A French-Eye View of America : Kern County Sits for a ‘Fantastic’ Portrait

At precisely 12:01 a.m., Frank Fournier snaps into action.

Fournier on one knee. Snap. Fournier standing on a chair. Snap-snap. Fournier belly-down on the barroom floor. Snap.

“Fantastic!” Fournier says to himself, squinting through the smoke. “Good, good. Very good. Ah, oui! “

On the dance floor, seven young women line themselves up, affecting boredom to screen a residual self-consciousness. Up on the stage, a beefy type in a cowboy hat flexes and preens.

“Remember,” the emcee says, “100 bucks to the winner. Everybody ready? OK, Kenny, wet ‘em down.”

The Wet T-Shirt Contest revs up. So does photojournalist Fournier.

When the contest ends, the women will share a few giggles, a few brews and head for home. Not Fournier. For 24 hours he will not sleep. He will ingest a grand total of two sandwiches, half a bowl of curdled chili, a Coke, two cups of coffee and a raw onion.

Many Miles to Go

He will cover 25 miles by foot and another 400 by streaking T-Bird. In his wake he will leave half the population of Bakersfield, all of Parkfield, one ex-national security adviser, three TV crews, half a dozen cops, a reporter running on empty and a hobo in a white suit.

For now, though, Fournier is just beginning to click.

“Let’s hear it for No. 3,” the emcee bellows. No. 3 takes a tentative step forward, does a little Sister Kate shimmy and falls back into line.

Fournier gets an offbeat angle from behind a mug of beer. “ Formidable, “ he mutters. “Fantastic!”

To Frank Fournier, all of America --including Bakersfield--is “fantastic.” It is his favorite word in English.

In French, America--Bakersfield still included--is “ vibrant , eclatant , puissant “ (stirring, dazzling, powerful). Maybe a little crass and commercial, too, but perhaps that is to be expected in a country “so young, so immature.”

Fournier, 37, a prize-winning photographer from Saint-Siver, outside Bordeaux, works for Contact Press Images. His beat, quite literally, is the world, but for now he has been selected as one of 200 elite international photographers to flare out across the 50 states and the District of Columbia one day last week to record “A Day in the Life of America,” destined for the best coffee tables. His assignment: Bakersfield and Parkfield, the latter a hamlet insouciantly perched squarely atop the San Andreas Fault.

Fournier, who’s never been here before, is almost maniacally enthusiastic about the assignment, the area and the people. He has been scouting the area for two days, and two hours before the beginning of D-Day, he permits himself a rare breather over Coke and chili to map out his headlong trajectory.

“I don’t know if Bakersfield is typical ,” he says. “Can anyplace in America be typical? It’s so fantastic, this country, so unstructured . You go from New York to L.A. to Chicago to Atlanta and every place you go to is so different .

“Europe is more civilized in a sense, sure, but also older, settled, structured. You get your meal at 12 and go back to work at 2, and then home at 6, see your wife, dinner and TV.

“Here, you never know what to expect. I feel the power of this country. The mountains, the plains. So big, so free. The space is unbelievable. In France, yes, it’s rich too, but everything seems to be at the end of your arm.

“In Bakersfield, you’ve got farms as far as you can see. You’ve got all these oil wells. You’ve got youth, so irrepressible. . . .”

Irrepressible is le mot juste --the precise word--for the scene in a roadhouse just south of Bakersfield.

To start his marathon, Fournier has chosen the Highland Inn as perhaps most representative of the area. It is an instinctive choice and he’s not far wrong.

Suds, fiddles, women, noise, movement--in its own way, a little good clean fun. A little redneck too, maybe, but that’s Bakersfield, or at least part of it.

Short, balding, intense and thoroughly charismatic, Fournier immediately draws more attention and admiration than even the women in the T-shirts.

He sees the contestants, the country combo, the boozers, the dancing couples as something very special, even precious. Flattered by his genuine interest, they respond in kind, a scene that is to be repeated for 24 hours.

The contest over, the young women lay siege to Fournier as he passes out release forms. “Gee, he’s cute,” one of the contestants says. He may not be--not physically--but his particular vision is a reflection of themselves, or at least of the way they would like the world to see them.

