Under the Redwoods

B >> Bret Harte >> Under the Redwoods


My Bohemian wanderings were confined to the limits of the city, for the
very good reason that there was little elsewhere to go. San Francisco
was then bounded on one side by the monotonously restless waters of the
bay, and on the other by a stretch of equally restless and monotonously
shifting sand dunes as far as the Pacific shore. Two roads penetrated
this waste: one to Lone Mountain--the cemetery; the other to the Cliff
House--happily described as "an eight-mile drive with a cocktail at
the end of it." Nor was the humor entirely confined to this felicitous
description. The Cliff House itself, half restaurant, half drinking
saloon, fronting the ocean and the Seal Rock, where disporting seals
were the chief object of interest, had its own peculiar symbol. The
decanters, wine-glasses, and tumblers at the bar were all engraved
in old English script with the legal initials "L. S." (Locus
Sigilli),--"the place of the seal."

On the other hand, Lone Mountain, a dreary promontory giving upon the
Golden Gate and its striking sunsets, had little to soften its weird
suggestiveness. As the common goal of the successful and unsuccessful,
the carved and lettered shaft of the man who had made a name, and the
staring blank headboard of the man who had none, climbed the sandy
slopes together. I have seen the funerals of the respectable citizen who
had died peacefully in his bed, and the notorious desperado who had
died "with his boots on," followed by an equally impressive cortege of
sorrowing friends, and often the self-same priest. But more awful than
its barren loneliness was the utter absence of peacefulness and rest
in this dismal promontory. By some wicked irony of its situation and
climate it was the personification of unrest and change. The incessant
trade winds carried its loose sands hither and thither, uncovering the
decaying coffins of early pioneers, to bury the wreaths and flowers,
laid on a grave of to-day, under their obliterating waves. No tree to
shade them from the glaring sky above could live in those winds, no
turf would lie there to resist the encroaching sand below. The dead
were harried and hustled even in their graves by the persistent sun, the
unremitting wind, and the unceasing sea. The departing mourner saw the
contour of the very mountain itself change with the shifting dunes as
he passed, and his last look beyond rested on the hurrying, eager waves
forever hastening to the Golden Gate.

If I were asked to say what one thing impressed me as the dominant and
characteristic note of San Francisco, I should say it was this untiring
presence of sun and wind and sea. They typified, even if they were not,
as I sometimes fancied, the actual incentive to the fierce, restless
life of the city. I could not think of San Francisco without the trade
winds; I could not imagine its strange, incongruous, multigenerous
procession marching to any other music. They were always there in my
youthful recollections; they were there in my more youthful dreams of
the past as the mysterious vientes generales that blew the Philippine
galleons home.

For six months they blew from the northwest, for six months from the
southwest, with unvarying persistency. They were there every morning,
glittering in the equally persistent sunlight, to chase the San
Franciscan from his slumber; they were there at midday, to stir his
pulses with their beat; they were there again at night, to hurry him
through the bleak and flaring gas-lit streets to bed. They left their
mark on every windward street or fence or gable, on the outlying sand
dunes; they lashed the slow coasters home, and hurried them to sea
again; they whipped the bay into turbulence on their way to Contra
Costa, whose level shoreland oaks they had trimmed to windward as
cleanly and sharply as with a pruning-shears. Untiring themselves, they
allowed no laggards; they drove the San Franciscan from the wall against
which he would have leaned, from the scant shade in which at noontide he
might have rested. They turned his smallest fires into conflagrations,
and kept him ever alert, watchful, and eager. In return, they scavenged
his city and held it clean and wholesome; in summer they brought him the
soft sea-fog for a few hours to soothe his abraded surfaces; in winter
they brought the rains and dashed the whole coast-line with flowers, and
the staring sky above it with soft, unwonted clouds. They were always
there--strong, vigilant, relentless, material, unyielding, triumphant.