Twain's Portrait - Chapter 4 - Bahia de Bodega
Bahia de Bodega is a shallow bay kept open to deep water vessels by dint of ceaseless dredging. It is the shipbuilding center of Alta California, its northernmost port of call, an important railhead, and the clam chowder capital of the world. We disembarked on the eastern shore in a bustling seaport villiage boasting a sandstone town hall, a clapboard opera house, half a dozen adobe churches with their bells all ringing constantly, and a restaurant serving clam chowder every twelve paces.
A great clamor was coming from the open doors of the town hall. I pulled John into the foyer to give a listen. He hung back and I had to pursuade him further. Finally we snuck in and pasted ourselves to the back wall of the meeting chamber. I was eager to witness Alta California’s famous Republican Democracy at first hand.
Between us we translated enough of the rapid-fire Spanish to understand that they were debating the claims of a local carpenter. Two years previous he had hauled a derilect oyster ketch up a slough to rebuild it. In the meantime, the slough silted over, the town leased the newfound land to the railroad for tie storage, and the railroad ran a spur line between the carpenter’s shipyard and the bay. Now the carpenter, having lovingly restored his boat to prime condition, would like the town council (two of whom are on the board of directors of the railroad) to direct the railroad to move 20 tons of ties and rip out their rails so that his boat can be shifted on rollers back to its element. He was to my mind the most hapless carpenter since Saint Joseph built his son’s coffin.
To give the Republican system its due, everyone was allowed to weigh in on the subject. Farmers, townsfolk, the railroad interest, shipbuilders, merchants, indians, and common drunks all put in their two bits worth, simultaneously and at great volume. At one point a shipyard navvy threw a train conductor’s cap on the floor and stomped it. Two Franciscan padres shreaked at each other, face to face, spewing relevant bible verses and fragments of their luncheon. A spotted sow delivered herself of a litter of piglets, and the matter was tabled for further discussion next week.
If all the energy squandered on this debate had been directed to the actual task in hand, the assembled multitude could have picked up the boat, carried it to the bay, and sailed it to San Diego. But don’t take me wrong. I love Democracy. It is the most equitable system whereby every citizen is afforded the chance to share the blame for bad government.
Contrast this lively give-and-take to the tradition-bound muddle that monarchy would make. Your average king would have despoiled the railroad, moved the ketch to the waterline, then impounded it as tribute, and imprisoned the carpenter for shipbuilding without royal charter. Saint Joseph would have been lucky to keep his head.
After all this excitement, I wanted nothing more than to check into our hotel, have a smoke and a nap, then prepare for my lecture in the evening. But no. John insisted on touring the waterfront with his sketchbook, dragging me along to deal with the natives. So off we tramped, down to the shipyards. Sargent is a husky lad, with a taste for the rougher side of town, but he is shy of its usual inhabitants. He likes me along to hobnob with the locals, distracting them so that he is free to sketch the decay and disorder he so admires.
* * *
After the town council meeting Mark Twain accompanied me on a tour of the Bahia de Bodega. We took a ferry across to the headlands, where I was able to indulge my fondness for drawing boats. The scene had everything—a steam boat towing a schooner, rocks and sand and water, a fort, a light house, three figures on the strand, and cannons for good measure!
A native woman was pounding nutmeats on a stone near the breakwater, but she fled when she realized I was sketching her labors. I made a quick thumbnail outline of her pose, thinking that I might use her in a painting later. I did quick studies of two soldiers sitting near the cannon. My hand felt stiff and awkward. I tended to draw the outlines of things, like an amateur, depending on my knowledge of structure, rather recreating the actual appearance of form modeled by light. I had become rusty. I resolved to devote at least two hours a day to drawing, preferable from the figure. I yearned to draw the local Indians, however shy and disinclined to pose.
Twain clambered over the rocks and looked about with his telescope. Most of the buildings and roads were crude, raw, and recently built. Unlike Europe, there is nothing manmade here that is truly old. White people have lived here in numbers less than a hundred years. I was quite taken with the rawness and vitality of the new world. I felt sure that in California I would discover images and emotions of such power that they would take the Salon de Paris by storm.
