tree trunks. They then presented them to Stephanie for autographs, which she doled out with the efficient amiability of a professional athlete.

Soon thereafter the crowd dispersed in a slow ebb. Families managed to get halfway to their cars before stopping to chat with acquaintances; then they would get only half the remaining distance again before stopping to see someone else; then they would be stopped once more. It was like an impromptu demonstration of Zeno's paradox. I wondered for a chilling moment if, like a creepy old guy on a playground, I was the only person there who wasn't related to someone else. It was all the excuse I needed. I picked my way through the dwindling crowd and ducked into the casino.

My love of gambling began as a childhood obsession with Hearts, which my family would play with cutthroat abandon every Christmas and Thanksgiving. In college at the height of the Texas Hold-'em craze, I developed a taste for poker as well. I soon discovered the thrill of taking other people's money—and a remarkable ability to forget when other people took mine. By the time I moved to New York (a mere 120 miles from Atlantic City, as I was quick to remind my friends whenever we were in search of a weekend activity) I had fallen head over wallet for blackjack.

Blackjack is an appealingly simple game. It's not quite as mindless as slots or roulette, but once you learn the ins and outs of basic strategy, you don't really have to think a whole lot. You don't have to lose a lot, either. Play your cards right, and the house edge in most casinos is around 0.67 percent. Play long enough and bet little enough, and even if you do lose it's probably a reasonable price to pay for the privilege of hanging out, playing cards, and drinking on somebody else's dime.

But the best part about blackjack is that you're playing
with
other gamblers, not against them. And they're probably drinking, too. It's you against the dealer, and it's a surefire recipe for short-term camaraderie. This is basically the only time in my life when I'm not crippled by social anxiety. I knew that if I could find a good table in Elko, I would get a much better sense of the festival attendees than I could standing awkwardly on the edge of a crowd.

Stockmen's doesn't have the polish of a Vegas casino, but it does have something that more than makes up for it: two-dollar tables. I went inside, found a beer and an empty table, and settled in for a long night.

The table didn't stay empty for long. To my right I was joined by a lively group of locals on summer break from college. To my left sat a slightly reserved man from Boise and a woman who seemed far too young to be on such good terms with the casino staff. For the first few shoes I kept my head down and shamelessly eavesdropped. Much of the conversation revolved around one of the college kids. His name was Jake, and his friends were delighted to discover that he had met his most recent girlfriend at a strip club.

Soon enough the group registered my presence.

“Where are you from?” they asked.

I hesitated. Would I rather present myself as a girl from the Midwest or a transplant to the East Coast? I remembered that the group had called Jake a city boy because his family had moved to Carson City. About 50,000 people live in Carson City. The difference between St. Louis and New York City, I figured, was probably going to be negligible.

“I live in New York,” I said.

They roared with laughter.

One of the college kids, a lanky blond who was startlingly devil-may-care with his betting strategy, leaned forward. “If you live in New York,” he asked, “then why the hell'd you come here?”

“To see the Basque festival.”

They laughed even harder.

All of a sudden the girl on my left looked up from her chips. “What is Basque, anyway? Is it, like, a religion?”

For the next several hours, in between increasingly questionable diversions from basic strategy, raucous shouts for more liquor, and impassioned arguments about the relative merits of Boise State and the University of Nevada–Reno, my new friends regaled me with story after story about Basques in Elko. I learned that there was a big difference between French Basque and Spanish Basque, and that in the past the two groups had gotten on about as well as the Sharks and Jets. When a Basque weightlifter stopped by to greet the table, I was given a rundown of his entire family tree, which included a cousin who owned one of the town's Basque dinner houses.

Everyone I met was proud of his Basque heritage in a disarmingly unpresuming way. The conversation was thick with self-deprecation. One player told me with a sly grin that his father had a sign on his wall that read, “You can tell a Vasco, but you can't tell him much.” I later discovered he was the grandson of Beltran Paris, one of the first Basque sheepherders to come to Nevada.

