sagging south to the equator; it is also the sea-birds' city of
refuge. This is the great murre rookery of the west coast, and formerly
thousands of dozens of eggs were regularly taken from the Faralones
to the San Francisco market; but since the islands became a Government
station the murres have no enemy but the pirates of the air. In clefts
and ledges close against the wall-sided cliffs they defend their
shallow nests against the sheering gulls, or, hard beset, will push
their single, new-hatched nestling into the friendlier sea, darting to
break its fall with incredible swiftness, for a swimming gait is one
of the things that come out of the shell with the native-born at the
Faralones. On the same shelving rocks puffins rear their ratty young in
burrows or under sheltering boulders, and the ashy petrel, the "little
Peter" of the sea, walking by night before the storm, comes ashore here
to hide his seldom nest. On the south Faralone the fierce cormorant
builds her house of painted weed, which often the gulls steal from her
as fast as she brings it ashore, for the gulls are the grafters of the
sea-birds' city. This particular variety, known as the western gull,
neither fishes for himself nor forages for building material. He feeds
on the eggs and nestlings of his neighbours, or waits to snatch the
day's catch from the beak that brought it up from the sea. He has the
virtue of all predatory classes, an exemplary domesticity. His nest is
soft and clean, his nestlings handsome. The western gull is often found
marauding far up the estuary of Sacramento, but it is his congener,
the herring gull, who follows the long white wake the ferries make
ploughing the windy bay; or, distinguished among the silent shore birds
for multitude and clamour, scavenges its reedy borders.
Except for the promontories north and south, and the bold front of the
Berkeley Hills opposing the Gate, the inland borders of the bay are
flat tide-lands and sea-smelling lagunas. Stilts, avocets, herons,
all the waders that haunt this coast or visit it in their seasonal
flights, may be seen stalking the shallows for minnows, or where the
marsh grass reddens, poised like some strange tide-land blossom, lifted
on two slender stems. Low over them any clear day may be seen the grey
old marsh hawk sailing, or the "duck hawk," the peregrine of falconry,
following fiercely in the wake of the migrating hordes of water-fowl.
All about Alviso the guttural cry of the black-crowned night-heron
sounds eerily above the marshes, along with the peculiar "pumping"
love-song of the bittern.
For some reason the air of the marshes is friendly to the mistletoe
infesting the oaks and sycamores which stand back from the tide-line;
but the marshes themselves are treeless. They have their own sorts
of growth, cane and cat-tails and tule, goosefoot, samphire, and the
tasselled sedges. This samphire of Shakespeare, _l'herbe de Saint
Pierre_ of the Normandy Marshes, is the glory of the Franciscan
tide-lands; miles of it, barely above the level of the slow-moving
water, spread a magic carpet of blending crimsons, purples, and
bronzes. Under the creeping mists and subject to the changes of the
water, beaten to gold and copper under the sun, it redeems the flat
lines of the landscape with a touch of Oriental splendour.
For it is a flat kingdom, that of the Little Duck--the hills hanging
remotely on the horizon, the few trees and scattered hugging the low
shore of the sloughs as the shipwrecked cling to their rafts, desperate
of rescue. The rich web of the samphire, the shifting colour of the
water, faintly reminiscent of Venice, borrow another foreign touch
from the names under which the borders recommended themselves to
attention:--Sausalito, "little willows," Tiburon, Corta Madero, San
Quentin, San Raphael. Approached from the water, these names, with
the exception of San Quentin, do no more than stir the imagination.
San Quentin, on one of those courtesy islands newly rescued from the
primordial mud, shows itself uncompromisingly for what it is, one of
those places for the sequestration of public offenders, which is itself
such an offence to our common humanity--to say nothing of our common
sense. Free tides, free sails go by, and long, untrammelled lines of
birds; south above the blue bay and bluer shore, the ethereal blue
dome of Diablo lifts into the free air. Across the upper end of San
Pablo Bay, which is really the north arm of the bay of San Francisco
extending inland, Mare Island lies so low on the water that if it had
not been made a naval reserve station it is difficult to know to what
other use it could be put. One expects to have the land dip and swing
from under like the ship's deck. It is in line with the guns which lie
beside the Gate like watchful, muzzle-pointed dogs, and commands the
whole upper bay and the opposing bluffs of Contra Costa in a manner
highly commendable to those curious persons whose chief excitement
lies in anticipating an Asiatic invasion. Nevertheless, along with
the bastions of San Quentin it strikes, somehow, the note of human
distrust amid all this charm of light and line and elusive colour,
as if suddenly one should discover the tip of a barbed tail under the
skirt of some seductive stranger.
