THE TREE OF LEGEND AND ROMANCE 



81 



with the rising tide. To hear these tales, one might rea- 

 sonably be led to believe that the abalone, though nothing 

 but a group of muscles encased in a shell, was possessed 

 of the agility of the cat rather than the sluggish move- 

 ment that is typical of his species. I personally have 

 never been able to reconcile my instinctive incredulity to 

 the tales of drowning fishermen imprisoned by the fero- 

 cious abalone, knowing, as I do, that the average tourist 

 whose shoes have been wetted by an unexpected wave is 

 prone to describe his experience as a miraculous escape 

 from a tidal wave of 

 the Pacific. The fact 

 remains, however, that 

 should one unwittingly 

 allow his fingers to re- 

 main beneath the edge 

 of an abalone shell 

 long enough to allow 

 the tremendous clamp- 

 ing power to crush 

 down upon them, he 

 would undoubtedly be 

 either imprisoned or 

 lose his fingers. The 

 practice amongst the 

 fishermen who supply 

 the cannery is to carry 

 a long steel bar, with 

 which they pry the aba- 

 lone from the rocks in 

 a manner that is aston- 

 ishingly prosaic for a 

 creature the permanent 

 abode of which is so 

 beautiful. 



The Carmel Bay, in 

 which the abalones are 

 most plentiful, is the 

 little sister of the Mon- 

 terey Bay, just to the 

 north, and the bits of 

 kelp which dot its sur- 

 face, combined with the 

 strange exotic charac- 

 ter of the trees and 

 promontories that bound it, lend an aspect to the land- 

 scape that suggests tropical scenery of the islands that 

 lie beyond the horizon. With a good cigar, and even an 

 indifferent book, one may spend a happy afternoon in 

 the shade of the cypress, and find at each upward glance 

 with the turning of a page an entirely new setting, with 

 a foreign drop upon the ever-changing stage that con- 

 fronts his western gaze. At his feet is an inlet that 

 begins with purple and ends with gold. Against the sky 

 is silhouetted the squat and sturdy cypress, every line of 

 which expresses tenacity and endurance. As the setting 

 sun passes over the sky, the shadows shift and change, 

 and the setting changes from the Land of Beyond to the 

 Land of Nod with a suddenness that is startling. "The 

 cliffs take on a purple hue, the sea is green and then is 



Photograph by Mark Daniels. 



A SENTINEL THAT BOWS TO THE WIND AND THE SETTING SUN 



Here and there along this portion of the coast an occasional tree stands out and 

 aloof from its fellows with its roots actually lapped by the waves of the sea. 

 They appear like nothing more than sentinels posted at the edge of the sea to 

 warn the forests behind of the fury of the waves. 



blue." Truly, Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed 

 like one of these. 



The chauffeur who one day accompanied me said a 

 visitor exclaimed about the roaring breakers that dashed 

 about the cliffs in a vain effort to wash away the scant 

 soil about a cypress that stood out on a headland like a 

 sentinel, "Isn't it just too cute?" I asked him what had 

 been his reply, and he said he had told her he reckoned 

 it was just as cute as the Battle of Ypres, intimating 

 further that, in his opinion, there were times when one 



was justified in heaping 

 coals of fire upon an- 

 other's head, despite 

 any little repugnance 

 for the odor of burning 

 bone. With the boom- 

 ing of the waves in the 

 cannon cave at Lobos 

 Point, where the en- 

 trapped surf has no 

 other outlet than to 

 roar over its impotence, 

 reverberating along the 

 coast, it was not diffi- 

 cult to agree with him. 

 With all the hue and 

 cry for the creation of 

 more national parks, 

 particularly when it is 

 considered that the de- 

 mand is so frequently 

 strongest where the 

 justification is least, it 

 is strange that this area 

 has not been set aside 

 either as a national or a 

 state park. That it has 

 not is probably due to 

 the fact that the public 

 now enjoy all the free- 

 dom of the locality that 

 could reasonably be de- 

 manded with the added 

 feature of the certain 

 knowledge that political 

 change may not interrupt the generous administration of 

 the district's affairs. 



Public reservations of the character of our national 

 parks are set aside for the purpose of preserving features 

 of unusual beauty and of historic and scientific interest. 

 Here is an area the only one that I know which pos- 

 sesses all three of these characteristics to a marked de- 

 gree. It is the sole abode of a species of wonderful trees ; 

 it is a district of fascinating historical interest, into which 

 are crowded more relics of days gone by than any other 

 equal area in the West, and, above all, it is a veritable 

 gem of exquisite and surpassing beauty. Therefore, de- 

 spite the fact that it is not in the category of national 

 parks, it is deserving of attention as the Cinderella of our 

 national scenic areas that is just coming into her own. 



