Truth Unplugged

I’m in Bakersfield researching the setting for several scenes in The Sheepwalker. I have some rewriting to do.

In my minds’ eye, the twin sisters who have never met are reunited at the Noriega Hotel. I’ve imagined the scene where they encounter each other in a private room off the hotel lobby. In fact, the Noriega Hotel was never a hotel, it was a boarding house for men, mostly sheepherders, mostly Basques, until the 1930s when it became more profitable to run as a restaurant and bar. This May, the owners will travel to New York to collect a prize from the James Beard Foundation for their culinary art.

Enter the Noriega from Sumner Street down by the railroad tracks. The Union Pacific brought the sheepherders to town in the early 1900s. Come in through the bar (no lobby) around 6:30 pm. Most patrons will be locals. At 7 pm a waitress will seat you at a long table for a family style dinner.

Unlabeled bottles of red wine grace the table and a succession of serving dishes pass across – listen up or you won’t know that you are supposed to add the beans and sauce to the vegetable soup after you’ve ladled it into your bowl. In the spirit of “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” I offer this list of what came after the soup:

Pickled calves tongue (I’m sorry, it was delicious)
Beets

Cottage cheese
Blue cheese
Lettuce
Beef stew
Bread
Corn
Spaghetti and red sauce
French fries
Ribs and sauce
Ice cream

I enjoyed conversation with my tablemates – a Sacramento transplant who manufactures and serves ice cream at Rosemary’s on F Street and a lady bartender who left teaching to tend bar for 25 years because if you manage to stay off drugs, alcohol and cigarettes you can pay off your house serving drunks who act like first graders, something teaching actual first graders who act like drunks won’t allow. Then I took my glass of wine down to the end of the table to talk to the sheepherders.

Okay, kill the scene where the oil company is the bad guy. The oil company and the sheep men are symbiotic – sheep keep the grass cut, which makes it easier to get to the oil. The bad blood was between the shepherds and the cowboys. Well we knew that, didn’t we?

The problem with writing a novel is that you have to amp the action. For those of us who find life’s daily routine compelling enough, this is hard. And people like my new Peruvian friend are no help. The most talkative of the bunch wasn’t one of the French Basque brothers or the Basque from Spain who spoke no English, it was the retired shepherd from Peru. He came to the U.S. because he wanted to be a veterinarian. On an exchange program, he discovered he had ambition that far exceeded what he would ever be able to do in Peru. In America, the Basques had already figured out which sheep to cultivate for meat and which strains would produce the best wool. There was so much to learn.

“It’s a lonely life,” I probed.

“Oh no! “ he said. “There is so much to think about. You have time to read books. Figuring out how you will feed and bathe yourself, how you will get exercise and stay healthy keeps you very busy. On my two week vacation, I went to night school to learn English.”

Would it surprise you if I told you he has four grown children who will never herd sheep? They are all professionals.

As I was leaving, the French Basque told me about the time the water truck came up to water the sheep he was tending.

“I stripped naked and threw myself under the stream of water to bathe before the sheep had a chance to drink,” he chuckled.

I think I can probably do something with that.