We skimmed merrily along, enjoying the salt tang of the breeze and the beauty of Old Ocean in one of his happiest moods. We ran along rather barren-looking headlands, which at times carried us to wonderful vantage-points from which we beheld indescribably glorious views of the sea, resplendent under the pale blue sky of a perfect day. The breeze had swept away the lingering ghosts of yesterday’s fog, revealing a shimmering expanse of water, jade-green near the shore and running through all the shades of green and blue into a deep violet in the far distance. Looking toward the sun it shimmered and coruscated like a sea of molten silver, while along the whole irregular shoreline around the detached rocks and beneath the bold, rugged headlands it rippled in long white breakers or dashed into wind-swept spray. The air was redolent with the fresh, pungent smell of the sea—how we enjoy it when on land and detest it when on shipboard!—and everything conspired to make us glad that we had made the necessary detour to catch this glorious stretch of Mendocino coast.
Fort Bragg, of some three thousand people, seventeen miles from Westport, is the largest and best-appearing town, with handsome public buildings and good-looking shops—clearly the chief business and trading center of this section. It is the terminus of a branch of the Northern Pacific Railroad leading to the main line at Willits, which is doubtless the secret of its superiority to the other coast towns we passed through. It is larger than Ukiah, the county seat, which probably holds the distinction because of its more central situation.
Beyond Fort Bragg we crossed several shallow, emerald-green inlets at the mouth of creek or river, both the descent and the climb a sharp scramble. Three or four of the larger inlets were dammed to a considerable depth and logs were floated from the interior to a busy sawmill near the sea. The coast, however, with the exception of a few picturesque little groves near the sea, is quite denuded of timber. There are a good many farm-houses, some of very comfortable appearance, but the agricultural resources of the country did not impress us as very great. The reddish brown soil did not give any special indication of fertility and live stock was not much in evidence. Directly on the coast in places there is a wide belt of sand dunes which are slowly shifting landward and encroaching on the farms a little each year.
THE MENDOCINO COAST
From painting by N. Hagerup
Mendocino City, the next place of any size, is a rather bleak, un-American-looking village of a thousand people. Here we paused for lunch at a large, rambling, wooden hotel which must have been a lively place in the old lumbering and stage-coach days. Now it seemed almost deserted and the well-worn floor of its dismantled bar-room told of the loss of a goodly number of patrons who were formerly wont to come here to assuage their thirst. It was with some misgivings that we entered the place, but the sight of the cleanly, kindly-faced landlady reassured us; and we fared far better than we hoped for in the scrupulously clean dining-room—which led us to again remark on the extremely rare instances where we have found slovenly service or niggardly meals in even the lesser California hotels. The young man who acted as clerk, when he heard that we expected to reach Cloverdale for the night, advised us not to go as far on the coast road as Greenwood, which we planned, but to turn inland at Navarro, six miles north—a change which he declared would save us some bad road.
We had not gotten far from Mendocino when we agreed that it was not especially desirable to pursue the coast road any farther than necessary, for we found it quite unimproved, dusty, and rough, with very steep grades—especially the one leading out of the deep canyon just south of the town. After that, every few miles we met with sharp plunges into deep, narrow canyons, and steep, dusty scrambles out of them, with some very rough going between.
At Little River and Albion, large sawmills were in operation. The former village is a pretty little place, with rose-embowered cottages and apple orchards laden with red and golden globes. The schoolhouse is situated in a group of fragrant pines and everything combined to give the village an air of Arcadian quiet and contentment. Perhaps much of this was only in our imagination, but we did not disturb our pleasant impressions by making useless inquiries.
The coast beyond the village was exceedingly rugged but beautiful and inspiring. Bold, wooded headlands rose above us, a deep violet sea lay in quiet beauty beneath, and we even had to admit that the inlets, with their steep plunges and rattle-trap bridges, were beautiful. Here is, indeed, a country for our artists to discover; they will find the color and rugged beauty of Monterey on a wilder and vaster scale. In fact, we often remarked that the whole coast from Greenwood to Crescent City, with its colorful ocean, its rugged, rock-bound shoreline, its giant forests, and a thousand other sights of beauty and grandeur, offers a field for the landscape painter such as scarcely exists elsewhere in the world.