CoffeeBeer >> Double Shot Buzz >> Kern County 2
Back in June of this year, I spent a few weeks at the Bakersfield home of my sibling group. One afternoon my sister-in-law Carol wanted to take a drive up to the mountains to check out a German bakery; and of course, like a dog wanting to go to the park, I jumped at the chance to accompany her. So we braved the heat and drove up CA-58 to the town of Tehachapi.
Located 38 miles southeast of Bakersfield, between the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert, the city of Tehachapi is quite small. At an altitude of 3,970 feet it has a population of just under 13,000 people. It’s situated close to several fault lines and in 1952 was damaged heavily as a result of a 7.3 earthquake. In the native Kawaiisu language, the word tehachapi means “hard climb", but in the also-native Yokuts language it means “oak covered flat water". Whichever translation is more appropriate, neither of them lessen the fact that the word “Tehachapi" is really fun to say. In 1860 white settlers moved in, and then sixteen years later the Southern Pacific Railway line was completed as the final link between San Francisco and Los Angeles. At this point the settlement, formerly called Williamsburg, was renamed Tehachapi Summit, and the name was finally shortened to Tehachapi in 1893, with the city incorporated sixteen years later.
These days Tehachapi is a center for renewable wind energy, which was evident on our drive up into the area which featured a view of several wind farms to the east. It’s also a popular site for gliding and hiking, particularly along the Pacific Crest Trail. The city is located ten miles from the National Chavez Center, which was established in 2004 in honour of Cesar Chavez, the civil rights activist who led the migrant farm workers to establish their own union in 1962. The local women’s prison near Tehachapi has featured in several classic films including The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, and Star Trek Generations, and there have been many other films featuring the city. And a couple of episodes of the TV series of “Bosch" were taped in front of the Tehachapi Police Station on C Street.
Back in 2023, when my unofficial brother Kim and I drove up to Tehachapi to have lunch, we left with the impression that there was an abundance of dental offices and not much else. But as it turned out, we were over in Old Town, in the southwestern part of the city. On this year’s visit Carol and I were pretty much in downtown Tehachapi. Our destination, Kohnen’s Country Bakery, turned out to be mostly a restaurant that was very busy on this Sunday. As we had already had lunch, we got in the queue at the counter and bought a handful of items to take back home, including a slice of apple pie for my brother and a couple of eclairss. It was cooler in the mountains than in blisteringly hot Bakersfield, so we decided to take a walk around the town, hopefully ending up at a coffee place.
But when we walked from the bakery to the car, the gale-force wind was so ridiculously strong and powerful that it was going to make simple perambulation difficult, even for me, as I love to walk. So we sat in the safety of Carol’s car while we checked our phones for coffee places. And the best option by far sounded like the Mountain Coffee House which was only a fifth of a mile away--or a six-minute walk, if I hadn’t been so much of a straw-hatted gale wimp.
We arrived at the same time as a group of kids with their bicycles; and one of them spilled the crown of his whip cream-topped drink onto the floor in front of me, which fortunately just missed my foot. Carol and I quickly moved to the counter and ordered our coffees from a confident young barista. My Cortado, served in a paper cup, was actually really nice, especially for a coffee shop in a small town in the mountains. And Carol’s doppio espresso was very good as well. The coffee they use is very smooth and nice, and Carol bought a half pound of their beans to take back to the Bakersfield house.
We sat in the back at a window table that was decorated with gorgeous plastic flowers, where we could watch the wind whipping madly around outside. It was a good thing that the previous day’s brush fires in nearby Kernville and Lake Isabella, where 600 acres were blackened, had been completely extinguished by the Kern County Fire Department.
The coffee menu at Mountain Coffee includes cortados, Cold Brew, iced espresso drinks, chai, smoothies, and all flavours of mocha, and they also offer almond avocado toast, eggy toast, and bagels, and at times they put on movie screenings. The coffee house is locally owned, which is always a good thing.