Fournier lingers at the roadhouse, utterly enthralled. “Come here and look through the lens,” he shouts to a companion, who at first sees nothing but a half-dozen synthetic cowboys and cowgirls sweating through the Texas two-step. “The energy!” Fournier says. “The enthusiasm! Fantastic!”

“You know,” says John Harte, a local photographer along for the ride, “he really makes it all come alive, all those things we take for granted.”

“ I don’t take it for granted,” says Kelly Waldron, one of the also-rans, caught up in the moment. “I was brought up here and I’ll never leave.”

Then, to Fournier, “Come back tomorrow night. We’re having mud wrestling, only it’s in chocolate pudding.”

“ Le chocolat ?” Fournier says, fascinated. “Fantastic!”

On to an all-night pool hall, where the lighting isn’t quite right although the early morning hangers-on, in the eyes of Fournier, are studies in intensity and purpose.

“Hi, Sonny,” a waitress says to a man as thin as his pool cue. “Where ya been?”

“Haven’t seen him in two years,” she explains, sotto voce. “He’s a hustler, comes in and out. They can’t stay in one place too long.”

“Fantastic,” Fournier says.

At 3 a.m., just getting into gear, Fournier speeds to Union Street, hoping to sneak a few shots of cops and hookers. The police do not take kindly to his efforts, and the photographer obligingly backs off. “Just because you’re a journalist doesn’t mean you have the right to be an (expletive),” Fournier says, in perfect English patois.

On the way uptown, though, Fournier has again demonstrated his gift for making the mundane seem magical, taking pictures of diners at a taco stand, a pizza parlor. To Fournier, even eating is metaphor. “The faces,” he says, “under the neon lights, all blue and white. It’s so sad , somehow . . . “

After Union Street, the town has folded in on itself. Even the Greyhound bus station is closed. Somebody--or something--must still be working, though, and Fournier, who’s done his homework, knows where.

He pushes his Thunderbird north (“The Highway Patrol sleeps too, no?”), heading for Lost Hills to catch the sunset over a field of unmanned oil pumps.

“Marvelous,” he says. “They’re like huge grasshoppers, working without a time clock. And the smell! I love it. It’s beautiful.”

Beautiful? “Sure. It smells good. It’s the smell of industry, the smell of the daily work of the people. I wish I could get it on film. . . .”

The sun reintroduces itself to Kern County, its scheduled arrival announced by the lichen-green foothills west of Bakersfield. Driving along Route 46, a stranger begins to notice-- really notice, a la Fournier--the little quirks and cricks of Americana in what would otherwise pass as a moribund landscape.

Outside of Wasco, an otherwise undistinguished farmhouse begs for attention by draping multicolored Chinese kites from its front-yard trees. To the south, an early farmer, stocky and stolid, plows his grain field under a green-and-white Perrier sun umbrella.

Even the highway signs cry for exploration, or at least investigation: Main Drain Road; Bitter Water Valley; Gun Club Road; Devil’s Den, 10 miles; Brown Material Road. . . .

Fournier is off on his own now, photographing the James Dean Memorial at Cholame, visiting with “Judge Bill” Clark, President Reagan’s former security adviser and one-time state Supreme Court justice, now a rancher in neighboring Shandon.

To the north, a one-lane road winds 18 miles uphill to Parkfield (Pop: 34. Elev: 1,350). Outside the Parkfield schoolhouse, camera crews from NBC, CBS, PBS paw at the roadside stubble like impatient stallions. Fournier is running late, maybe on purpose. (“It’s hard to work when you have the TV on your bottom.”)

In time, everyone assembles inside the one-room schoolhouse, doubling the village population but failing to flap urbane schoolmaster Duane Hamann, who’s seen it all before.

Obligingly if a little wearily, Hamann conducts an earthquake drill for his class of 22, grades kindergarten through sixth.

“When we get a little shake, we look at the clock,” he says. “If we don’t get another in 20 minutes, we’re OK.

“If we do get another little shake, we’re going to take our books and go to the school bus. It’s solid and it’s safe, even if it tips over. If you’re not in school, just make sure you stay out from under trees.