We walked the shore road back to our hotel. It was a long walk, past sand dunes, trash dumps, warehouses, boat yards, chandlers, derelect hulls, piles of lumber, and all the other charming maritime accoutrements. We stopped to rest at the northeast arc of the bay, where the water was shallow and a boat had been laid on its side so that men could work on its bottom. Twain said they tow the boat in when there is an unusually high tide, until the keel is firmly grounded parallel with the shore. As the tide recedes they “careen” her over on one side, exposing half the hull that is usually underwater, collecting weed and barnacles and wood-boring worms. Then they work frantically, hoping to finish scraping the bottom, replacing planks, caulking and painting and so on—before another very high tide or a storm can push the boat so far inland that it is stranded on terra firma forever.
I was intrigued by the enormous diagonal line of the masts. As if I had never seen a mast before, so accustomed are we to their relentlessly vertical lines against the sky. The yardarms were sagging just a bit off square, creating counter-diagonals. Some of the slacker ropes were sagging with gravity into long, lovely parabolae. With an abandoned ship’s skeleton in the foreground and the long horizontal of the railroad pier in the background, it was a ready-made composition of opposing lines.
I settled down to make a comprehensive sketch. The setting sun raked the forms from the left, and the righthand sky filled up with dark clouds, threatening to overcome the linear composition with interesting tonal possibilities.
I forgot about time. I forgot about myself.
I forgot about Twain, who apparently said goodbye several times without any reply from me, and continued on to the hotel, where I caught up with him several hours later, when darkness had finally chased me from my plein aire studio.
* * *
William Dean Howells
c/o Atlantic Monthly
New York, NY
Dear William:
I am in Bahia de Bodega. “Bodega” in Spanish means “storehouse” and the bay by that name is certainly the storehouse for the northern coast of Alta California. Shipping is nearly as brisk as in my home port of Honolulu. Two trains per day discharge lumber, vegetables, hides and salt meat at the busy waterfront. The lumber trains come right out onto a pier that extends a quarter mile into the anchorage Large cranes can load cargo direct from railcars into the ships, anchored in two fathoms at low water. Hundreds of two-masted sailing schooners converted to steam ply up and down the coast like squirrels on a burning tree trunk.
Today I went with John Sargent to the mouth of the bay to inspect the shore gun emplacement and take a gander at the entrance to the harbor. Sargent sat down to sketch the brig Invierno under tow by the steam schooner Maria Luz. He was entranced by his art for nearly two hours, which I put to good use, snooping around.
Considering that the Russian border is only 18 miles to the north, the Californian soldiers seemed very relaxed and far from vigilant. An army corporal and a Carribe Zoave sailor were sitting on the corner gun, eating their lunch and spitting into the Pacific. There was no sign of powder, wadding, or shot at the gun emplacement, so I would not describe it as in a state of readiness.
Through my glass I studied the fort on the headlands that is the true defense of the harbor. Three men were on the rocks in front of the fort, but there was no other sign of life. No smoke, no movement save the California flag stirring limply in the light sea breeze. The day was so quiet I could heard a seal barking fearlessly from a rock outcropping offshore, in serious danger of becoming a European’s high hat or an Indian’s rain cape. They say that the beleaguered mammals are seldom spotted near shore these days. The marine fur trade on this coast collapsed a generation ago, and has never come back. That collapse may have threatened the economy of this area back then, but there is no sign of a slump now. I would say that business is booming.
An Indian with a skiff saw me spying on the fort, and offered to row me across for a closer look, at bargain rates. It was slack tide and the narrow estuary was glassy as a millpond, so it took mere minutes to pull across to the headlands, where I landed unopposed and took the fort by storm. I dispatched a full brigade of defenders—three sleepy Mexican gunners fishing off the rocks and a sergeant overseeing two Indians replastering a cracked cistern. The soldiers were polite and completely unsuspicious, in marked contrast the many American military men by whom I have been warned away from forts, bunkers, officer’s messes, and other areas of journalistic interest.
The fort itself was tidy, clean, and in good repair. I asked the sergeant how many men were stationed there, and he just shrugged. “More inside,” he said, but not how many. He indicated in broken English, with many hand gestures, that most of the army was to the east, in las montanas, keeping order in the gold fields. Since the discovery of gold in 1854, all commerce in the region has turned one eye at least to El Dorado Sierra, the foothills to the east that supply the Republic of Alta California and Rossland with their lifeblood of dust and nuggets.