On our drive back down to Bakersfield, we took a detour to the lookout point over the Tehachapi Loop, which is a 3,779-foot-long helix on the Mojave subdivision of the Union Pacific Railroad. This helix, which passes through Tehachapi Pass, is an amazing engineering feat, as it allows trains to climb more gradually up the incline. When Carol and I got out of the car, there was already a small group of trainwatchers who had been waiting an hour for a train to appear. Almost immediately one showed up, and it was something to watch, appearing as if a very long snake was eating its own tail. (For some reason I was reminded of the Scala programming language which uses recursive code that basically rewrites itself while running. But that's just me...)
I have to apologise for the next part of this column, because in my long history of reviewing coffee places on Double Shot Buzz, I have only once reviewed a Starbucks, and that was back when it was pretty slim pickings for places to review. But during my last week in Bakersfield, I did visit a Starbucks, not once but three times, when Carol and I were driving around doing errands in the late afternoon, and she suddenly expressed the need for an espresso. The Starbucks we visited was a drive-through, which I had never experienced before. But as it was so hot I suggested, instead of sitting in a very hot convection oven of a car, we should go inside where we could have our drinks in the air conditioning. On our first visit, I forgot to specify just a single shot for myself, which was a bit foolish as it was after 5pm in the evening, which made the prospects of a good sleep that night a little less promising. But my macchiato was fine, strong and dark as Starbucks tends to be. (Some people I know think it tastes burnt, but beggars can’t be choosers.) The second time we stopped in we both went for iced chais, which were pretty yummy and refreshing, even if a bit filling. I mean, sometimes you just can’t beat an iced chai.
Carol drives through this particular Starbucks pretty often because it’s probably the closest source of espresso to my family’s house (meaning only two miles away, which is a short hop in Bakersfield). I had been oddly curious about it since the first time I rode past it, seeing as how it looked pretty natural thing in its setting, in a modern California city with wide boulevards and shopping centres. The first time I ever heard of a drive-through Starbucks was when a gorgeous and quite huge 11th-century pub in Sheffield closed down for good and was turned into a drive-through Starbucks, so this made a bit more sense. After all, in most parts of California, particularly in a sprawling city with little public transport like Bakersfield, one must have a car and drive everywhere. So why not?
The first drive-through Starbucks opened in 1994 in, not surprisingly, Southern California, with the first one in Europe opening in Cardiff, Wales in 2008. The Starbucks executives were at first afraid that allowing customers to drive through without coming inside and getting comfortable might (excuse the pun) drive them away from what they had originally hoped would be a “third place". But as of a year ago the United States has more than 9,300 corporate-owned Starbucks with drive-throughs, with every state except for Vermont and Wyoming having at least one. As a result, the technology for the drive-through lines has been enhanced, and the company is now hoping for employees to be walking through the queues to take orders. I mean, why not just go for roller-skate-clad Starbucks carhops? I think that would bring a lot of otherwise picky customers back, especially if the drive-through Starbucks with enough land space could erect huge screens to air movies. I mean, it’s the (back to the) future, isn’t it?
Speaking of futuristic developments, following is a recent WhatsApp conversation where my unofficial brother and I visualised a scary scenario for the near future:
We just bought this new crack machine.
We don’t use the “C" word anymore. The “in" phrases are “Gilded Age", “Manifest Destiny", and “White Man’s Burden". We’re making American 1890s again. Where a man’s place was on the golf course with a $100 cigar, and women and colored folk knew their place. When you next visit, be sure to wear something chaste.
And here am I, not knowing how to kowtow. I barely know what the word means.
I learned that in the 1890s, Asians were supposed to be sixth in intelligence, behind white folk. Mexicans were supposed to be last. Stephen Miller is following their playbook, except for the Asians. They own too many tech companies and are untouchable. His plan is to get Trump to deport even naturalized Latino citizens.
Will this be acceptable?
Excellent. Those outfits will be in all the stores by then.
If they have them at Target, I can pick up a few more to ship home with my jars of Trader Joe’s almond butter I always send myself. Oh wait, the Post Office won’t exist anymore, will it?
I guess it should be safe, since there won’t be mail-in voting anymore. Or any voting, for that matter. Though all letters will cost $6 to mail without Amazon Prime.
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