Between San Quentin and the Straits, all about the curve of the bay,
winding, wide-mouthed sloughs give access to a land as fertile as
Egypt. A slough is a mere wallow of unprofitable waters, waters unused
by men and still reluctant of the sea. Pushed aside by the compelling
tides, too undisciplined to make proper banks for themselves, they are
neglected by all but a few fringing willows and shapeless sycamores in
which the herons nest.
Often at evening the white-faced ibis can be seen flying in long,
voiceless lines, just clearing the twilight-tinted water, to their
accustomed night perches in the wind-beaten willows. They return there,
if undisturbed, year after year, accompanied in few and far-between
seasons by the egret and the snowy heron, grown man-shy, or if they
but knew the purpose for which their nuptial plumage is sacrificed,
woman-shy, and seldom seen even by the most wishful eyes.
At Napa a few bull-headed oaks come down almost to the tide-line, and
in Sonoma a clump of alien blue gums huddles aloof and unregarded,
but from the water little is visible beside the stilted cabins of some
gun club or the ramshackle resorts of the flat-nosed, slow craft that
wind on mysterious errands between the sunken lands. Whole families
of half-amphibious humans appear to live comfortably on these drifting
scows, but one never by any chance catches them doing any distinctive
thing.
The waters of the sloughs come down from the little inland valleys,
where summer nests and broods in a blue haze along the redwood-serried
hills. Whether it is white with cherry bloom at Napa, or purple with
winy clusters at Sonoma, there is always something interesting going
on there of the large process by which granite mountains are made food
for man. It is worth a visit if only to learn that a country which does
that sort of thing supremely well, finds it also worth while to do it
beautifully. Yachting off San Rafael, it is possible to catch at times
the scent of roses on an off-shore wind above the salt smell of the
marshes.
The last rip of the tide is through the Straits of Carquinez into the
back-water of Suisun. From here on, it is a rhythmic heaving to and fro
as of well-matched wrestlers, the river-water is set back to Crow's
Landing on the San Joaquin, and miles above Sacramento it returns
again past Antioch and the Suisun islands. It is lost in a wilderness
of tules, through which the sluggish currents blindly wind. Here we
have nothing to do with men, our business is all with the tribe of the
Little Duck: mallard, teal, tern, coot, heron, eared grebe, and awkward
loon.
The tule is a round leafless reed. It springs up along the tide-lands
or in the stagnant back-water of the rivers, or by any least dribble
of a desert spring. No condition daunts it but absolute dearth of
water; far-called, it travels on the wind over mountain ranges, over
great wastes of waterless plain to find the one absolute condition, a
pool--white rimmed with alkali or poisonous green with arsenic. I have
seen it flourish by springs so charged with mineral that each slender
column is ringed with its stony deposit, but I do not recall any
standing water where tules are not. The stems are filled with papery
pith so light that the Indians of the San Joaquin made boats of bundles
of them, faggoted together and tied upon a wooden frame.
Year by year the tules reclaim the muddy confluence of the twin rivers.
They make an annual growth, die palely, and are beaten down by the
wind; between their matted stems the young green comes up again. In the
Land of the Little Duck, miles upon miles of them, and not one other
thing, stand up on either side the winding water-lanes, man-high and
impenetrable.
The Tulare--the place of the tule--is the haunt not only of water-birds
but innumerable insect-catchers, and especially of the red-winged
blackbirds. In the spring these betake themselves to the reed-fringed
marshes in hundreds, building their nests in such neighbourly proximity
that the young can hop from rim to rim of the tight-slung, grassy
hammocks. Great clouds of the young birds can be seen, just before
mating and after nesting in the fall, rising from the low islands
of the river-junction. In the season also the male yellow-headed
blackbird may be heard singing his sweet but noisy cheering-song to
his sombre mate as she weaves marsh grass and wet pond-weed together
as a foundation for her home, always prudently completed some weeks in
advance of any need of it.
