California

A swift darted among the fig, marigolds, and portulacca of the inevitable rock-work which was the pride of the old Spanish gardens. Great rockets of tritoma flamed against the wall, on the other side of which traffic went unnoted and unsuspecting.

"But we, Dona Ina, we Americans, when we make a garden, make it in the sight of all so that all may have pleasure in it."

"Eh, the Americanos …" she shrugged; she moved to give a drink to the spotted musk, flowering in a chipped saucer; the subject did not interest her; her thought, like her flowers, had grown up in an enclosure.

VI
THE LAND OF THE LITTLE DUCK

Where the twin rivers set back the tides from the bay, the Land of the Little Duck begins. The tides come head-on past the Golden Gate and the river answers to their tremendous compulsion far inland, past the point where the Sacramento and San Joaquin flow together. On the lee side of the headland which makes the southern pilaster of the Gate, sits San Francisco, making of the name she borrowed from the bay a new and distinguished thing, as some women do with their husbands' titles. A better location for a city is Carquinez Strait; the Mexican comandante resident at Sonoma would have had it there, bearing the name of his wife, Francesca. Said he to the newly arrived American authorities, "Do so, and I will furnish you the finest site in the world, with State house and Residence complete." But it appears the land has chosen its own name.

All the years after the Pope had divided the New World between Spain and the Portuguese, the harbour lay hidden. Cabrillo, Drake, Maldonado, Juan de Fuca, Viscaino passed it in the night or veiled in obscuring fogs. And then Saint Francis showed it clear and lovely to Don Gaspar Portola, having for that revelation led him with holden eyes past his journey's objective. Likewise, when the time was ripe, he put it into the mind of the Yankee alcalde at Yerba Buena, a trading-post in the neighbourhood of Mission Dolores, that if the hamlet should be called San Francisco it might catch by implication the vessels clearing all ports of the world for San Francisco bay.

O Chance, Chance! says the historian and turns another page. But it is my opinion that among the birds to which Saint Francis preached was included the Little Duck.

The piers of the city front east, they face the Berkeley Hills, the Oaklands, the lands of the Sycamore, or, as the first settlers named them, the Alamedas. From thence vast settlements take their name, feeding the city as sea-birds do, from their own breasts. Back and forth between them the shuttling ferries weave thin webs of glistening wakes, duck-bodied tugs chugg and scuttle, busy still at world-building. From the promontory which makes the northern barrier of the Gate, Tamalpias swims out of atmospheric blueness. On its seaward slope, hardly out of reach of the siren's bellowing note, Muir Park preserves the ancient forest, rooted in the litter of a thousand years. And round about the foot of city and mountain the waters of the bay are blue, the hills are bluer. The hills melt down to greenness in the spring, the water runs to liquid emerald, flashing amber; the hills are tawny after rains, the waters tone to the turbid, clayey river-floods; land and sea they pursue one another as lovers through changing moods of colour; they have mists for mystery between revealing suns. Unless these things count for something, San Francisco is the very worst site in the world for a city. You take your heart in your mouth every time you go out to afternoon tea in the tram-cars that dip and swing like cockles at sea. They cut across streets so steep that grass grows between the cobbles where no traffic ever passes, to plunge down lanes of dwellings perched precariously as sea-birds' nests on the bare bones of hills that for true hilliness shame Rome's imperial seven. The bay side of the peninsula is mud, the Pacific side is sand. There great wasteful dunes blow up, they shift and pile, they take the contours of the wind-lashed waters – the very worst site in the world for a great city's pleasure-ground, and yet somehow it is there.

For this city is one of those which have souls; it is a spirit sitting on a height, taking to itself form and the offices of civilisation. This is a thing that we know, because we have seen the land shake it as a terrier shakes a rat, until the form of the city was broken; it dissolved in smoke and flame. And then as a polyp of the sea draws out of the fluent water form and perpetuity for itself, we saw our city draw back its shapes of wood and stone, and statelier, more befitting a spirit that has endured so much. Nobody knows really what a city is except that it is something more than a collocation of houses. From Telegraph Hill, where the old semaphore stood, which signalled the far-between arrivals of ships around the Horn, you can see the trade of the world pass and repass the pillars of the Gate, the wall-sided warships. But none of these things really explain how San Francisco came to be clinging there to the leeward of a windy spit of land, like a great, grey sea-bird with palpitating wings.

