Diablo I

Having got up the services of a team of mules for the week, they struck out quite like a band of gypsies. In the dull heat of the inland summer morning it quickly became the fashion for the women to don headscarves. And with that the resemblance was complete.

It had been a terrible flurry of organization before they set out. Hiring all the appropriate materials for such an expedition had become considerably more difficult as the time of any serious or sensible individuals considering mining—which is not to discount the far reaching boons still being had by those incorporated groups—crept further into history. And on the reverse, it had not yet become the vogue for large parties, including ladies, to test the wilderness for leisurely adventures. The resultant admixture of too delicate finery and gruff worksmen materials gave the party a joyous—perhaps delirious—air of the ramshackle.

The ferry ran regularly from the Pier buildings to Oakland harbour and the on to Port Costa, a newly bubbling hub for railway traffics. Ferry travel, especially in such a calm bay as San Francisco's gives one the sensation of mastery over nature's formidable elements. The ship steams and skips along the flat water pushing wind delectably through one's hair. And yet with just enough bounce, one recalls readily enough that they are yet upon the same water that runs the world round is the peril of so many brave men. The simplicity of the ferry contains all the art of man's ability to tame nature. Or perhaps better, the art of tricking nature as long as reasonable conditions remain. The genius of the ferry is as a contrivance. They are not only simple beasts that skit rapidly and headstrong along the waters. It is their conscious limitation that lends them the air of brilliance. They always play the same hand again and again and are all the while fairly reassured that they will take the trick. This too is mankind's genius: the ability to judge in advance whether or not a game is worth playing. Usually that alone is enough to save one's hide.

Despite the delicacy of the party, such games of several varieties were afoot amongst them. The ferry ride and the initial clatterings of the band, however, were terribly uneventful.
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They stayed the night at Port Costa where they were to obtain the next day their horses. A ride of nearly twenty miles stood before them and tho the mules had the gear that there were no mechanized means of traversing the distance seemed ghastly, even appalling. That none of the modern marvels of mechanization could aid them in penetrating such a distance seemed fairly unthinkable. At least to some of the party, who had unshakable faith in modern innovation and stood frustrated when faced with any of its particular limitations.

Luckily there were still significant roadways heading south out of Port Costa for some miles. They could take a carriage through the foothills' easy undulations and on into somewhat of a valley. They would then, however, trudge some three miles easterly to make their first camp at the northern base of the sleepy beast they wished to summit. Of course the summit itself would have been an easy feat, perhaps a mere day's stroll had not a man in their party,  ______, been interested more in surveying the whole of the surrounding lands. That and of course there were ladies in the company that had to be considered. All three had sworn, however, that no special consideration would at all be necessary to accommodate them. And while they were perhaps eager to prove this, it was an impossibility within the gentlemanly mind. Even the mere mention of a ladies presence will cause a man's mind to snap into all kinds of decorum. In the man, this need not speak well of him. Indeed it may be all the clearer sign of his own guilt at what he might have done had not a women been present. Suffice it to say, they had brought with them the traveling caravan mentioned before with all the fineries of the city made portable—a transition which is nonetheless mutating, occasionally to the point of satire. They had also hired several horses on the thought that those who wearied of the hike could hop aboard for a break. All in all they were excessively over-encumbered for a wild so near the heights of civilization—if one can yet call San Francisco that—so mild in its demeanor, so tame.

Port Costa proved a joyous, if rough around the edges, town. It had not lost the western character of the masculine public sphere. The town was nothing more than a commercial trading hub with its attendant saloon social life. At this date, however, it seemed already a nostalgic recreation of freer times when men were not gathering to discuss the volubility of the Peruvian rice trade, but the dangerous work of mining and land speculating. This phantasy crept along in the backs of bars, unspoken but appearing in the gruff gestures of the otherwise upstanding entrepreneurs.

To the party, the town seemed the authentic frontier past, so far was it from modern San Franciscan social life in which one could no longer pretend that the domestic world was something for the eastern cities, something for men to return to after they'd made their fortunes. The party's ladies revealed in this freedom more than their men. To them it was a novelty and not a nostalgic loss. It was their first stop on a pastward trajectory that would eventually take them to the beginnings of civilization by viewing—albeit from a safe and comfortable distance—the lives of the Indians. If the men didn't share these illusions it was not for more liberal hearts, but from an intense focus on making the journey profitable, of that continued speculation that ran just below the surface.

Of course, speaking of either the ladies or the gents of the party as a lump is like to abuse everyone at once with opinions they would never din to accept.

