Title: The Sea Fogs
Author: Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894
Language: English
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THE SEA FOGS

By Robert Louis Stevenson

With an Introduction by Thomas Rutherford Bacon


Western Classics No. 1

               A sheeted spectre white and tall,
               The cold mist climbs the castle wall
               And lays its hand upon thy cheek.

               --Longfellow.



Introduction


Robert Louis Stevenson first came to California in 1879 for the
purpose of getting married. The things that delayed his marriage are
sufficiently set forth in his "Letters" (edited by Sidney Colvin) and
in his "Life" (written by Graham Balfour). It is here necessary to refer
only to the last of the obstacles, the breaking down of his health. It
is in connection with the evil thing that came to him at this time that
he first makes mention of "the sea fogs," that beset a large part of the
California coast. He speaks of them as poisonous; and poisonous they
are to any one who is afflicted with pulmonary weakness, but bracing and
glorious to others. They give the charm of climate to dwellers around
the great bay. How he took this first very serious attack of the
terrible malady is indicated in the letter to Edmund Gosse, dated April
16, 1880. His attitude toward death is shown here, and is further shown
in his little paper AEs Triplex, in which he successfully vindicates
his generation from the charge of cowardice in the face of death.
Stevenson's two distinguishing characteristics were his courage and his
determination to be happy as the right way of making other people
happy. His courage, far more than change of scene and climate, gave him
fourteen more years in which to contribute to the sweetness and light
of the world. These years were made fruitful to others by his determined
happiness, a happiness in which the main factor, outside of his own
determination, came from the companionship which his marriage brought to
him. The great principles by which he lived influenced those who did not
know him personally, through his gift of writing. He always maintained
that it was not a gift but an achievement, and that any one could write
as well as he by taking as much pains. We may well doubt the soundness
of this theory, but we cannot doubt the spiritual attitude from which it
came. It came from no mock humility, but from a feeling that nothing was
creditable to him except what he did. He asked no credit for the talents
committed to his charge. He asked credit only for the use be made of the
talents.

Stevenson was married May 19, 1880. His health, which had delayed the
marriage, determined the character of the honeymoon. He must get away
from the coast and its fogs. His honeymoon experiences are recorded
in one of the most delightful of his minor writings, "The Silverado
Squatters." He went, with his wife, his stepson and a dog, to squat
on the eastern shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, a noble mountain which
closes and dominates the Napa Valley, a wonderful and fertile valley,
running northward from the bay of San Francisco. Silverado was a
deserted mining-camp. Stevenson has intimated that there are more ruined
cities in California than in the land of Bashan, and in one of these he
took up his residence for about two months, "camping" in the deserted
quarters of the extinct mining company. Had he gone a little beyond the
toll-house, just over the shoulder of the mountain, he would probably
never have seen the glory of "the sea fogs." It would have been better
for his health but worse for English literature.

My first knowledge of that glory came to me twenty years ago. I had come
to California to care for one dearly beloved by me, who was fighting the
same fight that Stevenson fought, and against the same enemy, and who
was fighting it just as bravely. I took him to the summit of the Santa
Cruz Mountains in the hope that we might escape the fogs. As I watched
on the porch of the little cottage where he lay, I saw night after night
what I believe to be the most beautiful of all natural phenomena, the
sea fog of the Pacific, seen from above. Under the full moon, or under
the early sun which slowly withers it away, the great silver sea with
its dark islands of redwood seemed to me the most wonderful of things.
With my wonder and delight, perhaps making them more poignant, was the
fear lest the glory should mount too high, and lay its attractive hand
on my beloved. The fog has been dear to me ever since. I have often
grumbled at it when I was in it or under it, but when I have seen it
from above, that first thrill of wonder and delight has come back to me
--always. Whether on the Berkeley hills I see its irresistible columns
moving through the Golden Gate across the bay to take possession of
the land, or whether I stand on the height of Tamalpais and look at the
white, tangled flood below,--

     "My heart leaps up when I behold."

It remains to me--

    "A vision, a delight and a desire."

