from sequestered parks of oak, madroño, and Douglas spruce. The trees
are not thickly set here as in the north, but admit of sunny space
and murmurous bee pasture between their gracefully contrasting boles,
and to a thousand bright-feathered and scaled things unknown to the
all-pine or all-redwood forests. Such parks or basins vary from a few
yards to an acre or two in extent, threaded like beads upon a single
stream. One thinks indeed of the old-fashioned "charm string" in which
each meadow space has its peculiar virtue:--open sunny shallows, arrowy
cascades, troops of lilies standing high as a man's head, forested
fern, columbine, delphinum, and scarlet mimulus along the water
borders.
They grow slighter as the trail ascends--it is possible now to make
nearly the whole distance in gravity cars for that purpose provided,
but I recommend a sure-footed mule for the true mountain-lover--until
above the source of the streams, from dips and saddles of the range,
above the summer-shrunken glaciers, where the trees are bowed and the
chaparral creeps as if awed and dizzy, it is possible to have a glimpse
of the still unconquered and unconquerable "sage brush county." All
along the back of the Sierra Madre wall the desert laps like a slow
tide, rolling up and receding with the drouths and rains. The eye takes
it in no less slowly than the imagination. It stretches, in fact, to
the Colorado, but a haze of heat obscures its eastern border; long
whitened lines of alkali, like wave marks, set the seasonal limit of
its encroachments. Here and there shows the dark checkering of fertile
patches, spilled over from the rich west-lying valleys; trending east
by south lies the Sierra Madre like an arm, guarding the favoured
region.
And yet in her very favour the Mother Mountain is impartial, for
equally as she saves the south from desertness, she has denied to us
the one instrument by which the desert could be mastered. Mighty as
man is in transforming the face of the earth, he is nothing without the
Rains.
III
THE COASTS OF ADVENTURE
Old trails, older than the memory of man, go out from the southern
country by way of Cahuenga, by Eagle Rock, toward that part of the
shelving coast where the Padre's mustard gold lingered longest, as if
to mark the locality where the gold they missed was first uncovered.
But suppose, on that day of the year '41, Francisco Lopez, _major-domo_
of the Mission San Fernando, had not had an appetite for onions? Who
knows how history would have made itself?
The speculation is idle; anybody named Lopez has always a
taste for onions because they are the nearest thing to garlic.
Señor Francisco,--I suppose one may grant him the title at this
distance--rested under an oak and dug up the wild root with his
knife, and the tide of the world's emigration set toward the Coasts
of Adventure. I have, holding my papers as I write, an Indian basket
reputed to be one of those in which, in those days, placer gold was
washed out of the sandy loam; it was given me by one who had it from
Don Antonio Coronel, and has a pattern about it of the low serried
hills of the coast district. Where it breaks, as all patterns of Indian
baskets do, to give egress to the spirit resident in things dedicated
to human use, there are two figures of men with arms outstretched, but
divided as the pioneers who carried the cross into that country were
from those who followed the lure of gold. The basket wears with time,
but the pattern holds, inwoven with its texture as Romance is woven
with the history of all that region lying between San Francisco on the
north and Cahuenga where, after a bloodless battle, was consummated the
cession of California from Mexico.
[Illustration: A CAÑON IN THE SIERRA MADRES]
From the white landmark of San Juan Capistrano to a point opposite
Santa Inez, saints thick as sea-birds, standing seaward, break the
long Pacific swell: San Clemente, Santa Catalina, Santa Rosa--their
deep-scored cliffs searched by the light, revealing their kinship
with the parallel mainland ranges. But there are hints here, in the
plant and animal life and in the climate, milder even than that of
the opposing channel ports, hints which not even the Driest-Dustiness
dare despise, of those mellower times than ours from which all fables
of Blessed Islands are sprung. Islands "very near the terrestrial
paradise" the old Spanish romancer described them. Often as not the
imagination sees more truly than the eye. I myself am ready to affirm
that something of man's early Eden drifted thither on the Kuro-Siwa,
that warm current deflected to our coast, which, for all we know of it,
might well be one of the four great rivers that went about the Garden
and watered it. Great golden sun-fish doze upon the island tides,
flying-fish go by in purple and silver streaks, and under the flat
bays, which take at times colour that rivals the lagoons of Venice,
forests of kelp, a-crawl with rainbow-coloured life, sleep and sway
upon tides unfelt of men. There are days at Catalina so steeped with
harmonies of sea and sun that the singing of the birds excites the
soothed sense no more than if the lucent air had that moment dripped in
sound. These are the days when the accounts that Cabrillo left of his
findings there, of a civil and religious development superior to the
tribes of the mainland, beguile the imagination.