“Now let me ask you: If there’s an earthquake, where do you want to be? Misty?”

“Far away,” Misty says.

The kids file out toward the bus for the benefit of Fournier, and of the TV crews filming Fournier filming the kids.

Satisfied, the crews peel off, leaving Fournier to his own considerable resources.

“Funny,” the photographer says, “the French are supposed to be famous for fault-finding. But where is it? It’s not exactly like the Suez Canal. . . .”

Enchanted as usual by the local scene, Fournier lingers, chatting with the kids, the teacher, with Marge Miller, the two-day-a-week librarian who operates out of a rancher’s converted bar, 10 feet by 11.

Fournier is impressed by the stoic hamlet’s history, its children, the sparkling computers in the one-room schoolhouse.

“Fantastic,” he says. “It’s all here, in this tiny place: the country’s past, present and future.”

In the afternoon heat, Fournier heads back to Bakersfield to shoot the crowds at a baseball batting cage, an enclave of hobos, a drag race; the faces of the old, the black, the prosperous, the disadvantaged, the sum total of Bakersfield.

For an hour or so, a print journalist takes his leave in search of another, perhaps less rosy, view of the town.

“It’s not your typical California city,” says Dr. Herman Brown, who moved here from the East five years ago. “It’s more . . . conservative. Since the oil companies have set up offices here, it’s a little more cosmopolitan. I guess.” Asked where he’d take visitors “to see the sights,” Brown just laughs.

“Why would anybody come here?” says Jeannine, a coffee shop waitress. “There’s no reason whatsoever.”

“You know the old saying,” says Jim Finch, a businessman staying at the Red Lion Inn: “ ‘When fascism comes to America, it will come in through Bakersfield.’ ”

“You have a new faction here that wants to project Bakersfield as a growing metropolitan area--which it is,” says John Harte, the Bakersfield Californian press photographer, “but you still have your roughnecks up in Oildale, and the cowboy image, the redneck image.

“Basically, it’s a town with no distinction, but these things take time.”

Later, Fournier, as usual, takes the totally fresh view of an outsider:

“There seems to be a good life here, a happy people. They’re very hard workers around here. Remember, it’s the next generation after ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ and there’s a tradition of work, a good one.

“I must say, I’m wondering where it is, all the money, because with all the farming, the oil, they must make a lot of it.

“But you don’t see signs of wealth here like you do in Los Angeles. Down there, they’re so oriented to money, preoccupied by success.

“Here, there’s maybe more focus to the heart. . . .”

At 9 p.m., the heart’s focus is on a stag party for Scott (Miami) Rice. Rice’s fiancee is undergoing minor surgery. The wedding has been postponed, but the party is still on.

All of which intrigues Fournier, along with the scheduled appearance of an exotic dancer at the all-male bash.

“We don’t do this in Europe,” he says. “We get together, get drunk, but we don’t make a woman to come.” Fournier’s English, sharp and idiomatic 21 hours ago, is beginning to fray, the only evident sign of fatigue.

The hired dancer proves to be energetic. Fournier steps back, tromps on a stag’s toe and apologizes: “Sorry, did I bless you?” ( Blesser , in French, is “to hurt.”)

At 11, the Frenchman girds for his last gig, the local phenomenon of cruising on Chester Avenue. It is Bakersfield’s own sound-and-light spectacle, and it is worth the detour.

Vans, cars, pickups, motorcycles weave an intricate and exuberant pattern of courtship, America’s motorized version of Europe’s weekend stroll around the piazza.

Fournier darts from the sidewalk to the middle of the street and back to the curb, waving his camera like a wand.

There is instant rapport between the photographer and the kids. His English has all but disintegrated, but they get the message all the same.

“I’m on a roll,” he shouts, as the kids pose on fenders, hang out of car windows, shower the little Frenchman with kisses, both blown and planted.

At 11:59 p.m., Fournier shoots his last picture, a dozen kids piled atop a white Trans Am buffed to a radiant sheen.

“It’s the movement,” he says, in French now. “The vitality. The spirit!

“It’s the youth of America, and America as Youth.

“Fantastic!”