True to her situation, San Francisco is nothing if not dramatic. One recalls that the earliest foundation was dedicated to Our Lady of Dolors, Nuestro Señora de Dolores; the Indians fought here as they did nowhere else against Christian dominion. There were more burials than baptisms, and in the old cemetery of Yerba Buena the dead were so abandoned of all grace that the sand refused to hold them. One who spent his boyhood in the shifting purlieus of the old Laguna told me how in the hollows where the scrub oaks shrugged off the wind and the sand waved like water, the nameless coffins were covered and uncovered between a night and day. But if the dead could not hold their tenancy, the living succeeded. They did it by the very force of that dramatic instinct awakened by the plot and counterplot of natural forces.

No Greek tragedy moved to more relentless measures than the moral upheaval of '56, when the whole city, in solemn funeral train behind the victim of one of those wild outbursts of lawlessness peculiar to the "gold rush," saw the lifeless bodies of the perpetrators hanging from the upper windows of the Vigilance Committee. Fifty years later came a wilder rout, down streets searched out by fire, snatching at humour as they ran, as so many points of contact for the city's rebuilding.

The very worst location in the world, as I have remarked, is this windy promontory past which the grey tides race, but so long as a city can dramatise itself, one situation will do as well as another in which to render itself immortal.

The bay of San Francisco with its contingencies is one of the most interesting of inland yachting waters, full of adventurous weather. It is possible to sail in one general direction from Alviso to the city of Sacramento, a hundred and fifty miles, and that without attempting the thousand miles of estuary and slough through which the waters slink and wind.

At this season of the year the river is pushed backward by the tide a matter of ten miles or more above Sacramento City: on the San Joaquin it is felt as far as Crow's Landing. At Antioch it begins to be saltish, and down through Suisun and Carquinez the river-water fights its way as far as San Pablo before its identity is wholly lost. At flood-times it may be traced, a yellowish, turgid streak, as far as Alcatraz. This is the islet of the albatross which lies south of the tide race, as Tiburon is on the north, fragments all of them of that salt-rimed ledge outside the gate where hoarse sea-lions play, and brother to the castellated cloud far along on the sea's horizon, the very capital of the kingdom of the Little Duck.

The Faralone Light is the last dropped astern by the Island steamships sagging south to the equator; it is also the sea-birds' city of refuge. This is the great murre rookery of the west coast, and formerly thousands of dozens of eggs were regularly taken from the Faralones to the San Francisco market; but since the islands became a Government station the murres have no enemy but the pirates of the air. In clefts and ledges close against the wall-sided cliffs they defend their shallow nests against the sheering gulls, or, hard beset, will push their single, new-hatched nestling into the friendlier sea, darting to break its fall with incredible swiftness, for a swimming gait is one of the things that come out of the shell with the native-born at the Faralones. On the same shelving rocks puffins rear their ratty young in burrows or under sheltering boulders, and the ashy petrel, the "little Peter" of the sea, walking by night before the storm, comes ashore here to hide his seldom nest. On the south Faralone the fierce cormorant builds her house of painted weed, which often the gulls steal from her as fast as she brings it ashore, for the gulls are the grafters of the sea-birds' city. This particular variety, known as the western gull, neither fishes for himself nor forages for building material. He feeds on the eggs and nestlings of his neighbours, or waits to snatch the day's catch from the beak that brought it up from the sea. He has the virtue of all predatory classes, an exemplary domesticity. His nest is soft and clean, his nestlings handsome. The western gull is often found marauding far up the estuary of Sacramento, but it is his congener, the herring gull, who follows the long white wake the ferries make ploughing the windy bay; or, distinguished among the silent shore birds for multitude and clamour, scavenges its reedy borders.

Except for the promontories north and south, and the bold front of the Berkeley Hills opposing the Gate, the inland borders of the bay are flat tide-lands and sea-smelling lagunas. Stilts, avocets, herons, all the waders that haunt this coast or visit it in their seasonal flights, may be seen stalking the shallows for minnows, or where the marsh grass reddens, poised like some strange tide-land blossom, lifted on two slender stems. Low over them any clear day may be seen the grey old marsh hawk sailing, or the "duck hawk," the peregrine of falconry, following fiercely in the wake of the migrating hordes of water-fowl. All about Alviso the guttural cry of the black-crowned night-heron sounds eerily above the marshes, along with the peculiar "pumping" love-song of the bittern.