One thinks of the watery highway between the west coast and the
channel islands as another _Camino Real_ of the sea, where in place
of mule trains and pacing Padres, went balsas, skin canoes, galleons,
far-blown Chinese junks, Russian traders, slipping under the cliffs
of San Juan for untaxed hides and tallow, Atlantic whalers, packets
rounding the Horn, sunk past the load line with Argonauts of '49,
opium smugglers dropping a contraband cask or an equally prohibited
coolie under the very wing of San Clemente. So many things could have
happened--Odysseys, Æneids--that it is with a sigh one resigns the
peaks of the submerged range, paling and purpling on the west, to the
student of sea-birds and sea-nourished plants.
Looking from the islands landward, the locked shores have still for
long stretches the aspect of undiscovered country. Hills break abruptly
in the surf or run into narrow moon-shaped belts of sand where a
mountain arm curves out or the sea eats inward. And yet for nearly four
centuries the secret of the land was blazoned to all the ships that
passed, in the great fields of poppy gold that every wet season flamed
fifty miles or more to seaward.
One must have seen the Eschscholtzia so, smouldering under the mists
of spring, to understand the thrill that comes of finding them later
scattered as they are, throughout the gardens of the world. I recall
how at Rome, coming up suddenly out of the catacombs--we had gone down
by another entrance and had been wandering for hours in the mortuary
gloom--memory leaped up to find a great bed of golden poppies tended
by brown, bearded Franciscans. They couldn't say--Fray Filippo, whom I
questioned, had no notion--whence the sun-bright cups had come, except
that they were common in the gardens of his order. It seemed a natural
sort of thing for some Mission Padre, seeking a memento of himself to
send back to his Brothers of St. Francis half a world away, to have
chosen these shining offsprings of the sun. There was confirmation in
the fact that Fray Filippo knew them not by the unspellable botanical
name, but by the endearing Castilian "dormidera," sleepy-eyed, in
reference to their habit of unfolding only to the light; but the
connecting thread was lost. Channel fishermen still, in spite of the
obliterating crops, can trace the blue lines of lupins between faint
streaks of poppy fires, and catch above the reek of their boats, when
the land wind begins, blown scents of _islay_ and ceanothus.
No rivers of water of notable size pour down this west coast, but
rivers of green flood the shallow cañons. Here and there from the crest
of the range one catches an arrowy glimpse of a seasonal stream, but
from the sea-view the furred chaparral is unbroken except for bare
ridges, wind-swept even of the round-headed oaks. This coast country is
a favourite browsing place for deer; they can be seen there still in
early summer, feeding on the acorns of the scrub oaks, and especially
on the tender twigs of wind-fallen trees, or herding at noon in the
deep fern which closes like cleft waters over their heads. Until
within a few years it was no unlikely thing to hear little black bears
snorting and snuffing under the manzanita, of the berries of which
they are inordinately fond. This lovely shrub with its twisty, satiny
stems of wine-red, suffusing brown, its pale conventionalised leaves
and flat little umbels of berries, suggests somehow the carving on old
Gothic choirs, as though it borrowed its characteristic touch from an
external shaping hand; as if with its predetermined habit of growth it
had a secret affinity for man, and waited but to be transplanted into
gardens. It needs, however, no garden facilities, but shapes itself
to the most inhospitable conditions. About the time it begins to put
forth its thousand waxy bells, in December or January, the toyon, the
native holly, is at its handsomest. This is a late summer flowering
shrub that in mid-winter loses a little of its glossy green, and above
its yellowing foliage bears berries in great scarlet clusters. Between
these two overlapping ends, the gaumet of the chaparral is run in blues
of wild lilac, reds and purples of rhus and buckthorn and the wide,
white umbels of the alder, which here becomes a tree fifty to sixty
feet in height. It is the only one of the tall chaparral which has
edible fruit, for though bears and Indians make a meal of manzanita,
it does not commend itself to cultivated taste. More humble species,
huckleberry, thimble, and blackberry, crowd the open spaces under the
oak-madroño forests, or, as if they knew their particular usefulness
to man, come hurrying to clearings of the axe, and may be seen holding
hands as they climb to cover the track of careless fires. In June whole
hill-slopes, under the pine and madroños, burn crimson with sweet, wild
strawberries. The wild currant and the fuchsia-flowered gooseberry are
not edible, but they are under no such obligation; they "make good"
with long wands of jewel-red, drooping blossoms, and in the case of
the currant, with delicate pink racemes, thrown out almost before
the leaves while the earth still smells of winter dampness. Though
nobody seems to know how it travelled so far, the "incense shrub" is
a favourite of English gardens where, before the primroses begin, it
serves the same purpose as in the west coast cañons, quickening the
sense into anticipations of beauty on every side.