When the beauty of the fog first got hold of me, I wondered whether any
one had given literary expression to its supreme charm. I searched the
works of some of the better-known California poets, not quite without
result. I was familiar with what seem to me the best of the serious
verses of Bret Harte, the lines on San Francisco,--wherein the city is
pictured as a penitent Magdalen, cowled in the grey of the Franciscans,
--the soft pale grey of the sea fog. The literary value of the figure
is hardly injured by the cold fog that the penitence of this particular
Magdalen has never been of an enduring quality. It is to be noted that
what Harte speaks of is not the beauty of the fog, but its sobriety and
dignity.

Sill, with his susceptibility to the infinite variety of nature and with
the spark of the divine fire which burned in him, refers often to some
of the effects of the fog, such as the wonderful sunset colors on the
Berkeley hills in summer. But I find only one direct allusion to the
beauty of the fog itself:--

     (1)"There lies a little city in the hills;
     White are its roofs, dim is each dwelling's door,
     And peace with perfect rest its bosom fills.

     "There the pure mist, the pity of the sea,
     Comes as a white, soft hand, and reaches o'er
     And touches its still face most tenderly."

In 1887 I had not read "The Silverado Squatters." Part of it had been
published in Scribner's Magazine. It was only in the following year that
I got hold of the book and found an almost adequate expression of my own
feeling about the sea fogs. Stevenson did not know all their beauty,
for he was not here long enough, but he could tell what he saw. In other
words, he had a gift which is denied to most of us.

Silverado is now a quite impossible place for squatting. When I first
tried to enter, I found it so given over to poison-oak and rattlesnakes
that I did not care to pursue my investigations very far. I did not know
at that time that I was quite immune from the poison of the oak and that
the California rattlesnake was quite so friendly and harmless an animal
as John Muir has since assured us that he is. The last time that
I passed Silverado, it was accessible only by the aid of a gang of
wood-choppers.

Curiously, the last great fog effect that I have seen was almost the
same which Stevenson has described. Last summer we had been staying for
a month with our friends who have a summer home about three miles
beyond Stevenson's "toll-house." It is, I believe, the most beautiful
country-seat on this round earth, and its free and gentle hospitality
cannot be surpassed. We left this delightful place of sojourning between
three and four o'clock in the morning to catch the early train from
Calistoga. Our steep climb up to the toll-house was under the broad
smile of the moon, which gradually gave way to the brilliant dawn.
When we passed the toll-house, the whole Napa Valley should have been
revealed to us, but it was not. The fog had surged through it and had
hidden it. What we saw was better than the beautiful Napa Valley. I
should like to tell what we saw, but I cannot,--"For what can the man do
who cometh after the king?"


(1) This exquisite little poem is unaccountably omitted from the
Household (and presumably complete) Edition of Sill's poems issued
by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1906. It is found in the little volume,
"Poems," by Edward Rowland Sill, published by the same firm at an
earlier date. Mountain View Cemetery is no longer a "little city."



THE SEA FOGS


A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning.
By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where
the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as
stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to
marvel how the qualities could be combined. At an earlier hour, the
heavens in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of
the mountain which shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in
a wonderful compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would
kindle, although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of
our crazy gable. If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that
struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in that
earlier and fairer light.

One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I rose
and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air. The night had
been very still. The little private gale that blew every evening in our
canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly
blown itself out; in the hours that followed, not a sigh of wind had
shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its breaches, was less
fresh that morning than of wont. But I had no sooner reached the window
than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two
bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.

The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was
shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain
slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed.
Napa Valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills
of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a
great level ocean. It was as though I had gone to bed the night before,
safe in a nook of inland mountains and had awakened in a bay upon the
coast. I had seen these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had
risen and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under
fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky--a dull sight
for the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid. But to sit
aloft one's self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of heaven,
and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was strangely
different and even delightful to the eyes. Far away were hilltops like
little islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices
and poured into all the coves of these rough mountains. The colour of
that fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten. For an instant, among
the Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on
the sea itself. But the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what
surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless crystal stillness
over all. Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning
among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in
a trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a
sound.

