Posted on 06/19/2023 2:39:47 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Editor's Note
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ARRIVED IN MONTEREY IN THE FALL OF 1879; it was a woman, whom he would soon marry, who brought him here. But the journey, which involved a transatlantic voyage by ship and a transcontinental trip by train, had ill effects on his health, and in the few months he spent in Monterey he was recuperating as his future wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, finalized her divorce in San Francisco. During that time, he boarded at the French Hotel at 530 Houston St.; it is now called the Stevenson House, and is owned by California State Parks. Stevenson’s descendants bequeathed several of his belongings to the state of California to be held in safekeeping in perpetuity. It’s a fascinating collection of items, many from his time in Samoa, where he spent the last years of his life before dying in 1894 at age 44 due to a stroke. State Parks now gives tours of the house every Friday and Saturday at 10am ($10/adults; free for those ages 17 and under), and it’s worth a visit for those who haven’t been already.
Stevenson’s time in Monterey was short, but it left a lasting mark. Though he would later become one of the most published (and republished) writers in the world, he was largely unknown at the time he lived in Monterey – he was a burgeoning writer, living on the cheap, a long-haired Scotsman who had abandoned the strictures of his Christian upbringing.
During his time in Monterey, he took it all in, and in 1880, published an essay, “The Old Pacific Capital,” which has proved to be a timeless, literary description of the Monterey Peninsula in that time.
What follows is the first half of that essay – “The Woods and The Pacific” – which largely describes the natural environs of the Peninsula. (The second half of the essay, subtitled “Mexicans, Americans, and Indians,” will be published in the Weekly later this year.)
Robert Louis Stevenson wasn’t just a novelist. “The Old Pacific Capital” shows he was also a poet, and his vivid descriptions of the Monterey Peninsula circa 1879 will last as long as the written word.
I hope you enjoy.
– David Schmalz
SPECIAL THANKS Historical photos used in this story came from the following sources:
Monterey County Historical Society Executive Director James Perry
Monterey Public Library, specifically Library and Museums Director Brian Edwards and history and reference librarian Andres Garza
California State Parks, especially Stuart Thornton
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 low, 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 seagulls 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 carcass, 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 keyboard 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 color, or such degrees of thunder in the sound. The very air is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep.
The Woods and The Pacific The “Ostrich Tree” in Pebble Beach along 17-Mile Drive, circa 1880.
MONTEREY COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY/PAT HATHAWAY COLLECTION In shore, 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, spotty 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 forever altered – and it was from here that you had your 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 canyons; 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 southwest, and mount the hill among pine woods. Glade, thicket, and grove surround you. You follow winding, sandy tracts 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 vigor 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 rumor. It sets your senses only 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.
The Woods and The Pacific A whale skeleton on display in Cypress Grove, just north of Point Lobos. Date unknown, but sometime after 1900.
MONTEREY COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY/PAT HATHAWAY COLLECTION 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 further, 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 [today’s Pacific Grove]. 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 Woods and The Pacific The rear of Stevenson House (which was originally the front of the building) circa 1912. Robert Louis Stevenson boarded there for a few months in 1879 when it was called French Hotel.
c/o CALIFORNIA STATE PARKS 2023 The barking of a dog led me at last to the house still occupied, where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass the winter alone in this empty theater. 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 neighborhood 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 seagulls. 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 a 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 [in the Chinese fishing village at Point Alones]. The joss-stick burns, the opium pipe is smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of colored 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 Above: The town pump, circa the 1890s, located near today’s Simoneau Plaza.
c/o CITY OF MONTEREY The Woods and The Pacific Below right: New sewers being put into Alvarado Street in 1887.
c/o CITY OF MONTEREY 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 treetops 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 favorable 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 fiber, 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 at 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 wagon 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 a 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 spirit.
The Woods and The Pacific Alvarado Street, near Casa Bonifacio; no definitive date, but believed to be circa 1890s.
c/o CITY OF MONTEREY The Woods and The Pacific Monterey’s first wooden house, circa 1879. It was built from wood imported from Australia.
MONTEREY COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY/PAT HATHAWAY COLLECTION 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 hilltop 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 sand-hills; 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, color 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.
Ping
Bttt
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 wagon 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 a 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 spirit.
Everyone should do the 17-Mile Drive at least once in their life.
Bump
Today, he'd be hailed by alphabet people as a proud Pyro-American.
I remember on that drive we went by Pirates Cove near and below 17 mile drive, we said Pirates Cove and my 6 year old son said, Pirates are here, my wife said, no they are living on top of the hill.
Beautiful drive.
I recently read this in a partial collection of RLS’s travel writing that I found at the used book store. It was very interesting.
“Part I”
What of the remainder???
Some 40 or 50 years earlier, Richard Dana visited that area, and San Francisco Harbor as a working sailor. He did not have a detailed description of the fires, but noted that they periodically swept that area.
My memory does not carry any detail, but it would serve to re read “Two Years Before the Mast” by him.
It was California, but one we don’t recognize any more.
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