Like most Californians, I’m frustrated with the recent extreme weather we’re having in our state and how our changing climate is feeding wildfires burning through the west. According to Cal Fire data and the Western Fire Chiefs Association, some of our deadliest, most destructive, and costliest fires occurred in the last five years; California averaged 6,769 fires per year, destroying 1,555,292 acres per year and costing into the billions in fire suppression costs. And then there’s the human toll: not only the obvious loss of life, but damaged structures, displaced people and animals, and unhealthy levels of air pollution that result in seemingly countless “Spare the Air” days where it’s necessary to stay indoors with the windows closed.
I shudder at the thought of an open flame in the woods, so I was all the more surprised to learn that Robert Louis Stevenson, one of California’s most notable visiting writers in the 1800s, intentionally started a conflagration in the Monterey forest–and bragged about it in his essay “The Old Pacific Capital.”
Before Stevenson set a forest fire, in the fall of 1879, he arrived in Monterey after an arduous journey from Glasgow and then by train from New York to be with his future wife, Frances Matilda Van de Grift Osbourne (“Fanny”), who he had met in Europe a few years prior. He was a long-haired, sickly, struggling writer; she was “short, dark, pretty, and unhappily married,” in the process of divorcing her husband, and was in Monterey “convalescing from what was then diagnosed as inflammation of the brain,” (306) as Anne Roller Issler, former curator of the Robert Louis Stevenson House (formerly the French Hotel), explains. In Monterey, the relatively unknown Scottish writer was frequently seen with Fanny on the street or at the beach, but their affair brought unwelcome attention. “The other matrons too, matrons of the town’s elite, whether of Spanish or American heritage, looked askance at Fanny, this different woman known to be the wife of Mr. Osbourne,” (310) Issler writes. Caring little for wagging tongues, Stevenson was more focused on making ends meet, writing part-time for the Monterey Californian newspaper, and also absorbing Monterey life.
Although Stevenson only stayed in Monterey about four months, it was a town whose background likely served as inspiration to a number of his stories, and it is legend–and perhaps even true–that Treasure Island was inspired by Point Lobos. But he did not only publish fiction; he would publish an account of his journey to California in Across the Plains in 1892, including the chapter on Monterey called “The Old Pacific Capital.” In 1941, literary critic Lawrence Clark Powell singled out “The Old Pacific Capital” as a foundational writing of the Peninsula in The Pacific Historical Review: “A high standard of writing about this region was set in the last century by Robert Louis Stevenson in ‘The Old Pacific Capital’ and his letters, which in our day has been matched by Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck” ( 99). Issler notes that “His Old Pacific Capital, completed the following year from notes of this period, was nonfiction, both realistic and poetic. Some of his noblest descriptions of the sea–and there are many such in his writing–found a place in this factual picture of the peninsula and its inhabitants” (317-18). That year, it is said, he carried notebooks, rolls of manuscript, and sharpened pencils with him continually, and often walked the beach for miles (317-18). He must have cut a strange figure.
The essay is split into two parts, “The Woods and the Pacific” and “Mexicans, Americans, and Indians,” the former describing the landscape and the latter describing the town of Monterey and various cultures of its peoples. In some ways, “The Old Pacific Capital” is a flawed California classic with the modern reader understandably cringing at much of the racial commentary in the second half of the essay. I agree with Monterey County Weekly editor David Schmalz who recently noted when the paper republished Stevenson’s essay this summer, despite the ways today’s reader may wince, “the arc of the essay is a strident alarm about social injustice . . . His observations about how many Californios were cash poor, though once rich with land, are dead accurate.” I’ll focus instead more on “The Woods and the Pacific,” which is arguably more relevant to the modern reader looking to appreciate the landscape of modern Monterey.
I set out this past September to visit Monterey and explore some of Stevenson’s old haunts. Driving in from the sunny Silicon Valley, the seaside fog appears around Prunedale and you realize you’re fast approaching your beach destination. Stevenson could have also been hit quickly by the fog as he arrived by train to Monterey, but I like to imagine him seeing Monterey for the first time on a sunny day. Regardless, he arrived in Monterey dangerously ill and collapsed upon reaching his destination. It took time and newfound friends to help him get back on his feet and start exploring Monterey (Issler 310-11). Always interested in historical backgrounds–“[Stevenson’s] one purchase in New York City was a six-volume set of George Bancroft’s History of the United States, which he carried by and to California” (Issler 308)–he begins “Old Pacific Capital” summarizing then-Lieutenant William T. Sherman’s observations of California, where Sherman casts his soldier’s eye on Monterey’s topography, comparing the Bay to a fish hook and the roar of the Pacific hanging “over the coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle.” As I sped past Ft. Ord, it struck me that Sherman’s military description of Monterey was more fitting than he’d ever realized. Monterey’s strategic location not only contributed to its being the original capital of California before it was a state, but also becoming home to Ft. Ord, the Naval Postgraduate School, and Defense Language Institute, the last two still operating today.
