Snow Mountain Passage (22 page)

The town—El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe—has no pattern, no grid of streets. The road from the north lies between two meandering waterways, rough-hewn irrigation ditches, and the houses are strewn here and there, some facing water, some facing the road, some thatched, some tiled, some with gardens, some with nothing in the yards but the heaped horns and ribs of cattle. The road widens into a dirt plaza, damp from recent rain, free of dust. The tallest building is another whitewashed adobe church. In the center of the plaza, the courthouse is a one-story adobe with a tiled roof, where an American flag flies from a high pole.

Beside the courthouse a U.S. Marine stands guard. Half a dozen more lounge with rifles and bayonets at the ready, beyond a deep moat that looks recently dug. The moat is five feet across and makes a square, and the dirt from the moat has been thrown against a breastwork of stakes not quite as high as the tallest marine. At first glance it is hard to know whether this little fortress has been created to protect the random scattering of cottages and sheds that surround it, or to protect the marines from the inhabitants of the town.

Jim is looking at the flag, the way its colors fold into one another, stripes of white and scarlet overlapping chunks of indigo. His throat thickens. He looks at these young men in their navy jackets. How have they come so far? By ship, no doubt, around the southern cape—in miles, ten times the distance he himself has traveled these past few months—to raise the Stars and Stripes at the farthest corner of the continent. In the muddy plaza of this foreign town, the cut of their uniforms stirs him profoundly. He is a lieutenant, after all. At Sutter’s he signed the paper. He swore the oath. The very sight of the flag tells him he must travel with Valentine’s militia. In his heart he has already joined them. Sutter was right. Until this war is done, there are no men to call upon for aid.

If there is a better way for him to go, he can’t think of it. Not today, with the marines right here in front of him and his flag flying. His nation is at war with Mexico, and he knows more now about what that means, having seen so much country in these recent days, the long valley with its multitude of creatures, and the rippling coastal ranges, and the smaller valleys where longhorns graze, and the fertile plain around this pueblo, and the orchards too. The dawn-burnished apples are in his mind somewhere, not
on
his mind, yet gathered there along with all the rest that he has seen and somehow feels closer to, as if crossing it on horseback brings him that much closer to possessing it.

Yes, he is willing to join them, to ride on across the plaza, though he knows this man is too full of himself. Outside the moat, Valentine speaks to the marines as if he commands their unit, too. One acknowledges him with a finger to the hat. He rides on, like a general reviewing troops. Even his horse seems to strut.

Of all the northern towns, he says to Jim, importantly, we are the largest. We are also the most vulnerable, with so many men gone south to join the colonel. The port of Yerba Buena has its warships. Here in San Jose we have no ships, and no presidio. These marines came down from the fleet to help us hold the town. Thanks to them, my Volunteers are free to roam the outskirts.

They pass an alleyway where a dozen men circle two battered bantam roosters. One bird is tearing out the eye of the other, stabbing at the dark socket with a bloody beak. The men shout wildly, among them two marines, their faces flushed, their jackets loose, suspenders showing. “Pronto!” they cry. “Vamoose! Vamoose!”

Valentine leads him toward a low-slung adobe already filled with voices in the early afternoon. Inside, the light is dim, the tables full. At the first table they stop, and a cry goes up, a call for drinks. These are militiamen, playing cards. Jim is introduced as a new Volunteer, just down from Sutter’s. Another fellow seems to recognize the name. Hands reach out. Chairs shove back to make room at the table. The bartender, a swarthy Californian with a large, engaging smile, brings a new bottle and some glasses. He calls Valentine “mi capitano.” To Jim, with elaborate courtesy, he says, “Buenas tardes, señor. Bienvenidos a San José.”

Jim finds himself in a swirl of toasts and noisy drunken greetings. As the welcoming subsides, as the game resumes, as his eyes adjust to the murky light, he notices three vaqueros heading for the door, like insulted citizens walking out of a public meeting. Their spurs clink with disapproval. Are they scowling at him? At Valentine? At other tables, in among off-duty marines, other moustachioed vaqueros seem aware of nothing but their cards. From a corner Jim can’t see he hears a sound he hasn’t heard in weeks, or months, the alto peal of female laughter. He glimpses a white blouse, a bare shoulder and another blouse. They are playing cards with two marines. He shifts his weight for a better look, but two large men block his view, pulling chairs in close to Valentine.