If these people are preparing for war, they do not expect it to break out any time soon in this neighborhood.
Your Obedient Servant,
Mark Twain
* * *
Our little locomotive labored mightily, blowing and snorting like a grampus up the steep grade to the town of Occidental. Upon reaching the summit, where the track flattened to something less than vertical, the engineer cut her back to a decorous “chuff-chuff,” like a Boston debutante stifling a sneeze, and we sashayed into the station as if we were not late by forty minutes. I have seen a steamboat captain do the same, booming along full speed ahead to make up time, then ringing down for half full just before rounding the bend in sight of his landing. It cheered me to see a railroad run with some of the old steamboat style. i memorialized the occasion with a photograph.
Dense forests crowded the hills surrounding the tiny pueblo, whose name means “western” in several languages, and lies in all; this place is by no means the farthest west of the Alta California towns. I have noticed this many times—people will name things capriciously, with no thought to the consternation their impulses cause their descendants. The founding fathers of places like Great Neck, Pahrump, and Askew have much for which they should atone.
We were late for our supper, but I told Master Sargent he dasn’t fret, since Occidental is deep in the country, and time is an hour and a half slower in the country than in town. We dined at a restaurant called Gonaditas Negras, which gave me pause at first, since the literal translation seemed to be “Little Black Gonads.” I opened the menu fearing I would find the special of the day was prairie oysters culled from the small black cattle that dotted the surrounding hills.
Fortunately I was mistaken. The menu ran more to spaghetti and ravioli and such exotic Italian truck. We settled on the five-course “family supper,” looking forward to a change from the more usual Californian fare of beans and rice enlivened occasionally by rice and beans. Our order was taken by the owner, Allejandro Gonaditas. He was built like a barrel, squat and perfectly symmetrical from toe to crown, with a bulge in the middle, such that his pantaloons would have plummeted earthwards without the support of his staves, I mean his galluses. I addressed him in cast iron Spanish, and he replied in quite flexible English, after which we gave Spanish a permanent rest.
The rotund restaurateur hollered our order back to the kitchen, where his equally round wife labored in a cloud of steam the escaped through a porthole in a swinging door. He explained that his restaurant’s name derived from the two most prominent families in the area, the Gonaditas and the Negras. They were traditional rivals on the scale of the Capulets and the Montagues, until twenty years ago, when a fortuitous marriage between their scions put paid to the feud forever. The restaurant was named by his father to commemorate the accord. Senor Gonaditas actually talked like that, as if he had learned his English from historical placards put up by the higher classes for the edification of the lower.
The good Senora bustled out from the kitchen with our first course, placed before us plates of brook trout with spaghetti in clam sauce, and retreated to her domain without a word. Because of my overindulgence at the Bahia Tomales clambake, the sight of clams nearly gave me the fantods; but I steeled myself and dug in. John gazed at his plate adoringly and stuffed a checkered napkin down his vest top in preparation for a long siege.
As we ate, our host hovered over our table, pouring wine and sprinkling grated cheese on our noodles and sleeves. He explained that the Gonaditas and Negras were originally from Naples, whence they immigrated in early 1700s, as part of the Sinisterian Diaspora.
Mrs. Gonaditas replaced my empty plate with a second course of veal and round noodles in red meat sauce. It was at this point I made my fatal mistake, and asked our host what on earth was the Sinisterian Diaspora?
He beamed like a missionary asked who was Jesus. It being past the normal luncheon hour and the establishment empty save ourselves, he pulled out a chair and sat with us.
“My people were chased out of Italy by the Inquisition,” he began. “The Pope declared the Gonaditas heretics because they were Sinisterians.”
Having learned most of my Latin from American coinage, I asked, “Does that mean they worshipped evil?”
“No, no. It means they crossed themselves with their left hands.”
“Why did they do that?”
“Tradition. My great great great grandfather was left-handed, and he made the whole family do it that way.”
I thought about this for a moment, leaning back so that Senora Gonaditas could supply me with my third course of chicken with square noodles in green sauce.