As the essay progresses, Stevenson is Virgil to the reader’s Dante; we are in the hands of a very skilled poet and guide as we meander towards Pacific Grove together. “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 colour, such degrees of thunder in the sound. The very air is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep,” he writes. He takes his reader to “The Pacific Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort” where “crowds come to enjoy a life of teetotalism, religion, and flirtation, which I am willing to think blameless and agreeable.” Today, it’s a private residence on the corner of Lighthouse Avenue, the main street of Pacific Grove. That day, Lighthouse Avenue was calm but had a steady stream of people. Across the street, I see that the popular Red House Cafe–once featured in an AT&T commercial–is busy. I start to wonder if Stevenson would have appreciated their local calamari, but remember that Stevenson was probably taking most of his meals at what was then the French Hotel. I continue my walk (and partial drive) with Stevenson to the Point Pinos Lighthouse in Pacific Grove. Stevenon’s came from a family of lighthouse engineers, so I imagine it must have been fascinating for him to meet Captain Allan Luce of Point Pinos. Luce, he writes, could be found “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 surrounded by a “wilderness of sand.” Today, the lighthouse is the oldest-operating lighthouse on the West Coast.
From the lighthouse, Stevenson takes us into the woods. He reflects on the danger of California fires, explaining:
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.
Of course, with California’s increased population today and more extreme storm and drought cycles, fire danger is arguably even more pressing. But despite knowing the real danger of forest fire in the 1800s, Stevenson was rather inexplicably compelled to satisfy his own curiosity about flames in the woods. While examining lichen on a Monterey pine–rarer but still iconic in the region today–he confesses,
I wished to be certain whether it was the moss, that quaint funeral 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 scorching, strike a match, and apply the flame generally to one of the tassels. The tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a roaring pillar of fire. . . .
Realizing what he had done, he admits he should have been “run up to convenient bough,” and instead runs for his life. The damage he did, however, was impressive. That night, he checked on his handiwork and seemed in awe of his skill: “. . . there was my own particular fire, quite distinct from the other, and burning as I thought with even greater vigor.” Unlike Mark Twain, who accidentally set off a forest fire, or Robinson Jeffers, who offers insight into the terrible beauty of the natural world in “Fire on the Hills,” Stevenson seems more interested in scientific experimentation–and a bit of arson.
For all his fascination with fire, Stevenson also paid close attention to the infamous fog of Monterey that had even initially made Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillio miss the mouth of the Bay entirely. Today, the fog, like the threat of wildfire, is unchanging.
At sunset, for months together, vast, wet, melancholy fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean. From the hill-top above Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is always sad. . . . Where their shadow touches, colour dies out of the world. The air grows chill and deadly as they advance. . . . Monterey is curtained in for the night in thick, wet, salt, and frigid clouds, so to remain til 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.
Indeed, Monterey has microclimates–some spots are seemingly in a “banana belt” and are sunnier than others, while other spots rarely see the sun until the afternoon, when the fog takes a break and rolls quickly back in time for dinner. No matter which microclimate, the promise–or threat–of Monterey fog is always near. Although the forecast was for a clear fall weekend when I visited, the fog never lifted and I could barely see to the end of Alvarado Street, Monterey’s main drag.
As Stevenson concludes his sketch of Monterey, he admits that “The Monterey of last year exists no longer.” In 1880, Hotel Del Monte opened. “Three sets of diners sit down successively to table,” Stevenson gasped. “Monterey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting-rooms at railway stations, as a resort for wealth and fashion.” Perhaps anticipating the Red House Cafe, Monterey, becoming rather prosperous, continued growing and evolving. And it was not only tourists who visited Monterey. The editor of the Overland Monthly exclaimed in 1909’s piece “Literary Monterey” that explored Stevenson’s relatively recent time in the city, “Monterey is fast becoming a large artistic and literary rendezvous, and as such should be of much interest to the world at large” (19). Little did he know that John Steinbeck, perhaps the Central Coast’s most famous local talent, would put Monterey permanently on the map with Cannery Row in 1945.
In her biography of Stevenson, his stepson’s wife, Katharine Osbourne, muses that “For Stevenson himself his coming to California was one of the most vital and decisive steps in his life. It marked the dividing line between a reckless, intense, but indulgent youth and a deep and sincere manhood” (3). By October, Stevenson was living alone in Monterey; Fanny was in Oakland, struggling with her mental health. At this time, his letters reveal his concern about her, triggering his own illness. He received a diagnosis of pleurisy and barely survived, but remained an invalid for the rest of his life (Issler 321). He only lived fourteen more years, dying at age 44 on December 3, 1894 of a hemorrhagic stroke in Samoa. In his later days, he “sorrowfully called himself Don Quixote” (5), as his travels included France, Belgium, New York, Hawaii, and Samoa. Ultimately, it was his travels that gave the world such classics as Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and A Child’s Garden of Verses. And perhaps without his time in Monterey, a little less inspiration for these classic works of literature and poetry.
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“Cypress Cove, Point Lobos State Reserve” courtesy Annette Elrod.
