Judge Graham had once been the marrying judge of the county and had many a tale of “indigents and nit-wits” who had come to him for “splicing.” After one particularly stupid pair had left his presence he turned to the witnesses and remarked: “Two hearts that beat as one, two heads that think as none.”
He stopped talking only when we got out to look at the views. He let the wind from vast spaces blow over us and quiet us, and he was always the last one to get into the car—looking back reluctantly over his shoulder— although he has known this country intimately for half a century.
“There’s nothing pretty about eastern Oregon. It just fascinates you, that’s all,” was his opinion; and certainly there is some curiously compelling quality in this land. There are places where it seems to break and flow like vast turbulent waters. In fact this land was once all ocean and it is as though the ocean has left its rhythm here, with tides of hills and mesas, breaking surf of buttes and rocks. In one place there was a beautiful wide view where we stood for many minutes, looking at the long—the singularly long—flat mesas that seemed to move out into space like the prows of ships. Over and over one thinks here of the sea; the same abstract rhythmic sense, the same soothing, yet never dull, monotony.
There was a single farm in a valley I cannot forget, lonely and lovely, with a square of poplars defining the yard and, peering over the buttes that surrounded it, red spears and thrusts and juts of dark solitary rocks. What the moon must do to such a setting comes at once into the mind, and one does not wonder that in such a land people must hold themselves to the earth by collecting its relics in stone and petrified wood. Almost every lonely house along these lonely roads has a yard bristling with weird gardens of onyx, quartz, chromium, jasper, and copper.
Down in Jordan Valley for all their years of solitude the transplanted “Bascos” seem to have little need of devices to keep themselves gay and sane. We put up for the night in a sprawling farmhouse. We found Mama Madariaga, the mother of eleven children—“seven grandchildren; ten by Christmas” (with a hearty poke in the ribs and a big laugh)—putting up some sixty bushels of peaches in a canning shed in the backyard of the old farm. We were late and we were very hungry and there were six of us, but Mama Madariaga was quite unaffected by this sudden incursion of outsiders. Before we had more than time to walk out in the cool evening light as far as the one drugstore for some medicinal whiskey, she had our supper ready for us: food with foreign flavor, old recipes out of the Pyrenees handed down these many years, a tomato soup with clabber in it; little fish, split, boned, dipped in egg and crumbs and then fried; Spanish meatballs with a hot red sauce; fried chicken; shoestring potatoes; lemon and coconut cream pie, and great mugs of dark brown coffee, served au lait as it is in Basque country.
After supper we went out and wandered about the streets of this little town, cut off from the outside world by deplorable roads for so many years. Some of the Basque faces are quite handsome, dark, passionate, merry, and yet with a curious reticence in them. It has been suggested that the American Basque is reticent because he does not like to be laughed at; he speaks a most extraordinary native tongue; must, in learning a new language, make speech mistakes, and to avoid being an object of derision he takes refuge in silence with strangers. We stopped to talk with some men in front of a filling station, men in blue denims and old faded hats—high crowned, not cowboy hats. The judge talked to them. They replied monosyllabically; there was a good deal of soft laughter, and the whole feeling became momentarily very un-American. We looked for the one dress characteristic we were told could still be found in everyday garments among the Americanized Basque who was born in the Pyrenees—the collar button kept closed no matter what the temperature. Finding it pleased us, for we knew we would have no opportunity to see any other details of native dress—the beret, the scarf, the full skirt, or the rope-soled shoes.
The Basques came into the high range country of Eastern Oregon and Idaho during the eighties and nineties of the last century. They are still for the most part sheepherders and farmers, an industrious hardworking lot who never appear on relief rolls, collect old age pensions, or send their boys to C.C.C. camps.
The Basques still speak their native tongue in Jordan Valley—although it is slowly being allowed to die among the young people. In the Commonwealth Review, Cressman and Yturri tell a charming tale of the difficulties which lead the Basques to encourage their children to learn to speak English well and quickly. A Basque who lived in cattle country went to a neighboring ranch to buy some chickens with which to start a flock of his own. He asked for some hens. When the owner was putting the chickens in the crate the observant Basque protested in some agitation: “Some bull hens! Some bull hens.”
We watched the card games in pool halls, some curiously quiet, some very noisy. The judge, who was no stranger, unbent the villagers a little. We spoke of Spain and it brought head-shakings. The Basques were passionate Loyalists. They know that times are bad at home. It has been suggested that the new critical attitude of many of these pious people toward the Church has its root in their low opinion of the role the Catholic powers played in the tragedy of Spain.
We ended at a charivari dance where we saw some really beautiful Basque girls, delicately made, with blue-black hair, sparkling eyes, and smiles which lighted their faces in a most bewitching fashion. Some of the younger ones go out now to the state university and arrive home looking very Mademoiselle and properly stereotyped. The young ones are friendly and gay and utterly without self-consciousness.
We left the dance about midnight, went home and were hardly abed before most of the dancers arrived at Madariaga’s for midnight supper. We remained in our rooms but the judge got up and reported on it to us the next morning at breakfast. Papa and Mama both prepared the meal: ham, and their favorite hot sausages called chorizos. Papa was garbed only in his long woolen underclothes, having had no time to dress. When we saw Mama at breakfast she confessed to us her chagrin and humiliation—not at our having been kept awake—but at the fact that she had not been forewarned about the festivities and so had had no time to prepare the freezer of ice cream which the Madariaga household always provides for these impromptu post-dance gatherings.
In the morning we went to call on Marie Marquiña, whom we had met in the general store the night before, and again at the dance, and who had promised to show us the church. Marie’s home adjoins the old pelota court, some one hundred and twenty feet in length, with stone walls fifty feet high. The court is slowly moldering away since there seem to be few men left with the stamina or the time to play this fast tough game brought over from the Pyrenees.
Marie took off her apron and went with us to open the church. Although it was Sunday, of late years there are only infrequent services by itinerant priests from Boise or Ontario. The girls of the community painted the interior, a complicated quite hideous and very touching piece of work, all squares, in a number of sickly colors. Marie’s attitude toward the whole matter seemed markedly impersonal and practical. She apparently felt little awe, indicating the Host in casual fashion, showing us the different robes of purple, white, green, and black for Easters, funerals, Christmas, and festivals. She said that many of the robes had disappeared. Probably some of the priests had taken them. She seemed to bear little rancor toward them for what appeared to us arrant thievery.