CHAPTER II - THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL
THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC
THE Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than
General Sherman to a bent fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less
important than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a
soldier for topography. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the
mouth of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and
Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb. Thus the
ancient capital of California faces across the bay, while the
Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and forest, bombards her
left flank and rear with never-dying surf. In front of the town,
the long line of sea-beach trends north and north-west, and then
westward to enclose the bay. The waves which lap so quietly about
the jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance; you
can see the breakers leaping high and white by day; at night, the
outline of the shore is traced in transparent silver by the
moonlight and the flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet
weather, the distant, thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the
coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle.
These long beaches are enticing to the idle man. It would be hard
to find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to
the mind. Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea.
Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the retiring waves,
trilling together in a chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea-
tangles, new to the European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes
a whole whale's carcase, white with carrion-gulls and poisoning the
wind, lie scattered here and there along the sands. The waves come
in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst
with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and waning, up and down
the long key-board of the beach. The foam of these great ruins
mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly
fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker. The
interest is perpetually fresh. On no other coast that I know shall
you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's
greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of
thunder in the sound. The very air is more than usually salt by
this Homeric deep.
Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach. Here and
there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and
hunters. A rough, undergrowth partially conceals the sand. The
crouching, hardy live-oaks flourish singly or in thickets - the
kind of wood for murderers to crawl among - and here and there the
skirts of the forest extend downward from the hills with a floor of
turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with Spaniard's Beard.
Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near to Monterey
from the junction at Salinas City - though that and so many other
things are now for ever altered - and it was from here that you had
the first view of the old township lying in the sands, its white
windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the first
fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea.
The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of
the ocean. A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up
into the inland canons; the roar of water dwells in the clean,
empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where
you will, you have but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the
Pacific. You pass out of the town to the south-west, and mount the
hill among pine-woods. Glade, thicket, and grove surround you.
You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither. You see a
deer; a multitude of quail arises. But the sound of the sea still
follows you as you advance, like that of wind among the trees, only
harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length you gain the
summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened vigour that
same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for now you
are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only
mounts to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but
from your right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and
from down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river. The whole
woodland is begirt with thundering surges. The silence that
immediately surrounds you where you stand is not so much broken as
it is haunted by this distant, circling rumour. It sets your
senses upon edge; you strain your attention; you are clearly and
unusually conscious of small sounds near at hand; you walk
listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the Pacific is a
sort of disquieting company to you in your walk.
When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turn
homeward. All woods lure a rambler onward; but in those of
Monterey it was the surf that particularly invited me to prolong my
walks. I would push straight for the shore where I thought it to
be nearest. Indeed, there was scarce a direction that would not,
sooner or later, have brought me forth on the Pacific. The
emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and discovery in
these excursions. I never in all my visits met but one man. He
was a Mexican, very dark of hue, but smiling and fat, and he
carried an axe, though his true business at that moment was to seek
for straying cattle. I asked him what o'clock it was, but he
seemed neither to know nor care; and when he in his turn asked me
for news of his cattle, I showed myself equally indifferent. We
stood and smiled upon each other for a few seconds, and then turned
without a word and took our several ways across the forest.
One day - I shall never forget it - I had taken a trail that was
new to me. After a while the woods began to open, the sea to sound
nearer hand. I came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a stile. A
step or two farther, and, without leaving the woods, I found myself
among trim houses. I walked through street after street, parallel
and at right angles, paved with sward and dotted with trees, but
still undeniable streets, and each with its name posted at the
corner, as in a real town. Facing down the main thoroughfare -
"Central Avenue," as it was ticketed - I saw an open-air temple,
with benches and sounding-board, as though for an orchestra. The
houses were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound but
of the waves, no moving thing. I have never been in any place that
seemed so dreamlike. Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and
its antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination; but this
town had plainly not been built above a year or two, and perhaps
had been deserted overnight. Indeed, it was not so much like a
deserted town as like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with
no one on the boards. The barking of a dog led me at last to the
only house still occupied, where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass
the winter alone in this empty theatre. The place was "The Pacific
Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort." Thither, in the warm
season, crowds come to enjoy a life of teetotalism, religion, and
flirtation, which I am willing to think blameless and agreeable.