As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this
sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be. Away in the
extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above the
general surface, and as it had already caught the sun it shone on the
horizon like the topsails of some giant ship. There were huge waves,
stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and yet, as I
looked again, I was not sure but they were moving after all, with a slow
and august advance. And while I was yet doubting, a promontory of the
hills some four or five miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall
pines, was in a single instant overtaken and swallowed up. It reappeared
in a little, with its pines, but this time as an islet and only to be
swallowed up once more and then for good. This set me looking nearer,
and I saw that in every cove along the line of mountains the fog was
being piled in higher and higher, as though by some wind that was
inaudible to me. I could trace its progress, one pine tree first growing
hazy and then disappearing after another; although sometimes there was
none of this forerunning haze, but the whole opaque white ocean gave a
start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a gulp. It was to flee these
poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and climbed so high among
the mountains. And now, behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my
chosen altitudes, and yet came so beautifully that my first thought was
of welcome.

The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the
hills it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean. An eagle,
or some other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over the
nearer pinetops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as if to look
abroad on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with terror, for
the eyries of her comrades. Then, with a long cry, she disappeared again
toward Lake County and the clearer air. At length it seemed to me as
if the flood were beginning to subside. The old landmarks, by whose
disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave
pine tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make their reappearance
into daylight. I judged all danger of the fog was over. This was not
Noah's flood; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift
out seaward whence it came. So, mightily relieved, and a good deal
exhilarated by the sight, I went into the house to light the fire.

I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform to
look abroad. The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last I saw
it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where the Toll
House stands and the road runs through into Lake County, it had already
topped the slope, and was pouring over and down the other side like
driving smoke. The wind had climbed along with it; and though I was
still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing below me, and their
long, strident sighing mounted to me where I stood.

Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the opposite
side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still warded it
out of our canyon. Napa Valley and its bounding hills were now utterly
blotted out. The fog, sunny white in the sunshine, was pouring over into
Lake County in a huge, ragged cataract, tossing treetops appearing and
disappearing in the spray. The air struck with a little chill, and
set me coughing. It smelt strong of the fog, like the smell of a
washing-house, but with a shrewd tang of the sea-salt.

Had it not been for two things--the sheltering spur which answered as
a dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly engulfed
whatever mounted--our own little platform in the canyon must have been
already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous air. As it was, the
interest of the scene entirely occupied our minds. We were set just out
of the wind, and but just above the fog; we could listen to the voice of
the one as to music on the stage; we could plunge our eyes down into the
other, as into some flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge;
thus we looked on upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition
of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from
moment to moment like figures in a dream.

The imagination loves to trifle with what is not. Had this been indeed
the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would
have been similar in kind. I played with the idea as the child flees in
delighted terror from the creations of his fancy. The look of the thing
helped me. And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was
indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it
was also part in play.

As I ascended the mountainside, I came once more to overlook the upper
surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from what I
had beheld at daybreak. For, first, the sun now fell on it from high
overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a great nor'land moor
country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow. And, next, the new level
must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old,
so that only five or six points of all the broken country below me
still stood out. Napa Valley was now one with Sonoma on the west. On the
hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and
through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean into the
blue clear sunny country on the east. There it was soon lost; for it
fell instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the watershed;
and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern
sky.

Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side,
the deluge was immense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it,
rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes. The speed of its
course was like a mountain torrent. Here and there a few treetops were
discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough of a
dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man.
But still the imagination was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for
something more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the
eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled
upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines And yet
water it was and sea-water at that--true Pacific billows, only somewhat
rarefied, rolling in mid-air among the hilltops.

I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf
underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon
Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay. The sunny plain
of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a
gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every second
to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past
the Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in
the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine. About
eleven, however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and
I began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was
the last effort. The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began
to blow squally from the mountain summit and by half-past one all that
world of sea fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the
south in little rags of cloud. And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found
ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside, with the clear green
country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in the
air.

This was the great Russian campaign for that season. Now and then, in
the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen far down
in Napa Valley but the heights were not again assailed, nor was the
surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.



  Here Ends No. One the Western Classics Being The Sea Fogs by Robert
  Louis Stevenson With an Introduction by Thomas Rutherford Bacon & A
  Photogravure Frontispiece After A Painting by Albertine Randall Wheelan
  of this First Edition One Thousand Copies Have Been Issued Printed Upon
  Fabriano Handmade Paper the Typography Designed by J. H. Nash Published
  by Paul Elder and Company & Done Into A Book for Them at the Tomoye
  Press in the City of New York MCMVII





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