“Wait a minute,” I said, “That accounts for the Gonaditas, but what about the Negras? Were they Sinisterians too? Did they have a great great great lefty in the family?”
He looked at me like I was an ignorant boob, as if no one had ever learned me any history.
“The Negras were not Sinisterians. They hated Sinisterians. But they got lumped into the same heresy as us, because they crossed themselves backwards, with their right hands, only starting at the right shoulder and going right-left-stomach-head.” He demonstrated this awkward ritual.
“So they were anti-Sinisterians,” I quipped.
“No, no, no.” He cast another of those looks at me. “Anti-Sinisterians are the backwards and left-handed sect. They were all burned at the stake in 1709. None of them made it out of Italy. The correct term for the Negras is ‘Semi-Sinisterian.”
“You must be joking,” I said.
“Swear to God,” he said, crossing himself with his left hand.
At this point I should have capitulated. It was too many for me. “So…” I said, stumped for words as has rarely happened to me in this life. “Excellent…” I continued, stalling for time, trying to get up a new head of conversational steam. Finally I squeezed out: “And… your family came to California early in the last century.”
“Not directly,” he said. He pulled my plate away so that his wife could serve me course number four, tripe with summer squash and tubular noodles in brown sauce. Sargent held onto his plate, mopping up the last of his green sauce with a crust of bread, then realigning his artillery to attack the tripe. Allejandro smiled in great good humor to see the boy eat.
“First the Gonaditas and the Negras went to France,” he continued, “then England, then Spain. Everywhere they tried to settle, anti-Sinisterianistic and anti-Semi-Sinisterianistic sentiment forced them to move onward. Finally, hounded by hatred, hating each other, but bound together in their heretical misery, they found refuge in California, or New Spain as it was called then.”
“And when was that?” I asked, picking at my squash.
“In 1750, the same year Father Serra arrived in Mexico city. New Spain was full of all the groups the Inquisition had been chasing out of the Old World for a hundred years: radical Catholic mystics, Albigensian revivalists, half-breed Moorish jihadis, social realist painters, conversos jews, political dissidents, outspoken poets and playwrights, free-thinkers of all types.”
I said, “I’ve heard that the Western Church only ever gave lip service to the Inquisition.”
“That is correct,” he said. “The Italian Pope accused them of using rubber thumbscrews and a Paper Maiden. New Spain was paradise for heretics, so the Sinisterian Diaspora finally came to rest on these hospitable shores.”
I glanced over at young Sargent to see how he was taking this claptrap. He was shoveling the last of the tubular noodles down his gullet, listening to us with a glazed expression of satisfied appetite, with no more use for the topic than a rooster has for a hatband. He brightened as the Missus approached with our fifth and last course of lettuce salad with cold semi-ovoid noodles in pale yellow sauce.
I asked, “What was it like in these parts, back then?”
“Wilderness mostly. Indians mostly. The two families followed Serra northward, reaching San Francisco in 1760. They rented two adjoining haciendas from the brother of one of Serra’s mistresses. Then in 1763 there was a big building boom, and they got into the lumber business up here in Occidental. It started as a lumber camp, and gradually grew into a town.”
I interjected, “With Sinisterian and Semi-Sinisterian ghettos?”
“No,” he explained, “They learned their lesson finally. They used their lumber money wisely, buying up all the land around the town as it was logged off. To this day, the Gonaditas own everything west of the main road and the Negras own everything to the East. We meet in the middle and squeeze everyone else into the ghettos.”
I left Allejandro Gonaditas a handsome tip when we paid our bill, in tribute to his ability to spin a yarn. He and his wife waived us farewell from the doorway as we waddled out.
I turned and said, “Goodbye and God bless,” crossing myself with my left hand. He smiled and did the same. She use her right hand and did it backwards. Thus do feuds refuse to die.
We navigated down the street towards the station, slow and careful, with our swollen bellies before us like overladden barges. We tied up to a bench on the platform and settled into a doze to await the next train out of Occidental. When I awoke, I discovered that the wretched Sinisterian had told me such monstrous lies that they swelled my left ear up, and spread it so that I was actually not able to see out around it. It remained so for months, and people came miles to see me fan myself with it.