For some reason the air of the marshes is friendly to the mistletoe infesting the oaks and sycamores which stand back from the tide-line; but the marshes themselves are treeless. They have their own sorts of growth, cane and cat-tails and tule, goosefoot, samphire, and the tasselled sedges. This samphire of Shakespeare, l'herbe de Saint Pierre of the Normandy Marshes, is the glory of the Franciscan tide-lands; miles of it, barely above the level of the slow-moving water, spread a magic carpet of blending crimsons, purples, and bronzes. Under the creeping mists and subject to the changes of the water, beaten to gold and copper under the sun, it redeems the flat lines of the landscape with a touch of Oriental splendour.

For it is a flat kingdom, that of the Little Duck – the hills hanging remotely on the horizon, the few trees and scattered hugging the low shore of the sloughs as the shipwrecked cling to their rafts, desperate of rescue. The rich web of the samphire, the shifting colour of the water, faintly reminiscent of Venice, borrow another foreign touch from the names under which the borders recommended themselves to attention: – Sausalito, "little willows," Tiburon, Corta Madero, San Quentin, San Raphael. Approached from the water, these names, with the exception of San Quentin, do no more than stir the imagination. San Quentin, on one of those courtesy islands newly rescued from the primordial mud, shows itself uncompromisingly for what it is, one of those places for the sequestration of public offenders, which is itself such an offence to our common humanity – to say nothing of our common sense. Free tides, free sails go by, and long, untrammelled lines of birds; south above the blue bay and bluer shore, the ethereal blue dome of Diablo lifts into the free air. Across the upper end of San Pablo Bay, which is really the north arm of the bay of San Francisco extending inland, Mare Island lies so low on the water that if it had not been made a naval reserve station it is difficult to know to what other use it could be put. One expects to have the land dip and swing from under like the ship's deck. It is in line with the guns which lie beside the Gate like watchful, muzzle-pointed dogs, and commands the whole upper bay and the opposing bluffs of Contra Costa in a manner highly commendable to those curious persons whose chief excitement lies in anticipating an Asiatic invasion. Nevertheless, along with the bastions of San Quentin it strikes, somehow, the note of human distrust amid all this charm of light and line and elusive colour, as if suddenly one should discover the tip of a barbed tail under the skirt of some seductive stranger.

Between San Quentin and the Straits, all about the curve of the bay, winding, wide-mouthed sloughs give access to a land as fertile as Egypt. A slough is a mere wallow of unprofitable waters, waters unused by men and still reluctant of the sea. Pushed aside by the compelling tides, too undisciplined to make proper banks for themselves, they are neglected by all but a few fringing willows and shapeless sycamores in which the herons nest.

Often at evening the white-faced ibis can be seen flying in long, voiceless lines, just clearing the twilight-tinted water, to their accustomed night perches in the wind-beaten willows. They return there, if undisturbed, year after year, accompanied in few and far-between seasons by the egret and the snowy heron, grown man-shy, or if they but knew the purpose for which their nuptial plumage is sacrificed, woman-shy, and seldom seen even by the most wishful eyes.

At Napa a few bull-headed oaks come down almost to the tide-line, and in Sonoma a clump of alien blue gums huddles aloof and unregarded, but from the water little is visible beside the stilted cabins of some gun club or the ramshackle resorts of the flat-nosed, slow craft that wind on mysterious errands between the sunken lands. Whole families of half-amphibious humans appear to live comfortably on these drifting scows, but one never by any chance catches them doing any distinctive thing.

The waters of the sloughs come down from the little inland valleys, where summer nests and broods in a blue haze along the redwood-serried hills. Whether it is white with cherry bloom at Napa, or purple with winy clusters at Sonoma, there is always something interesting going on there of the large process by which granite mountains are made food for man. It is worth a visit if only to learn that a country which does that sort of thing supremely well, finds it also worth while to do it beautifully. Yachting off San Rafael, it is possible to catch at times the scent of roses on an off-shore wind above the salt smell of the marshes.

The last rip of the tide is through the Straits of Carquinez into the back-water of Suisun. From here on, it is a rhythmic heaving to and fro as of well-matched wrestlers, the river-water is set back to Crow's Landing on the San Joaquin, and miles above Sacramento it returns again past Antioch and the Suisun islands. It is lost in a wilderness of tules, through which the sluggish currents blindly wind. Here we have nothing to do with men, our business is all with the tribe of the Little Duck: mallard, teal, tern, coot, heron, eared grebe, and awkward loon.

The tule is a round leafless reed. It springs up along the tide-lands or in the stagnant back-water of the rivers, or by any least dribble of a desert spring. No condition daunts it but absolute dearth of water; far-called, it travels on the wind over mountain ranges, over great wastes of waterless plain to find the one absolute condition, a pool – white rimmed with alkali or poisonous green with arsenic. I have seen it flourish by springs so charged with mineral that each slender column is ringed with its stony deposit, but I do not recall any standing water where tules are not. The stems are filled with papery pith so light that the Indians of the San Joaquin made boats of bundles of them, faggoted together and tied upon a wooden frame.

