The speculation1 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. [48] 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 loam2; it was given me by one who had it from Don Antonio Coronel, and has a pattern about it of the low serried3 hills of the coast district. Where it breaks, as all patterns of Indian baskets do, to give egress4 to the spirit resident in things dedicated5 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 lure6 of gold. The basket wears with time, but the pattern holds, inwoven with its texture7 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 consummated8 the cession9 of California from Mexico.
From the white landmark10 of San Juan Capistrano to a point opposite Santa Inez, saints thick as sea-birds, standing11 seaward, break the long Pacific swell12: 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 [49] even than that of the opposing channel ports, hints which not even the Driest-Dustiness dare despise, of those mellower13 times than ours from which all fables14 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 thither15 on the Kuro-Siwa, that warm current deflected16 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 doze17 upon the island tides, flying-fish go by in purple and silver streaks18, and under the flat bays, which take at times colour that rivals the lagoons19 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 soothed20 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, beguile21 the imagination.
One thinks of the watery22 highway between the [50] west coast and the channel islands as another Camino Real of the sea, where in place of mule23 trains and pacing Padres, went balsas, skin canoes, galleons24, 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, opium26 smugglers dropping a contraband27 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 abruptly28 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 blazoned29 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 [51] under the mists of spring, to understand the thrill that comes of finding them later scattered30 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—Fray31 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 memento32 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 confirmation33 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 obliterating34 crops, can trace the blue lines of lupins between faint streaks of poppy fires, and catch above the reek35 of their boats, when the land wind begins, blown scents36 of islay and ceanothus. [52]
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 crest37 of the range one catches an arrowy glimpse of a seasonal38 stream, but from the sea-view the furred chaparral is unbroken except for bare ridges39, wind-swept even of the round-headed oaks. This coast country is a favourite browsing40 place for deer; they can be seen there still in early summer, feeding on the acorns41 of the scrub oaks, and especially on the tender twigs42 of wind-fallen trees, or herding43 at noon in the deep fern which closes like cleft44 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 inordinately45 fond. This lovely shrub46 with its twisty, satiny stems of wine-red, suffusing47 brown, its pale conventionalised leaves and flat little umbels of berries, suggests somehow the carving48 on old Gothic choirs49, as though it borrowed its characteristic touch from an external shaping hand; as if with its predetermined habit of growth it had a secret affinity50 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 [53] the time it begins to put forth51 its thousand waxy52 bells, in December or January, the toyon, the native holly53, is at its handsomest. This is a late summer flowering shrub that in mid-winter loses a little of its glossy54 green, and above its yellowing foliage55 bears berries in great scarlet56 clusters. Between these two overlapping57 ends, the gaumet of the chaparral is run in blues58 of wild lilac, reds and purples of rhus and buckthorn and the wide, white umbels of the alder59, which here becomes a tree fifty to sixty feet in height. It is the only one of the tall chaparral which has edible60 fruit, for though bears and Indians make a meal of manzanita, it does not commend itself to cultivated taste. More humble61 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 axe25, 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 crimson62 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, drooping63 blossoms, and in the case of the [54] 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 "incense64 shrub" is a favourite of English gardens where, before the
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