Around the cards the men are swapping opinions about a report that came in today by courier from Monterey, where militant rancheros are said to be gathering in the hills. It follows hard upon yesterday’s report, dispatched by launch from Yerba Buena—advance parties of the Mexican fleet have been sighted as far north as Santa Barbara, sailing up from Mazatlán with orders to capture and execute all foreigners. Here at the pueblo, two mothers camping with their children—women who narrowly survived the crossing of the continent and now await the return of husbands traveling with Fremont—these mothers say that dark-complected men on horseback surrounded them one night, brandishing swords and swinging lariats, and then laughed hysterically as they rode off into the darkness.

With each story the voices grow louder. The eyes grow wide with drink and indignation. One by one the card-playing vaqueros leave the cantina. Then the women leave. And the bartender too. Valentine, rising to his feet, vows that this time his men will not return empty-handed.

T
HEY SET OUT
early, thirty mounted men and a caballada of fifty horses, heading westward toward dark green ridges, the last low range before the land ends and the sea begins. Above the mountains some distant probing light off the endless water lends its silver to the morning sky.

From timbered slopes the rivulets and creeks come spilling down to stripe the valley. Carlos rides far ahead, toward a winding canyon they will follow into the foothills, and Jim is moving ever farther from where he wishes he could be. He is pulled two ways. Yesterday he was glad to be with Valentine. Today he is cursing the war and the weather and the mushy trail and the Indian guide who chose it and the manzanita bushes grabbing at his stirrups, and cursing Valentine, who rides with shoulders thrown back like a general at the head of a regiment.

Jim knows now who this man reminds him of. Why hadn’t he seen it sooner? The smugness. The theatrical horsemanship. Is he not, in certain ways, like Lewis Keseberg? About the same age. Similar build. A friendlier Keseberg with a caustic humor and a satanic laugh.

The possibility alarms him. Yet he is drawn to it, drawn to Valentine, whose contempt for the adversary somehow suits Jim’s mood, his rising self-disgust. As they ride, Valentine mutters to himself and to anyone who’s listening. They pause in a clearing, to consider the route, and Jim lets himself be prodded by the words.

“These people don’t deserve California, Mr. Reed. They don’t know what they want. They are their own worst enemies. You saw them playing cards with Americans. They are glad to see us in the town. Yet they have brothers and sisters who despise all foreigners and all Mexicans too. No two of them can agree on anything. Families fight with families. How else do you think sixty marines who are usually drunk can hold a town of eight hundred souls?”

As they climb, scouting parties head out to explore the higher ridges. Jim volunteers to lead half a dozen men through a shaded, nameless gully and upward to the topmost pinnacle. Valentine calls after them, bellowing instructions. As his voice rings through stands of pine and redwood, these searches take on a hectic frenzy, a headlong lunging here and there. The horses sweat and fight the muck and rear back wild-eyed on the steep ascents. It’s exactly what Jim wants. He doesn’t want to think, he wants to ride until he drops and fall into a sleep of bottomless fatigue and wake to ride again.

THEY ARE TWO
days making the summit, two days making the descent. A westward-flowing creek takes them down through dense timber to the narrow valley of the San Lorenzo River, lined with more redwood groves and cottonwoods and sycamores and willow. They cross and recross the river, searching for any sign of an enemy encampment, until it passes at last between two promontories set a mile back from the sea.

Here two villages face each other across a marshy delta. On a bluff above the river, dissolving remnants of an adobe compound cluster around old Mission Santa Cruz, named for the Holy Cross. Its bell tower still lies toppled in a heap where it fell during an earthquake. To the east and up a gentler rise, they see the low tiled roofs of Branciforte, colonized by convicted criminals sent up from Mexico, says Valentine with his mocking smile, and named for a Spanish viceroy now long gone.