[Illustration: WAITING FOR DUCK--LOS BAÑOS]
Where the tules thin out along the moving currents, numerous woven
balls of marsh vegetation hang like some strange fruit safely above the
summer rise of the waters. These are the nests of the tule wren, built
by the industrious male, with who knows what excess of parental care
or what intention to deceive. All the while he is at work upon them,
in one, the least conspicuous and apparently the least skilfully built,
the mother bird nurses the brown nestlings with which, suddenly at the
end of July, all the whispering galleries of the tulares are alive.
One who has the courage to penetrate deeper within the tulares, past
the crazy wooden landings of nameless ports at which the flat scows
put in, past the broken willows where the herons nest and the weedy
back-waters lie all smoothly green with the deceptive duck-weed, will
see many wished-for sights. Just before dawn and after nightfall the
inner marshes are vocal with the varied cries of coot and mallard
and the complaining skirl of the mud-hen, the whistling redwing,
the bittern booming from his dingy pool, and all the windy beat of
wings. But by day a stillness falls through which the clicking whisper
of the reeds and the croon of the great rivers cradling to the sea
reaches the sense almost with sound. The air is all alive with the
metallic glint of dragon-flies; now and then the plop of some shining
turtle dropping into the smooth lagoon, or the frightened splash of a
marsh-nesting bird, flecks the silence with a flash of sound. Here one
might see all the duck kind leading forth their young broods, or the
eared grebe swimming with her day-old nestlings on her back. If the
day is dark--black clouds with lightnings playing under--one may hear
the voice of the loon sliding through his sonorous scale to shaking,
witless laughter. Or perhaps the day's sight might be a flock of
pelicans on their way to their nesting-ground in Buena Vista, breasting
the shallows, and with beating wings driving a school of minnows into
some tiny inlet where they may be scooped up in the pouched bills, a
dozen to a mouthful. Better still, some morning mist might rise for
you suddenly on a strip of sandy shore the cranes had chosen for their
wild dances, from which the stately measures of the Greek are said to
be derived. Against the yellow sand, as on the background of a vase,
the dipping figures and white outstretched wing draperies make the
connection clear to you for the moment, along with some other things
long overlaid in the racial memory.
Always at evening in the tulares the air is winnowed by the clanging
hordes of geese and ducks. Triangular flights of teal wing by you,
whizzing like bullets, hazy with speed. Beach-nesting birds, paddlers
in the foodful creeks, go seaward. Now and then some winged frigate of
the open sea, an albatross perhaps blown inland on a storm, will climb
the air to the sea-going wind. Low on the twilight-coloured waters the
tule fog creeps in.
You emerge properly from the vast intricacies of the tulares--if you
emerge at all, and are not completely mazed and lost in them--at
Sacramento, a city but barely rescued from the marsh, and still
marsh-coloured with the damp-loving lichens. _La Dame aux Camelias_, to
the eye, rich in that exotic blossom as no city in the world, but with
a past, oh, unmistakably, and a touch of hectic disorder. The Russians
possessed her, and then the breed of Jack Hamlin, and then--but it
is unfair to list the lovers of a lady of so much charm and such
indubitable capacity for reformation. Sacramento is the State capital,
the geographical pivot of the great twin valleys; she divides with
Stockton on the San Joaquin the tribute of their waters. It was here
on her banks that the overland emigrant trains sat down to wait for
the subsidence of waters in the new world of the West, from here they
scattered to all its hopeful quarters.
If the part the city has played in history has been that of a hostel, a
distributing station, at least she has played it to some purpose. There
are few empires richer than the land the twin rivers drain.
VII
THE TWIN VALLEYS
It is geographical courtesy merely, to treat of intramontane California
as a valley; it is in reality a vast, rolling plain. Several little
kingdoms of Europe could be tucked away in it. North and south it has
no natural line of demarcation other than the rivers meeting for their
single assault upon the sea, but its diversity deserves the double
name. They make, the Sacramento rushing from the wooded north and the
sluggish San Joaquin, one of the most interesting waterways of the
world. I should say they made, for of the San Joaquin one must be able
to speak in the past also, to understand it. One must have seen it
before man had tamed it and taught it, supine as a lioness in the sun.