I soon discovered that every conversation about Basque life eventually circles round to sheep. Because for years the fates of Basque immigrants—and the vitality of their language—depended largely on the ups and downs of the sheepherding industry.

Contrary to common belief, the Basques didn't go into sheepherding because they possessed some sort of venerable Old World sheep juju. Rather, the Basques first learned to herd large groups of sheep on the South American pampas. They then brought these skills north to California, at the time the center of the U.S. shepherding industry. With the completion of the Transcontinental Railway in 1869, however, the grazing lands of Idaho and Nevada became more accessible to businesses, to established immigrants from California, and to newly arrived European immigrants from the East Coast. Soon, cities such as Boise, Reno, and Winnemucca—not to mention Elko—were home to growing seasonal populations of sheepherders, many of whom were of Basque descent.

Sheepherding was a demanding but potentially lucrative occupation, and the majority of immigrants the industry attracted were young men looking to work only until they were able to earn enough money to make the round trip back to Basque Country worthwhile. Suffice it to say that this did not create an ideal assimilatory atmosphere, and the situation was exacerbated by the extreme isolation characteristic of open-range sheepherding. If herders weren't out on the range, they typically stayed at Basque-run boardinghouses, where they were able to eat Basque food, enjoy Basque entertainments, and speak the Basque language. It was remarkably easy for a Basque to come to the United States, work for several years, and head back to France or Spain without having learned more than a few words of English.

Relations between Basque immigrants and their adopted communities were further undermined by escalating tensions between sheepherding and cattle-ranching interests, and these tensions were amplified by linguistic and cultural differences.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northeast Nevada's sheepherding industry exploded, and by 1901 there were at least 659,000 sheep grazing in the Elko area. Although some Basques were employed by owners of private grazing land or were themselves landowners, many grazed their sheep on public lands or on private lands that were poorly secured. These itinerant herders enraged local cattle ranchers, many of whom felt it necessary to fight back against these “tramps” and “gypsies.” Sometimes ranchers turned to politics to protect their land from encroaching herders. They were often successful: the Nevada legislature passed a number of measures that targeted and restricted the activities of itinerant sheepherders. Other times, however, ranchers would resort to less gentlemanly means, and there are numerous accounts of violence between Basque herders and cattle ranchers.

This combination of economic conflict and cultural differentiation eventually—and perhaps inevitably—resulted in ill will being directed at Basque herders not because they were herders but because they were Basque. In
Amerikanuak
, his excellent history of the Basques in America, William A. Douglass cites a number of examples of anti-Basque sentiment that managed to find their way into print. The
Caldwell Tribune
in Idaho, for instance, ran a piece on July 17, 1909, that included the statement “[The Basques] have some undesirable characteristics that the Chinese are free from. They're filthy, treacherous, and meddlesome.”

Then there are the comments made by longtime Nevada senator Key Pittman. Testifying in Congress in 1913 against a wool tariff he felt would reward “alien” herders, he remarked, “As a general thing [the Basques] never associate with the other people of the state; they live among themselves; they can only speak a few words of the English language; they live in the lowest possible way for a human being to live; and they are nothing but sheepherders.” When Nevada's many Basque supporters publicly took issue with his statements, Pittman responded not with a qualification or an apology but with an escalation, calling Basques “men of the lowest type and the most inferior intelligence.” I'd like to think that today such rhetoric would result in immediate calls for resignation. At the time, though, Pittman's electability was ultimately unaffected by his remarks: he remained in office until his death in 1940.

The ranching-herding conflict was resolved in 1934, when the Taylor Grazing Act essentially outlawed itinerant sheepherding. Although it resulted in the departure of a number of Basque immigrants, the Taylor Act ultimately may have been a boon for those Basques who remained. Once Basque identity was uncoupled from itinerant herding, many of the negative stereotypes associated—however unfairly—with Basques and Basque culture began to fade away.