There was joy in the heart, luncheon in the knapsack, and a sparkle in
the eye of each of us as we set forth on our exploring expedition, all
of a sunny Saturday. Outside of California there never were such
Saturdays as those. We were perfectly sure for eight months in the year
that it wouldn't rain a drop; and as for the other four months--well,
perhaps it wouldn't. It is true that Longfellow had sung, even in those
days:
Unto each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
Our days were not dark or dreary,--indeed, they could not possibly be in
the two-thirds-of-the-year-dry season. It did not rain so very much even
in the rainy season, when it had a perfect right to; therefore there was
joy in the heart and no umbrella anywhere about when we prepared to set
forth on our day of discovery.
We began our adventure at Meigg's Wharf. We didn't go out to the end of
it, because there was nothing but crabs there, being hauled up at
frequent intervals by industrious crabbers, whose nets fairly fringed
the wharf. They lay on their backs by scores and hundreds, and waved
numberless legs in the air--I mean the crabs, not the crabbers. We used
to go crabbing ourselves when we felt like it, with a net made of a bit
of mosquito-bar stretched over an iron hoop, and with a piece of meat
tied securely in the middle of it. When we hauled up those home-made
hoop-nets--most everything seems to have been home-made in those
days--we used to find one, two, perhaps three huge crabs revolving
clumsily about the centre of attraction in the hollow of the net; and
then we shouted in glee and went almost wild with excitement.
Just at the beginning of Meigg's Wharf there was a house of
entertainment that no doubt had a history and a mystery even in those
young days. We never quite comprehended it: we were too young for that,
and too shy and too well-bred to make curious or impertinent inquiry. We
sometimes stood at the wide doorway--it was forever invitingly open,
--and looked with awe and amazement at paintings richly framed and hung
so close together that no bit of the wall was visible. There was a bar
at the farther end of the long room,--there was always a bar somewhere
in those days; and there were cages filled with strange birds and
beasts,--as any one might know with his eyes shut, for the odor of it
all was repelling.
The strangest feature of that most strange hostelry was the amazing
wealth of cobwebs that mantled it. Cobwebs as dense as crape waved in
dusty rags from the ceiling; they veiled the pictures and festooned the
picture-frames, that shone dimly through them. Not one of these cobwebs
was ever molested--or had been from the beginning of time, as it seemed
to us. A velvet carpet on the floor was worn smooth and almost no trace
of its rich flowery pattern was left; but there were many square boxes
filled with sand or sawdust and reeking with cigar stumps and tobacco
juice. Need I add that some of those pictures were such as our young and
innocent eyes ought never to have been laid on? Nor were they fit for
the eyes of others.
There was something uncanny about that house. We never knew just what it
was, but we had a faint idea that the proprietor's wife or daughter was
a witch; and that she, being as cobwebby as the rest of its furnishings,
was never visible. The wharf in front of the house was a free menagerie.
There were bears and other beasts behind prison bars, a very populous
monkey cage, and the customary "happy family" looking as dreadfully
bored as usual. Then again there were whole rows of parrots and
cockatoos and macaws as splendid as rainbow tints could make them, and
with tails a yard long at least.
From this bewildering pageant it was but a step to the beach below.
Indeed the water at high tide flowed under that house with much foam and
fury; for it was a house founded upon the sand, and it long since
toppled to its fall, as all such houses must. We followed the beach,
that rounded in a curve toward Black Point. Just before reaching the
Point there was a sandhill of no mean proportions; this, of course, we
climbed with pain, only to slide down with perspiration. It was our Alp,
and we ascended and descended it with a flood of emotion not unmixed
with sand.
Near by was a wreck,--a veritable wreck; for a ship had been driven
ashore in the fog and she was left to her fate--and our mercy. Probably
it would not have paid to float her again; for of ships there were more
than enough. Everything worth while was coming into the harbor, and
almost nothing going out of it. We looked upon that old hulk as our
private and personal property. At low tide we could board her dry-shod;
at high tide we could wade out to her. We knew her intimately from stem
to stern, her several decks, her cabins, lockers, holds; we had counted
all her ribs over and over again, and paced her quarter-deck, and gazed
up at her stumpy masts--she had been well-nigh dismantled,--and given
sailing orders to our fellows amidships in the very ecstasy of
circumnavigation. She has gone, gone to her grave in the sea that
lapped her timbers as they lay a-rotting under the rocks; and now
pestiferous factories make hideous the landscape we found so fair.
[Illustration: The Old Flume at Black Point, 1856]
As for Black Point, it was a wilderness of beauty in our eyes; a very
paradise of live-oak and scrub-oak, and of oak that had gone mad in the
whirlwinds and sandstorms that revelled there. Beyond Black Point we
climbed a trestle and mounted a flume that was our highway to the sea.