Year by year the tules reclaim the muddy confluence of the twin rivers. They make an annual growth, die palely, and are beaten down by the wind; between their matted stems the young green comes up again. In the Land of the Little Duck, miles upon miles of them, and not one other thing, stand up on either side the winding water-lanes, man-high and impenetrable.

The Tulare – the place of the tule – is the haunt not only of water-birds but innumerable insect-catchers, and especially of the red-winged blackbirds. In the spring these betake themselves to the reed-fringed marshes in hundreds, building their nests in such neighbourly proximity that the young can hop from rim to rim of the tight-slung, grassy hammocks. Great clouds of the young birds can be seen, just before mating and after nesting in the fall, rising from the low islands of the river-junction. In the season also the male yellow-headed blackbird may be heard singing his sweet but noisy cheering-song to his sombre mate as she weaves marsh grass and wet pond-weed together as a foundation for her home, always prudently completed some weeks in advance of any need of it.

Where the tules thin out along the moving currents, numerous woven balls of marsh vegetation hang like some strange fruit safely above the summer rise of the waters. These are the nests of the tule wren, built by the industrious male, with who knows what excess of parental care or what intention to deceive. All the while he is at work upon them, in one, the least conspicuous and apparently the least skilfully built, the mother bird nurses the brown nestlings with which, suddenly at the end of July, all the whispering galleries of the tulares are alive.

One who has the courage to penetrate deeper within the tulares, past the crazy wooden landings of nameless ports at which the flat scows put in, past the broken willows where the herons nest and the weedy back-waters lie all smoothly green with the deceptive duck-weed, will see many wished-for sights. Just before dawn and after nightfall the inner marshes are vocal with the varied cries of coot and mallard and the complaining skirl of the mud-hen, the whistling redwing, the bittern booming from his dingy pool, and all the windy beat of wings. But by day a stillness falls through which the clicking whisper of the reeds and the croon of the great rivers cradling to the sea reaches the sense almost with sound. The air is all alive with the metallic glint of dragon-flies; now and then the plop of some shining turtle dropping into the smooth lagoon, or the frightened splash of a marsh-nesting bird, flecks the silence with a flash of sound. Here one might see all the duck kind leading forth their young broods, or the eared grebe swimming with her day-old nestlings on her back. If the day is dark – black clouds with lightnings playing under – one may hear the voice of the loon sliding through his sonorous scale to shaking, witless laughter. Or perhaps the day's sight might be a flock of pelicans on their way to their nesting-ground in Buena Vista, breasting the shallows, and with beating wings driving a school of minnows into some tiny inlet where they may be scooped up in the pouched bills, a dozen to a mouthful. Better still, some morning mist might rise for you suddenly on a strip of sandy shore the cranes had chosen for their wild dances, from which the stately measures of the Greek are said to be derived. Against the yellow sand, as on the background of a vase, the dipping figures and white outstretched wing draperies make the connection clear to you for the moment, along with some other things long overlaid in the racial memory.

Always at evening in the tulares the air is winnowed by the clanging hordes of geese and ducks. Triangular flights of teal wing by you, whizzing like bullets, hazy with speed. Beach-nesting birds, paddlers in the foodful creeks, go seaward. Now and then some winged frigate of the open sea, an albatross perhaps blown inland on a storm, will climb the air to the sea-going wind. Low on the twilight-coloured waters the tule fog creeps in.

You emerge properly from the vast intricacies of the tulares – if you emerge at all, and are not completely mazed and lost in them – at Sacramento, a city but barely rescued from the marsh, and still marsh-coloured with the damp-loving lichens. La Dame aux Camelias, to the eye, rich in that exotic blossom as no city in the world, but with a past, oh, unmistakably, and a touch of hectic disorder. The Russians possessed her, and then the breed of Jack Hamlin, and then – but it is unfair to list the lovers of a lady of so much charm and such indubitable capacity for reformation. Sacramento is the State capital, the geographical pivot of the great twin valleys; she divides with Stockton on the San Joaquin the tribute of their waters. It was here on her banks that the overland emigrant trains sat down to wait for the subsidence of waters in the new world of the West, from here they scattered to all its hopeful quarters.

If the part the city has played in history has been that of a hostel, a distributing station, at least she has played it to some purpose. There are few empires richer than the land the twin rivers drain.