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54 would remember the moment, December 1947, and carry it with him for all time. “I go to Amedica,” he said, “to do what oders do, to work, to be bigger, to do someding, and den I call dat my own.” 7 “Dis so pretty,” Dad said. We had traveled twenty miles west of Bilbao toward Laredo on Spain’s northern coast. After our stay in Gernika, I looked forward to exploring new scenery, architecture, and small hamlets that grew more Spanish and less Basque the farther west we drove. The buildings slowly lost red clay roofs in favor of wood or thatch, and the distance between them shrank until, eventually , one home stacked on another into tightly pressed communities. The towns didn’t lack for space, but the inhabitants seemed to prefer density over sprawl, perhaps a remnant of earlier Spanish days when conquerors came by sea, attacking citadels on the shore and forcing citizens to huddle in close quarters behind fortified walls. This mentality, born during moments of duress, did not dissipate during moments of peace, and still seemed deeply rooted among the small towns of the coastline. The road we traveled could have been in Russia or China and Dad might not have known the difference. True, he hailed from Spain, but truer to say he hailed from a northwestern corner of Basque Country. He hadn’t ventured outside his geographic nook before departing for the United States in December 1947. He seemed now like a man thirsting for water after a desert walk, taking in everything as new and wondrous. Rolling down the windows, we inhaled the sweet perfumes of milkweed and long grass, tasted salt on our tongues, and felt sea air on our faces. Winter firs lined the edges of plunging cliffs with white waves crashing hundreds of feet below. Geology had gotten its start along this coast. God had pressed His fingertips into the earth and pried it apart, leaving Spain in one palm and Central America in the other, the land cleaved by a great ocean in between. The cliff walls cataloged the passage of time in layers of colored sediment from prehistoric waters that flooded and receded, leaving remnants of life and traces of our origin. 55 “Have you ever been out here?” I asked, knowing the answer. “No. Dis de first time.” He craned his neck out his window. “Why didn’t you ever come out here?” “What for?” “To see all this, to see something new.” “I seeing it now.” I sensed no regret for not exploring these lush hillsides over a single mountain opposite his childhood home. “Imagine all the people you would’ve met,” I suggested. “Like what kinda people?” “What do you mean, ‘What kind of people?’ Any kind. All kinds.” “What for? No Bascos come here.” “To meet and talk to different people, to learn about them, what they like and don’t like, and how they live.” “Bah!” He grunted. “Maybe I come out here, and den I never leave Spain and den you never been born. Bascos, dey stay to demselves.” When I was growing up, Dad represented my first and largely only exposure to all things Basque. He became my baseline, a rule against which I compared all other Basque encounters. Mentally, I marked any variations to this baseline as an exception to the Basque archetype, but over time the variations mounted until finally Dad became the exception—a tough admission for a son to make of his father. Soon the variations formed or at least had begun to form a new Basque identity, a new baseline. I marveled at how Dad’s truth no longer represented the truth around him. As a seafaring people, the Basques had ventured farther and farther from Spanish shores in search of fish or the perfect whale. Evidence placed them on Canadian shores as early as the sixteenth century. As Spain colonized the New World, the Basques joined crews as expert navigators and seamen, making them some of the earliest Europeans to touch South American soil. They found honored places among the crews of Columbus and Magellan. As an upset to history, in fact, Magellan did not circumnavigate the globe. He died about halfway, in the Philippines during the Battle of Mactan. A Basque navigator, Juan Sebastian Elkano, took the wheel after Magellan died and led his men the rest of the way home, an achievement often overlooked in the annals of early navigational history. The...
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