Through this flume the city was supplied with water. The flume was a
square trough, open at the top and several miles in length. It was cased
in a heavy frame; and along the timbers that crossed over it lay planks,
one after another, wherever the flume was uncovered. This narrow path,
intended for the convenience of the workmen who kept the flume in
repair, was our delight. We followed it in the full assurance that we
were running a great risk. Beneath us was the open trough, where the
water, two or three feet in depth, was rushing as in a mill-race. Had we
fallen, we must have been swept along with it, and perhaps to our doom.
Sometimes we were many feet in the air, crossing a cove where the sea
broke at high tide; sometimes we were in a cut among the rocks on a
jutting point; and sometimes the sand from the desert above us drifted
down and buried the flume, now roofed over, quite out of sight.
So we came to Fort Point and the Golden Gate; and beyond the Fort there
was more flume and such a stretch of sea and shore and sunshine as
caused us to leap with gladness. We could follow the beach for miles; it
was like a pavement of varnished sand, cool to the foot and burnished to
the eye. And what sea-treasure lay strewn there! Mollusks, not so
delicate or so decorative as the shells we had brought with us from the
Southern Seas, but still delightful. Such starfish and cloudy,
starch-like jelly-fish, and all the livelier creeping and crawling
creatures that populate the shore! Brown sea-kelp and sea-green
sea-grass and the sea-anemone that are the floating gardens of the
sea-gods and sea-goddesses; sea-birds, soft-bosomed as doves and crying
with their ceaseless and sorrowful cry; and all they that are sea-borne
along the sea-board,--these were there in their glory.
We hid in caverns and there dreamed our sea-dreams. We ate our lunches
and played at being smugglers; then we built fires of drift-wood to warn
the passing ships that we were castaways on a desert island; but when
they took no heed of our signals of distress we were not too sorry nor
in the least distressful.
At the seal rocks we tarried long; for there are few spots within the
reach of the usual sight-seer where an enormous family of sea-lions can
be seen at home, sporting in their native element, and at liberty to
come and go in the wide Pacific at their own sweet wills. There they had
lived for numberless generations unmolested; there they still live, for
they are under the protection of the law.
The famous Cliff House is built upon the cliff above them, and above it
is a garden bristling with statues. Thousands upon thousands of curious
idlers stare the sea-folks out of countenance--or try to; but they, the
sons of the salt sea and the daughters of the deep, climb into the
crevices of the rocks to sun themselves, unheeding; or leap into the
waves that girdle them and sport like the fabled monsters of marine
mythology. Seal, sea-leopard, or sea-lion--whatever they may be--they
cry with one voice night and day; and it is not a pleasant cry either,
though a far one, they mouth so horribly. Long ago it inspired a wit to
madness and he made a joke; the same old joke has been made by those who
followed after him. It will continue to be made with impertinent
impunity until the sea gives up its seals; for the temptation is there
daily and hourly, and the humorist is but human--he can not long resist
it; so he will buttonhole you on the veranda of the Cliff House and
whisper in your astonished ear as if he were imparting a state secret:
"Their bark is on the sea!"
The way home was sometimes a weary one. After leaving the bluff above
the shore, we struck into an almost interminable succession of
sand-dunes. There was neither track nor trail there; there was no oasis
to gladden us with its vision of beauty. The pale poet of destiny and
despair has written:
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree;
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speaks to my spirit of thee.
There was no fountain in our desert, and we knew it well enough; for we
had often braved its sands. In that wide waste there was not even the
solitary tree that moved the poet to song; nor a bird in our solitude,
save a sea-gull cutting across-lots from the ocean to the bay in search
of a dinner. There were some straggling vines on the edge of our desert,
thick-leaved and juicy; and these were doing their best to keep from
getting buried alive. The sand was always shifting out yonder, and there
was a square mile or two of it. We could easily have been lost in it but
for our two everlasting landmarks--Mount Tamalpais across the water to
the north, and in the south Lone Mountain. Lone Mountain was our
Calvary--a green hill that loomed above the graves where slept so many
who were dear to us. The cross upon its summit we had often visited in
our holiday pilgrimages. They were _holydays_, when our childish feet
toiled hopefully up that steep height; for that cross was the beacon
that lighted the world-weary to everlasting rest.
And so we crossed the desert, over our shoetops in sand; climbing one
hill after another, only to slide or glide or ride down the yielding
slope on the farther side. Meanwhile the fog came in like a wet blanket.
It swathed all the landscape in impalpable snow; it chilled us and it
thrilled us, for there was danger of our going quite astray in it; but
by and by we got into the edge of the town, and what a very ragged edge
it was in the dim long ago! Once in the edge of the town, we were
masters of the situation: you couldn't lose us even in the dark. And so
ended the outing of our merry crew,--merry though weary and worn; yet
not so worn and weary but we could raise at parting a glad "Hoorah for
Health, Happiness, and the Hills of Home!"