THE SEA FOGS
A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the
morning. By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our
western gable, where the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed
suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark
and splendid that I used to marvel how the qualities could be
combined. At an earlier hour, the heavens in that quarter were
still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain which
shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful
compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would kindle,
although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our
crazy gable. If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that
struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in
that earlier and fairier fight.
One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I
rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air.
The night had been very still. The little private gale that blew
every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter
of an hour, had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that
followed not a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops; and our
barrack, for all its breaches, was less fresh that morning than of
wont. But I had no sooner reached the window than I forgot all
else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two bounds into
my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.
The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it
was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own
mountain slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was
entirely changed. Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower
slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a
thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean. It was as
though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland
mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast. I had seen
these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone
abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms
on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky--a dull sight for
the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid. But to sit
aloft one's self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of
heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was
strangely different and even delightful to the eyes. Far away were
hilltops like little islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the
foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough
mountains. The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be
forgotten. For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about
sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself. But the
white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly
increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness over all.
Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning among the
weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a
trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble
with a sound.
As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this
sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be. Away in
the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above
the general surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone
on the horizon like the topsails of some giant ship. There were
huge waves, stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea;
and yet, as I looked again, I was not sure but they were moving
after all, with a slow and august advance. And while I was yet
doubting, a promontory of the some four or five miles away,
conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single instant
overtaken and swallowed up. It reappeared in a little, with its
pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once
more and then for good. This set me looking nearer, and I saw that
in every cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled
in higher and higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to
me. I could trace its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy
and then disappearing after another; although sometimes there was
none of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque white ocean
gave a start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a gulp. It was
to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and
climbed so high among the mountains. And now, behold, here came
the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet came so
beautifully that my first thought was of welcome.
The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the
hills it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean. An eagle,
or some other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over
the nearer pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as
if to look abroad on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with
terror, for the eyries of her comrades. Then, with a long cry, she
disappeared again towards Lake County and the clearer air. At
length it seemed to me as if the flood were beginning to subside.
The old landmarks, by whose disappearance I had measured its
advance, here a crag, there a brave pine tree, now began, in the
inverse order, to make their reappearance into daylight. I judged
all danger of the fog was over. This was not Noah's flood; it was
but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward whence it
came. So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by the
sight, I went into the house to light the fire.
I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform
to look abroad. The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last
I saw it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where
the Toll House stands and the road runs through into Lake County,
it had already topped the slope, and was pouring over and down the
other side like driving smoke. The wind had climbed along with it;
and though I was still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing
below me, and their long, strident sighing mounted to me where I
stood.
Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the
opposite side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still
warded it out of our canyon. Napa valley and its bounding hills
were now utterly blotted out. The fog, sunny white in the
sunshine, was pouring over into Lake County in a huge, ragged
cataract, tossing treetops appearing and disappearing in the spray.
The air struck with a little chill, and set me coughing. It smelt
strong of the fog, like the smell of a washing-house, but with a
shrewd tang of the sea salt.
Had it not been for two things--the sheltering spur which answered
as a dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly
engulfed whatever mounted--our own little platform in the canyon
must have been already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous
air. As it was, the interest of the scene entirely occupied our
minds. We were set just out of the wind, and but just above the
fog; we could listen to the voice of the one as to music on the
stage; we could plunge our eyes down into the other, as into some
flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge; thus we looked on
upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition of the
powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from
moment to moment like figures in a dream.
The imagination loves to trifle with what is not. Had this been
indeed the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the
emotion would have been similar in kind. I played with the idea,
as the child flees in delighted terror from the creations of his
fancy. The look of the thing helped me. And when at last I began
to flee up the mountain, it was indeed partly to escape from the
raw air that kept me coughing, but it was also part in play.
As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the
upper surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from
what I had beheld at daybreak. For, first, the sun now fell on it
from high overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a
great nor'land moor country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow.
And next the new level must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred
feet higher than the old, so that only five or six points of all
the broken country below me, still stood out. Napa valley was now
one with Sonoma on the west. On the hither side, only a thin
scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and through all the
gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the blue clear
sunny country on the east. There it was soon lost; for it fell
instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed;
and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the
eastern sky.
Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other
side, the deluge was immense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown
high above it, rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes.
The speed of its course was like a mountain torrent. Here and
there a few treetops were discovered and then whelmed again; and
for one second, the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray
like the arm of a drowning man. But still the imagination was
dissatisfied, still the ear waited for something more. Had this
indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge
of reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course,
disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines! And yet water it
was, and sea-water at that--true Pacific billows, only somewhat
rarefied, rolling in mid air among the hilltops.
I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf
underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon
Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay. The sunny
plain of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting
spur a gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with
every second, to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the
vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong; and there lay
our little platform, in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying
its unbroken sunshine. About eleven, however, thin spray came
flying over the friendly buttress, and I began to think the fog had
hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was the last effort. The
wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow squally from
the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that world of sea-
fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the south in
little rags of cloud. And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found
ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside, with the clear
green country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga
blowing in the air.
This was the great Russian campaign for that season. Now and then,
in the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen
far down in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again assailed,
nor was the surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.
