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 cañons; 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.