California: The Land of the Sun

by Mary Austin

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.

Returning to the bay, one finds all interest centering about the Point of Pines, a very ancient, rocky termination of the most westerly of the coast barriers. The Point, which is really a peninsula, is one of the most notable landmarks between Point Conception on the south and Fort Point at San Francisco. Its lighthouse stands well out on a rocky finger, ringed with incessant, clanging buoys; between it and Santa Cruz light is a roadstead for an empire. A windy bay at best, deep tides, and squally surfaces, the waters of Monterey have other values than the colourist finds in them. Sardines, salmon, cod, tuna, yellow tail run with its tides. At most seasons of the year whales may be seen spouting there, or are cast upon its shoals. At one time the port enjoyed a certain prosperity as a whaling station, of which small trace remains beside the bleaching vertebræ that border certain of the old gardens and the persistent whalebone souvenirs of the curio dealer. Lateen-rigged fisher fleets flock in and out of the harbour, butterfly winged; and all about the rock beaches creep the square-toed boats of the Japanese and Chinese abalone gatherers. Thousands of purple sea-urchins, squid, hundred-fingered star-fish, and all manner of slimy sea delicacies, these slant-eyed Orientals draw up out of the rainbow rock pools and the deeps below the receding surf. They go creeping and peering about the ebb, their guttural hunting cries borne inshore on the quiet air, seeming as much a native sea speech as the gabble of the gulls. So in their skin canoes and balsas the Indians must have crept about the inlets for as long as it requires to lay a yard or two of mould over the ancient middens of the tribe, as long as it takes to build a barrier of silver dunes half a mile seaward. Even at that distance the plough turns up the soil evenly sprinkled with crumbling shell which holds to the last a shred of its old iridescence. Far inland, past the Sierra Wall even to the country of Lost Borders, I have found amulets of this loveliest of the pearl shells, traded for and treasured by a people to whom the "Big Water" is a half-credited traveller's tale.

About five hundred yards outside the surf, from Laboratory Point, circling the peninsula to Mission Point on the south, the submerged rocky ridge has grown a great, tawny mane of kelp. Every year it is combed and cut by the equinoctial tides, and cast ashore in brown, sea-smelling wind-rows, and every year it grows again to be the feeding-ground of a million water-haunting birds. Here the Ancient Murrelet fattens for the long flight to the Alaskan breeding-grounds, and in the wildest gales the little nocturnal auklets may be heard calling to one another above the warring thunder of the surf, or when the nights are clear and the mists all banded low beneath the moon, they startle the beach wanderer with their high keen notes and beetle whirring wings. Long triangular flights of curlew drop down these beaches against the westering sun, with wings extended straight above their heads, furling like the little lateen sails come home from fishing. Sandpipers, sanderlings, all the ripple runners, the skimmers of the receding foam, all the scavengers of the tide, the gulls, glaucous-winged, ringbilled, and the species that take their name from the locality, may be found here following the plough as robins do in the spring. When the herring school in the bay nothing could exceed the multitude and clamour of the herring gulls. They stretch out in close order, wing beating against wing, actually over square miles of the ruffling water between Point Pinos and the anchorage. But any attempt to render an account of the wild, winged life that flashes about the bays of Carmel and Monterey would read like an ornithologist's record.

After storms that divide the waters outside the bay into great toppling mountains, in the quiet strip between the kelp and the beaches, thousands of shearwaters may be seen sleeping in long, swaying, feathered pontoons, shoulder to shoulder. The island rocks standing within the surf, from the Point of Pines all down the coast to Point Sur, are famous rookeries of cormorant. Watchful and black against the guano-whitened rocks, they guard their ancestral nests, redecorated each season with gay weed, pulled from the painted gardens of the deep; turning their long necks this way and that like revolving turret-tops, they beat off the gluttonous gulls with a devotion which would seem to demand some better excuse than the naked, greasy, wide-mouthed young. Warm mornings these can be seen stretching black-stemmed, gaping bills from the nesting hollows, waving this way and that like the tips of voracious sea anemones. Other rocks, white with salty rime, are given by mutual consent to rookeries of the yelping seals, the "sea lions" of this coast. Moonlight nights they can be seen playing there, with the weird half-human suggestion as of some mythical sea creatures.

Other and less fortunate adventurers on the waters of Monterey have left strange traces on that coast; one stumbles on a signboard set up among the rocks to mark where such and such a vessel went to pieces in a night of storm. Buried deep in the beach beyond the anchorage is the ancient teakwood hull of the Natala, the ship that carried Napoleon to Elba. It brought secularisation to the Missions also, after which unfriendly service the wind woke in the night and broke it against the shore. Just off Point Lobos, the Japanese divers after abalones report a strange, uncharted, sunken craft, a Chinese junk blown out of her course perhaps, or one of those unreported galleons that followed a phantom trail of gold all up the west coast of the New World. Strange mosses come ashore here, tide by tide, all lacy and scarf-coloured, and once we found on the tiny strand below Pescadero, a log of sandal-wood with faint waterworn traces of tool marks still upon it.

Most mysterious of all the hints held by the farthest west—for behold, when you have come to land again, sailing from this port, it is east!—of a time before our time, is the Monterey cypress.

Across the neck of the peninsula, a matter of six or eight miles, cuts in the little bay of Carmel, a blue jewel set in silver sand. Two points divide it from the racing Pacific, the southern limb of Punta Pinos, and the deeply divided rocky ledge of Lobos—Lobos, the wolf, with thin, raking, granite jaws. Now on these two points, and nowhere else in the world, are found natural plantations of the trees that might have grown in Dante's Purgatorio, or in the imagined forests where walked the rapt, tormented soul of Blake. Blake, indeed, might have had a hint of these from some transplanted seedling on an English terrace, for the Monterey cypress is quick-growing for the first century or so and one of the most widely diffused of trees; but only here on the Point and south to Pescadero ranch do they grow of God's planting. With writhen trunks and stiff contorted limbs they take the storm and flying scud as poppies take the sun. Incredibly old, even to the eye, they have no soil, nor seek none other than the thousand-year litter of their scaly needles, the husk of their nut-shaped, woody cones—the Spirit of the Ancient Rocks come to life in a tree. Grown under friendly conditions the young trees spire as do other conifers, but here they take on strange enchanted shapes. Their flat, wind-depressed tops are resilient as springs; one may lie full length along them, scarcely sunk in the minutely-feathered twigs, and watch the coasting steamers trail by on seas polished by the heat, or the winter surf bursting high in air. Or one could steal through their thick plantations unsuspected, from twisty trunk to trunk in the black shade, feeling the old earth-mood and man's primeval fear, the pricks and warnings of a world half made. The oldest of the cypresses are attacked by a red fungus rust, the colour of corroding time. It creeps along the under side of boughs and eats away the green, but even then the twisted heart wood will outlast most human things.