To arrive at a proper feeling for the continuity of the great central
plain, it must be approached from the south, by way of the old Tejon
Pass, up from San Fernando, or down the Tehachapi grade where the
railroad loops and winds through the confluence of the Coast Range with
the Sierra Nevada. Here the hills curve graciously about the vast oval
of the lower San Joaquin. The downthrow of the mountain, stippled with
sage-brush, gives way to tawny sand glistening here and there with
white patches of alkali, mottled with dark blocks of irrigated land.
Its immensity is obscured by the haze of heat.
One is reduced to the figures of the real estate "booster" for terms of
proportion. That modest checkering of green, hours away to the left,
is a forty-mile field of alfalfa; beyond it lie the vineyards that in
less than a quarter of a century relegated Spain to a second place in
the raisin industry of the world. This is the San Joaquin of to-day
and to-morrow. The white-tilted vans of the Argonauts saw it as one
vast, overlapping field of radiant corollas, blue of lupins, phacelias,
nemophilias, gold of a hundred packed species of composite. Wet years
it is still possible for the settler in the unirrigated districts to
wake some morning to blossomy lakes of sky-blueness in the hollows;
from San Emigdio in the Temblors, I have seen, across the whole width of
the valley, the smouldering poppy fires along the bluffs of Kern River.
On the mesa below Tejon the moon-white gilia that the children call
"evening snow" unfurls its musky-scented drifts mile after mile. But
the prevailing note of the San Joaquin is tawny russet; gold it will
be in the season, resplendent as those idols which the Incas overlaid
yearly with fresh-beaten leaf, and in September the barrancas above
Bakersfield and Visalia as yellow as brass, but all up and down the
hill-rimmed hollow is every lion-coloured tint contending still with
the thin belts of planted orchard.
[Illustration: MIRROR LAKE, YOSEMITE]
Twenty-five years of cultivation have served to shift the lines of
greenness but not greatly to modify the desert key. Once it was all
massed in the tulares which fringed the series of lakes and connecting
sloughs, continuing northward from the lowest point of the San Joaquin.
Kern, Kings, Kaweah, Tule, Merced, and Tuolumne, mighty rivers, and a
hundred lesser singing streams fed it. Elk by thousands ramped in its
reedy borders. It was a haven of nesting water-birds. Whole islands
were populated by pelicans, repairing there annually for the strange,
sidling wing-dances that attend their mating. Blue herons nested in
the tulares; they could be seen trailing their long dangly legs for
hours above the shallows. Indians paddled in their frail balsas, built
of papery, dry reeds, down intricate water-lanes in which white men
venturing, lost themselves and were mazed to madness. Malaria of a
surpassing virulence rode up and down that country on the "tule fogs."
Even yet it is the dread of the cities of the plain to find themselves
beleaguered by the thick, ghost-white mists that at long intervals roll
along the ground, retaking the ancient marshes.
Into this potential opulence the cattleman precipitated himself.
He bought--it is more exact to say he acquired--vast acreage of
Spanish grants; along the rim of the Coast Ranges, territory equal to
principalities was given over to long-horned, lean herds. All about the
old beach-line of the San Joaquin may still be seen the remnant of the
cattle ranches, low formless houses with purlieus of pomegranate and
pampas grass and black figs, and the high, stockaded, acrid-smelling
corrals, to mark the receding waves of the cattle industry. On the
Sierra side the guttered mesas, the hoof-worn foothills advertise
the devastation of the wandering flocks. Early in the 'sixties these
appeared, little, long-armed French and Basques, with hungry hordes
of sheep at their heels, pasturing on the public lands. They ate into
the roots of the lush grass and left the quick rains to cut the soil.
The wool in the hand was always worth the next season's feed to the
sheep-herder.
[Illustration: AMONG THE REDWOODS OF THE GREAT TWIN VALLEYS]
Never was a land so planned for the uses of man, its shielding
mountains, its deep alluvial terraces sloping gently to the sun. Men
read it in the hieroglyphic the glistening waters spelled between the
dark patches of the tulares, but it took some experimenting to read the
message aright.