Inland the close, round-backed hills draw into ranks and ranges, making
way for chains of fertile valleys which also fill out the Californian's
calendar of saints. But, in fact, your true Californian prays to his
land as much as ever the early Roman did, and pours on it libations
of water and continuous incense of praise. Every one of these longish,
north-trending basins is superlatively good for something,--olives or
wheat, perhaps; Pajaro produces apples and Santa Clara has become the
patroness of prunes.
Nothing could be more ethereally lovely than the spring aspect of the
orchard country. It begins with the yellowing of the meadow lark's
breast, and then of early mornings, with the appearance, as if flecks
of the sky had fallen, of great flocks of bluebirds that blow about
in the ploughed lands and are dissolved in rain. Then the poppies
spring up like torchmen in the winter wheat, and along the tips of
the apricots, petals begin to show, crumpled as the pink lips of
children shut upon mischievous secrets; a day or two of this and then
the blossoms swarm as bees, white fire breaks out among the prunes,
it scatters along the foothills like the surf. Toward the end of the
blooming season all the country roads are defined by thin lines of
petal drift, and any wind that blows is alive with whiteness. After
which, thick leafage covers the ripening fruit and the valley dozes
through the summer heat with the farms outlined in firm green, like a
patchwork quilt drawn up across the mountains' knees.
The tree that gives the memorable touch to the landscape of the coast
valleys is the oak, both the roble and encinas varieties. There are
others with greater claims to distinction, the sequoia, the "big
tree," lurking in the Santa Cruz mountains, the madroño, red-breeched,
green-coated, a very Robin Hood of trees, sequestered in cool cañons,
and the redwood, the _palo colorado_, discovered by the first Governor,
Don Gaspar de Portola, on his search for the lost port of Monte Rey.
All these keep well back from the main lines of travel. The most that
the rail tourist sees of them is a line of redwoods, perhaps, climbing
up from the sea-fronting cañons to peer and whisper on the ridges above
the fruiting orchards. But the oaks go on, keeping well in the laps
of the hills, avoiding the wind rivers, marching steadily across the
alluvial basins on into the hot interior. They are more susceptible to
wind influence than almost any other, and mark the prevailing direction
of the seasonal air currents with their three-hundred-year-old trunks
as readily as reeds under a freshet. You can see them hugging the
lee side of any cañon, leaning as far as they may out of the sea-born
draughts, but standing apart, true aristocrats among trees, disdaining
alike one another and the whole race of orchard inmates. When in full
leaf, for the _roble_ is deciduous, they are both of them distinctly
paintable, particularly when in summer the trunks, grey and aslant,
upbearing cloud-shaped masses of dark green, make an agreeable
note against the fawn-coloured hills. The _roble_ is a noble tree,
high-crowned, with a great sweep of branches, but seen in winter
stripped of its thick, small leafage, it loses interest. Its method of
branching is fussy, too finely divided, and without grace.