The neighbourhood at least is well selected. The Pacific booms in
front. Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse in a
wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the
piano, making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise
in amateur oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits
and interests to surprise his brave, old-country rivals. To the
east, and still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down, a
hamlet, a haven among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea-
gulls. Such scenes are very similar in different climates; they
appear homely to the eyes of all; to me this was like a dozen spots
in Scotland. And yet the boats that ride in the haven are of
strange outlandish design; and, if you walk into the hamlet, you
will behold costumes and faces and hear a tongue that are
unfamiliar to the memory. The joss-stick burns, the opium pipe is
smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured paper -
prayers, you would say, that had somehow missed their destination -
and a man guiding his upright pencil from right to left across the
sheet, writes home the news of Monterey to the Celestial Empire.
The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this
seaboard region. On the streets of Monterey, when the air does not
smell salt from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the
resinous tree-tops of the other. For days together a hot, dry air
will overhang the town, close as from an oven, yet healthful and
aromatic in the nostrils. The cause is not far to seek, for the
woods are afire, and the hot wind is blowing from the hills. These
fires are one of the great dangers of California. I have seen from
Monterey as many as three at the same time, by day a cloud of
smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance. A
little thing will start them, and, if the wind be favourable, they
gallop over miles of country faster than a horse. The inhabitants
must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the pleasant
groves that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally at
stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry
up perennial fountains. California has been a land of promise in
its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to
perish, it may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.
To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange
piece of experience. The fire passes through the underbrush at a
run. Every here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from
root to summit, scattering tufts of flame, and is quenched, it
seems, as quickly. But this last is only in semblance. For after
this first squib-like conflagration of the dry moss and twigs,
there remains behind a deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very
entrails of the tree. The resin of the pitch-pine is principally
condensed at the base of the bole and in the spreading roots.
Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing flames, which are only as
the match to the explosion, have already scampered down the wind
into the distance, the true harm is but beginning for this giant of
the woods. You may approach the tree from one side, and see it
scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently survivor of the
peril. Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of the
column, is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer;
while underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are
being eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through the
fissures to the surface. A little while, and, without a nod of
warning, the huge pine-tree snaps off short across the ground and
falls prostrate with a crash. Meanwhile the fire continues its
silent business; the roots are reduced to a fine ash; and long
afterwards, if you pass by, you will find the earth pierced with
radiating galleries, and preserving the design of all these
subterranean spurs, as though it were the mould for a new tree
instead of the print of an old one. These pitch-pines of Monterey
are, with the single exception of the Monterey cypress, the most
fantastic of forest trees. No words can give an idea of the
contortion of their growth; they might figure without change in a
circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and at the rate at
which trees grow, and at which forest fires spring up and gallop
through the hills of California, we may look forward to a time when
there will not be one of them left standing in that land of their
nativity. At least they have not so much to fear from the axe, but
perish by what may be called a natural although a violent death;
while it is man in his short-sighted greed that robs the country of
the nobler redwood. Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills
of seaboard California may be as bald as Tamalpais.
I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so
near to lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might have
retained a thrill from the experience. I wished to be certain
whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal ornament of
Californian forests, which blazed up so rapidly when the flame
first touched the tree. I suppose I must have been under the
influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for my
experiment what should I do but walk up to a great pine-tree in a
portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching, strike
a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels. The
tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a
roaring pillar of fire. Close by I could hear the shouts of those
who were at work combating the original conflagration. I could see
the waggon that had brought them tied to a live oak in a piece of
open; I could even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through
the underwood into the sunlight. Had any one observed the result
of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff;
after a few minutes of passionate expostulation I should have been
run up to convenient bough.
To die for faction is a common evil;
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.
I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. At night I
went out of town, and there was my own particular fire, quite
distinct from the other, and burning as I thought with even greater
vigour.
But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious
power upon the climate. At sunset, for months together, vast, wet,
melancholy fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean. From the
hill-top above Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is
always sad. The upper air is still bright with sunlight; a glow
still rests upon the Gabelano Peak; but the fogs are in possession
of the lower levels; they crawl in scarves among the sandhills;
they float, a little higher, in clouds of a gigantic size and often
of a wild configuration; to the south, where they have struck the
seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they double back
and spire up skyward like smoke. Where their shadow touches,
colour dies out of the world. The air grows chill and deadly as
they advance. The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh,
and all the windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and
filling their cisterns with the brackish water of the sands. It
takes but a little while till the invasion is complete. The sea,
in its lighter order, has submerged the earth. Monterey is
curtained in for the night in thick, wet, salt, and frigid clouds,
so to remain till day returns; and before the sun's rays they
slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to the bosom of the
sea. And yet often when the fog is thickest and most chill, a few
steps out of the town and up the slope, the night will be dry and
warm and full of inland perfume.