After the cattle and the flocks came the wheat. Up from the meeting
waters the land billowed with grain. Owners buckled the ploughs
together and drove them with engines by tens and twenties across the
thousand-acre fields. But men and engines, they were alike driven
by the drouth. In wet years the wheat rancher rode to view his
shoulder-high harvest, but when the rains, going high and wide over
the valley to break along the saw-teeth of the Sierras, left the wheat
unwatered, the same thing happened to the crops that had happened to
the cattle and the sheep. And at last, amid the rotting carcases and
the shrivelled acres, the message came clear--not the land, but the
water. So they shut up the rivers in the cañons and the day of the
orchardist began.
Geographically it begins at Bakersfield, below the gap where the Kern
comes down from the giant sequoias and is constrained to the wide,
willow-planted canals, governed by head-gates and weirs. Such waters as
find again their ancient levels, do so by way of the loose sandy soil
through which they are filtered in vineyard and orchard. The tulares
have been turned under; the elk are strictly preserved in the hope
that enough of them will breed to serve the purposes of curiosity.
The antelope bands that once flashed their white rumps from bench
to bench of the tawny mesas were reduced, the last time I saw them,
to a scant half-score roving the Tejon under the watchful eye of the
superintendent. But with all this change, nowhere as at this diminished
end, does one gather such an impression of the variety, the imperial
extent of the San Joaquin. For at Bakersfield is one of the world's
largest petroleum fields. The gaunt derricks rear along the unwatered
hills like half-formed prehistoric creatures come up out of the ground
to see what men are about. Reservoirs, fed with the stinking juices
of a time decayed, squat along the barrancas, considering with a slow
leech-like intelligence the tank cars in the form of a Gargantuan
joint-worm of the same period that produced the derricks, as they clank
between the oil-fields and the town. One of the largest oil-fields in
the world--and yet the turn of the road drops it out of sight in the
valley's immensity!
Bakersfield is a heaven of roses. Doubtless there are other things by
which the inhabitants would be glad to have it remembered, but this is
the item that the traveller in the season carries away with him. Roses
do not die there, they fall apart of their own sweetness, wafts of
which envelop the town for miles out on the highway. After nightfall,
when each particular attar distils upon the quiescent air, the
townspeople walk abroad in the streets and the moon comes up full-orbed
across the Temblors at about the level of the clock-tower. Overhead
and beyond it the sky retains a deep velvety blueness until long past
midnight. Traces of colour can be seen sometimes in the zenith when the
glimmer along the knife-edge of the Sierras announces the dawn.
North of Bakersfield, as the valley widens, the Coast Range fades
to a mere shadow mountain, the peaks of Kaweah stand out above the
banded haze, angel-white like the ranked Host. As the road swings in
to the Sierra outposts, broad-headed oaks begin to appear; it skirts
the foot of the great Sierra fault close enough for the landscape to
borrow something from the dark, impending pines. But for the most part
what the observer has to consider is soil and water and the miraculous
product of these two. One must learn to think of the land in terms of
human achievement.
[Illustration: CLEAR LAKE, LAKE COUNTY]
North from the delta of Kern River lies a hundred miles of country
scarcely disputed with the flocks, far-called and few, which still
at the set time of the year forgather in green swales behind the
town for the annual shearing, for the herders to play hand-ball at
Noriegas', to grow riotously claret drunk and render an evanescent
foreign touch to the brisk modern community. And every foot of that
hundred miles is rife with the seeds of life, awaiting the touch of
the impregnating water. One holds to that conviction as to a friendly
assuring hand. In the presence of that vast plain, palpitating with
the heat, the sluggish, untamed water lolling in the midst of it, the
white-fanged Sierra combing the cloudless blue, beauty becomes a poor
word: appreciation is shipwrecked and cast away. With relief one hails
the beginning of a stripe, dark green like a scarf, scalloping the
foothills--the citrus belt. From Portersville, Lindsay, Exeter it runs
north past the meeting of the waters into the valley of the Sacramento,
and for quality and early fruiting sets the figure of the world market.
As if its waters had some special virtue, wherever a river is poured
out upon the plain some particular crop is favoured. About Fresno
it is raisins, at Madera port wine, sherry, and mild muscatel. The
Merced, which takes its rise in the valley of Yosemite, is partial to
melons and figs. But everywhere are prunes, peaches, apricots, almonds,
sugar-beets, alfalfa, unmeasurable acreage of barley, beans, and
asparagus. Anything is impressive if the scale be large enough, even a
field of onions. Here the league-long rows are as terrible as an army.