[Illustration: THE CEMETERY, SANTA BARBARA MISSION]
Around Santa Margarita and Paso Robles filmy moss spreads a veil over
the _robles_ as of Druid meditation; one fancies them aloof from the
stir of present-day life as they were from the bears that used to
feed on the mast under them. A hundred years or so ago the Franciscans
drove out the bears by an incantation--I mean by the exorcism of the
Church enforced with holy water and a procession with banners around
the Mission precinct: "I adjure you, O Bears, by the true God, by the
Holy God ... to leave the fields to our flocks, not to molest them nor
come near them." But bears or _homo sapiens_, it is all one to the oaks
of San Antonio; indeed, if legend is to be credited, the four-footed
brothers would have been equally as acceptable to the patron of the
Mission where this interesting ceremony took place. I can testify,
however, that after all this lapse of time the exorcism is still in
force, for though I have been up and down that country many times I
have seen no bears in it.
Things more pestiferous than bears are driven out, humours of the
blood, stiffness of the joints, by the medicinal waters that bubble
and seep along certain ancient fissures of the country rock. This has
always seemed to me the very insolence of superfluity. Who wishes, when
all the air is censed with the fragrance of wild vines, to have his
nose assaulted with fumes of sulphur, even though it is known to be
good for a number of things? But there are some people who could never
be got to observe the noble proportions of five-hundred-year-old oaks
with the wild grapes going from tree to tree like a tent, except as a
by-process incident to the drinking of nasty waters. So the land has
its way even with our weaknesses.
[Illustration: SYCAMORES, A COAST RANGE CAÑON]
Besides these excursions inland, which bring us in almost every case to
one of the ancient Franciscan foundations, there are two or three ports
of call on the sea front worth lingering at for more things than the
pleasant air and the radiant wild bloom. One of these is Santa Barbara
which Santa Inez holds in its lap, curving like a scimitar opposite
the most northerly of the channel islands. Understand, however, that
no good comes of thinking of Santa Barbara as a place on the map. It
is a Sargossa of Romance, a haven of last things, the last Mission in
the hands of the Franciscans, the last splendour of the Occupation, the
last place where mantillas were worn and they danced the _fandango_ and
_la jota_; an eddy into which have drifted remnants of every delightful
thing that has passed on the highways of land and sea, which here hail
one another across the curving moon-white beach. Summer has settled
there, California summer which never swelters, never scorches. Frost
descends at times from Santa Inez to the roofs, but lays no finger on
the fuchsias, poinsettias, and the heliotropes climbing to second-story
windows. The wild thickets which connect the territory with the town,
are vocal with night-singing mocking-birds; along the foreshore white
pelicans divide the mountain-shadowed waters. The waters, taking all
the sky's changes, race to the fairy islands, the chaparral runs back
to the flanks of Santa Inez showing yellowly through the distant blue
of pines; overhead a sky clouded with light. This is not a paradox but
an attempt to express the misty luminosity of a heaven filled with
refractions of the summer-tinted slope, the glaucous leafage of the
chaparral, the white sand and sapphire-glinting water. The sky _beyond_
the enclosing mountains has the cambric blueness of the superheated
interior, but directly overhead it has depth and immensity of colour
unequalled except along the Mediterranean.
Santa Barbara is a port of distinguished visitors; more, and more
varieties, of sea-birds put in there on the long flight from the Arctic
to the Isthmus than is easily believable. In the Estero--_esteril_,
sterile--an ill-smelling tide pool lying behind the town, may be found
at one season or another, all the western species that delight the
ornithologist. The black brant, going by night, and wild swans, as
many as a score of them together, have been noted in its backwaters,
and scarcely any stroll along the receding surf but is enlivened by
the resonant, sweet whistle of the plover. In hollows of the sands
thousands of beach-haunting birds may be seen camping for the night,
looking like some sea-coloured, strange vegetation, and early mornings
when the channel racing by, leaves the bay placid, tens of thousands
of shearwaters sleep in shouldering ranks that sway with the incoming
swell as the kelp sways, without being scattered by it. One can see
the same sight, augmented as to numbers, around Monterey, a long day's
journey to the north as the car goes, long enough and lovely enough to
deserve another chapter.
