My Favorite Day: Renowned writer Gerald Haslam travels back in time when he visits Kern
| Wednesday, Jul 09 2008 01:55 PM
Last Updated Friday, Mar 27 2009 01:25 PM
WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE DAY?
Where do you like to go, what do you like to do, who do you like to hang with? We’d love to know. If you’re interested in writing a My Favorite Day piece, call or
e-mail Lifestyles Editor Jennifer Self: 395-7434 or jself@bakersfield.com.
Images
An egret and his reflection glide across the still waters of one of the lakes at Hart Park. The natural beauty of the park is unchanged from how Haslam remembers it as a boy.
A trio of colorful tubers head to a starting point along the Kern River at Hart Park. Haslam makes sure to visit Hart Park when he's in town to relive happy childhood memories.
When my wife, Jan, and I travel to our home area, the mileage is sweetened by the sense that we’re traveling back in time. Of course, we don’t journey all the way to the past: breakfast is no longer biscuits and gravy, eggs, spuds, sausage and a cup of Joe at the Coffee Mill.
“I’ll have an earth bar and cup of decaf, please.” The waitress’s eyes say, “Of course you will, grandpa.” Her lips say, “Comin' up, honey.”
That’s how my day starts, the morning sun now filtered through smog dense as a drunk’s breath, and the hills north of Oildale no longer forested with wooden oil derricks, but my hometown is still my hometown, and I enjoy being there. People I meet when I take a morning walk all say hello, although I’ve never before seen most of them. Instead of visiting Trout's Cocktail Lounge, which fortunately has assumed the area’s rich honky-tonk heritage, I walk by the house of the Trout family across the street and just up the block from the one where I was raised, and I think about the three lovely daughters the Trout family raised there.
If there’s time, I like to drive to Hart Park — called Kern River Park or Kern County Park in my youth — where my folks and their friends enjoyed so many picnics. It was a wonderfully democratic setting when I was a kid, people of various colors assembling there, and I sometimes ran into kids from other school against whom I’d competed in one sport or another, got to know them. We’d dare one another to drink the sulfuric water — we called it fart juice — bubbling from the fountain near the vast swimming pool.
For lunch Jan and I like to meet high school pals at Casa Munoz, run by my old Garces friend Joe (then Joey) Munoz. Mexican food in Bakersfield is better, no matter what folks up north think. Our multi-ethnic lunch gang looks like a United Nations meeting, except that we get along ... even if we don’t exactly remember those old football games the same way. That’s okay, since I know my version’s correct.
Weather permitting, Arvin-Lamont-Weedpatch and Granite Station merit afternoon visits. My family lived in Arvin when I was born, and I worked most summers from the time I entered junior high school on at a ranch near Caliente Creek where my uncle was field foreman. Despite the gravy-dense smog now obscuring that otherwise nostalgic locale, I well remember how proud I was at 12 when I first earned a man’s paycheck for chopping cotton there.
We swing back through Oildale and drive past my parents’ house on El Tejon Avenue, then north to the old Shell Oil tank farm where my father took me to work with him when I was small. He called me his “tax-exemption,” an expression I didn’t understand but that always garnered laughs from his fellow employees.
At Granite Station, I feel as though we’ve returned to the Old West. That entire region — Poso Creek, Glenville, even Round Mountain — triggers in me fantasies of Jack Palance slapping leather. And, of course, the books of Arnold Rojas suggest something like that might have happened. Many years ago, too, a classmate guided a group of us to his uncle’s ranch near Poso Flat where we found wonderful, haunting Yokuts’ petrographs.
Evenings are highlighted by seeing more old friends and eating Basque food at the Pyrenees Cafe or Noriega Hotel. A few years ago, a Bay Area journalist asked me to define Bakersfield, so I said, “A Dust-Bowl guitar-picker and his Latina wife dipping their Pyrenees bread into a tumbler of red wine.” He didn’t have clue what I was talking about. “No, seriously...,” he said. “What about the Crystal Palace?”
“Nice place,” I replied, “my next choice. But I’d prefer the Blackboard.”
As for an alternative day, I’d simply walk all over the surprisingly unchanged Oildale and Bakersfield of my youth — Oleander Street, La Cresta, Riverview. et al. It seemed like such a vast region when I was kid, but even at seventy I can hike it easily in a day now, and eat Mexican and Basque food and, if lucky, see many old gals and pals. Either way, I'm back in my home area and I never feel like a stranger here ... unless I walk west onto what was once the great uninhabited flood plain.
Gerald Haslam, who grew up in Oildale and has written extensively about the area, lives with his wife, Jan, in Penngrove in Sonoma County.
Haslam’s most recent book-length writing project — not yet published — is a biography of Sen. S.I. Hayakawa. Haslam also writes shorter pieces “constantly” and is assembling a new collection of short stories.