Adobes are scattered along a mile of dusty boulevard. The caravan parades its length, the throng of horses, the thirty armed riders with bridles clinking. Men stand by their porches waiting to learn who this motley band may be, what they’ll ask for, relieved to learn that all they’ll want today is information and something to drink and a couple of steers to barbecue. In the cantina an American rancher tells Valentine they’ve seen no ships or heard of any passing in the night, though marauding bands were sighted down the coast, or so they’ve heard. Whether these were rebellious Californians, or Mexicans on the march, or reckless Indians posturing in western garb, it’s hard to know.

They move on, heading south around the bay’s curve, across tablelands and down through dunes tufted with seagrass, onto a sandy beach where white surf spills over blue-green water. It’s Jim’s first look at the Pacific, such a spectacle that he is almost glad again for a moment, glad to have come this far. The tide is low. On packed sand the horses kick up flecks of foam and bits of kelp. If only his children could be riding with him on such a day to witness the swarm of seabirds rising off the beach ahead, sandpipers, pelicans, gray-white gulls, squawking and flapping in exuberant protest.

Another river delta turns the caballada inland, searching for the ford. Now Jim sees his family as if they have suddenly joined him here. He sees them as they looked in Illinois, but standing under pine boughs, Margaret, Virginia, Patty, James Junior, baby Tom. Around them a grove of pines makes a kind of barricade. Beyond the pines a bulge of granite, the mountain swelling up from Truckee Lake. Yes. That has to be the place he has looked for, as he has traveled and retraveled the long route in his mind, searching for a spot that can hold and protect them through the wintry weeks ahead. He needs to know that such a spot exists. Finally, like a vision, it has come to him.

He sees the grove, the pale circles of the stumps rimmed with sawdust where trees were felled to make logs to build the cabins. Again he counts the cattle and the horses. Wagon by wagon, family by family they walk through his mind. One by one he counts them. The animals are alive. Then they have been slaughtered, cut up in a timely fashion, and jerked, and the meat will keep, thanks to the cold. And the cold can be fought off with fire. Limbs have been cut and stacked for kindling. Yes. This winter will be hard, but they won’t freeze or starve before the snows recede enough for him to make it through. All the things he would have done have now been done by someone. Milt. Bill Eddy. Charlie Stanton …

The picture is so vivid, Jim himself could be standing in snow beside a cabin. He sees this scene, and holds to it like a drowning man who will grasp at anything that floats, as the Volunteers ford one river, then ford a wider river and swing back toward the curving shore, where a fishhook point makes a sheltered cove for the presidio and custom house at Monterey.

P
EOPLE
tend to think all the beaches on the Pacific Coast face west. Ours happens to face due south across the bay. This time of year the tide runs out so far, sometimes you can imagine you could walk on sand for twenty miles, clear across to the old presidio where Spanish cannons used to guard the Point of Pines. Young men go clamming on days like this. They gather up big, thick pismos by the gunnysack and don’t even need a fork. The wet sand is flat and glistening, and the white shells stick out, sometimes clusters of shells. It’s called a minus tide. The fuller the moon, the farther out the water goes. Sometimes the rising moon is huge in the east, just as the sun sets in the west, lighting the sky on fire, and the fire is reflected in the smooth mirror of a thousand acres of wet sand.

It is glorious then to walk down toward the water’s faraway, receding edge and think that where your head and shoulders are, fish were swimming not long ago, and sea otters and glossy seals out diving for their dinners. Where the water has been six feet deep and soon will be that deep again, you can walk along through air still somehow owned by the sea.

At one end of our beach, cliffs jut out. When so much water draws away from their rocky sides, a wonderland is revealed to you, whole colonies of long black mussels, tiny limpets and barnacles by the thousands, and anemones that will suck the end of your baby finger, and here and there an abalone too. I have seen them a foot wide, curving, crusty saucers clinging to the rocks. These are the shells some people gather up for ashtrays and fireplace decorations and borders for their lawns. Here in the house there is a piece of abalone shell I have kept now for over seventy years, though when I first saw it I didn’t know it was abalone. I did not yet know that word—which is an old Indian word the Spaniards first heard right around here somewhere, along the shores of this bay—nor had I ever seen anything that gleamed in its particular way, as if light from underneath or inside were shining through.