[Illustration: TALL CHAPARRAL, SANTA CRUZ]
IV
THE PORT OF MONTEREY
Without doubt history is made quite as much by the mistakes of men
as by their utmost certainties. The persistent belief of the ancient
geographers in the existence of the Straits of Anian, the traditional
North-West Passage, led to some romancing, and to the exploration of
the California coast a century or so before it was of any particular
use to anybody. It led also to the bluest bay. Viscaino took possession
of it for Philip of Spain as early as 1602, nearly two hundred years
before the Franciscans planted a cross there under Viscaino's very
tree. During all that time the same oaks staggered up the slope
away from the wind, and the scimitar curve of the beach kept back
the brilliant waters. There is a figure of immensity in this more
terrifying than the mere lapse of years. Not how many times but with
what sureness for every day the sapphire deep shudders into chrysoprase
along the white line of the breakers. We struggle so to achieve a
little brief moment of beauty, but every hour at Monterey it is given
away.
The bay lies squarely fronting the Pacific swell, about a hundred
miles south of the Golden Gate, between the horns of two of the little
tumbled coast ranges, cutting back to receive the waters of the Pajaro
and the Salinas. From the south the hill juts out sharply, taking
the town and the harbour between its knees, but the north shore is
blunted by the mountains of Santa Cruz. The beach is narrow, and all
along its inner curve blown up into dunes contested every season by
the wind and by the quick, bright growth of sand verbena, lupins, and
mesembryanthemums. The waters of the rivers are set back by the tides,
they are choked with bars and sluiced out by winter floods. For miles
back into the valleys of Pajaro and Salinas, blue and yellow lupins
continue the colour of the sand and the pools of tide water. They climb
up the landward slope of the high dunes and set the shore a little
seaward against the diminished surf. Then the equinoctial tide rises
against the land that the lupins have taken and smooths out their
lovely gardens with a swift, white hand, to leave the beach smooth
again for the building of pale, wind-pointed cones.
[Illustration: LOOKING DOWN ON MONTEREY AND THE BAY]
The valley of the Salinas, which has its only natural outlet on the
bay, is of the type of coast valleys, long, narrow and shallow, given
over to farming and to memories of Our Lady of Solitude lying now as
a heap of ruins in a barley field. It is a place set apart, where any
morning you might wake to find the sea has entered between the little,
brooding hills to rest.
Gulls follow the plough there, and pines avoid the river basin as
though each of them knew very well their respective rights in it. One
has, however, to make a point of such discoveries, for the entrance to
the valley is obscured by its very candour, lying all open as it does
to drifting dune and variable sea marshes.
It is even more worth while to follow the flat-bordered Pajaro into the
shut valley where dozes the little town of San Juan Bautista, taking
on its well-sunned mesa, those placid lapses of self-forgetfulness
which are to the aged as a foretaste of the long sleep. Here it was
that the magic muse of Music came into the country. It came in a
little tin-piped, wooden hand-organ, built by one Benjamin Dobson of
22 Swan Street, London, in the year 1735, but of all its history until
it was unpacked from mule-back by Padre Lausan in 1797, there is not
a word current. Our acquaintance with it begins on the day that the
Padre set it up in the hills and played, "The Siren's Waltz," "Lady
Campbell's Reel," and all its repertoire of favourite London airs, of
which the least appropriate to its present mission must have been the
one called "Go to the Devil." Which only goes to prove that the spirit
of the Franciscans was often superior to their means, for what the
simple savages did do as soon as they had overcome their superstitious
fear of the noise box, was to come to Mass to hear it as often as
possible. There remain three old volumes of music written later for
the Mission which came true to its founding and excelled in all sweet
sounds, but none, it is said, pleased the Indians so much or so raised
their spirits as "The Siren's Waltz." No doubt its inspiriting strains
added something to the warlike spirit which led here to the only
local resistance opposed to the American invasion, for it was on the
Gavilan heights above the little town that Frémont, on the tallest
tree that he could find, raised the Stars and Stripes, gallantly if
somewhat prematurely. It was from San Juan that Castro's men marched
to the final capitulation of Cahuenga, and finally from here the last
remnant of the old life drains away. One hears the echo of it faint as
the sea sounds that on rare days come trembling up the valley on the
translucent air.