As such, the party:

Mr. X, the founder of the trip, a land speculator with a reputation as somewhat of a playboy (with sights on land and Miss C)

Mr. G, a cartographer and naturalist by efforts, the trust fund recipient of a large mining operation by trade (with star-eyed wonder at Miss C...ohh...competition)

Mr. Y, a brilliant old businessman and socialite, wearying of the game (with eyes for no one in particular, but as an old bachelor, happy to meet nice young ladies of any stripe)

Miss C, a beautiful young heiress with romantic notions and old world grandeur (really just happy to be in dazzling company, distracted by these worldly things, but not consciously shallow)

Miss A, a headstrong young women testing the limits of the social fabric, raised in the California wilds (with eyes of fire and determinations, ruled by her unhappiness at a women's limitations in the open world)

Mr. H, a poor adaptable sort, a hardworking, jovial writer for the San Francisco papers & emergent arts and critic scene (the ascendant middle class mind worker, too kind hearted to social climb)

The Mr. Bs, a lovely couple having in compact with each other produced a large amount of newspaper wealth (no one had ever known which of them was indeed the brains of their fortune or if perhaps theirs was a true symbiosis)

It being the West social forms were never rightly allowed to crystalize. There certainly were pretensions towards such a thing throughout, but they could hardly survive the continual tumult that left one without a solid set of peer on which to place the hopes of descent society. Anyone claiming to come from an old aristocracy was either from back east—and therefore willfully alienating themselves—or some poor holdover from grand old Europe itself—in which case they were usually so broke that the charm and novelty of their position was all they ever had to trade on. And this, rather than the high mightiness of true aristocracy, was more of a carnival feat that would allow them to entertain the gawking westerns with tale of having once met Victoria herself. Which, once told immediately began depreciating in value on each subsequent telling.

This party, described perfectly the highest of the San Francisco scene, for one cannot properly related that scene without such an enjambed set made up of some higher, some lower, some smarter and some duller. It would be impossible, for instance, in these late days with Victoria dead and her cloud of feminine submission disappearing, to imagine San Franciscan society without a headstrong young women—testing the limits of the social fabric. In this party, Miss A played that role to a tee. She had not married and appeared not to be interested in doing so. She had plenty of money from her father and had found a set quite willing to let her into society with only a modest amount of fear at her liberal tendencies. It was conjectured that she too would eventually marry, but that it would likely be some poor chap content to writhe under her thumb all his days. Presumably also, had she any desire for serious travel there were still all too many places she would be immediately barred from without the aid of a husband. And she was much too smart to be barred from anywhere.

The others in the party accorded just as well with the great Californian originality. Mr. H was another potentially anomalous figure, but contained as well too much genius to be put out my any simple laws of formality. His birth was too plain for anyone to regard with any interest. His father was not a blackguard and therefore couldn't raise any contempt. Nor was he a man of any consequence. H's upbringing, as such, was ignored in total. He had, however, proven himself an eloquent wordsmith at all levels. He seemed to operate at once as a petty contract journalist and the most astute lecturer and social critic. All the while, he presented an air of sweet timidity. His insights in the nature of man were not undercut by this but entered the hearers consciousness as if they had been thoughts of their own, so natural they were.  If H's success had been limited thus far, it was only on account of its renown being enclosed within the relatively minor net of San Francisco's society. This was an adroit move on the part of that city's society, so conscious of other brighter scenes across the country and the world with whom they were not yet able to compete. And H's freedom—with no history, family or monetary ties—would assuredly allow him to fly from their grasp without a moment's hesitation.

While Mr G. was not a calculating man, this very trip was one element in fixing Mr H to the environs of that fair state. G had a passion of California's landscape. The ochre hills of Autumn presented to hill all the loveliness of Elysium. Even as a grown man he had vivid visions of himself running freely up their easy incline into some bright and unknown land. It was as if the hills would at once give onto some perpetual landscape that would no longer have need for social propriety or even the base necessities of life. Upon reflection, an activity he excelled in, these loves were precisely why he had made such a hobby of cartography. Happy, in this age, with his wealth, hobby had easily transported him to the forefront of the field. New surveys were being done throughout the state and his expertise had gotten him awarded the role as Executive General Comptroller of Land Survey in California. That is, he accounted for and reviewed every element of the new survey. This trip, however, allowed him to once again be an active member of the project on the very land he loved. Somehow this little inland region had been thus far neglected offering nothing so daring as large granite peaks, nor so languorously luxurious as the wave addled shores. No, these were merely undulating hills of dry grass. And he loved them unduly.

But the rest of the party can attend to themselves for presentation. The night at Port Costa wrought little in the way of adventure. The entire party supped the Bull's Inn's dining room. The ladies adjourned then to the salon to take café. The gents abjured and paced the town instead, presumably to talk shop and perhaps reconnoiter the local trade scene. Miss A was ruffled to be stuck in a shabby hotel's drawing room without chance of escape or adventure. All the more so for the fact of their so near proximity to wild areas free of social restraint. Her own party knew well her rebellious nature and were quite content to let her indulge it. It would even in a more gruff trading town, however, be impossible for her to enter society unattended. She roiled as the coffee percolating. A shabby room indeed they were in the same room as the cookstove, tho it was also the room's source of heat. Whether that added to or detracted from the scene varied for perspective to perspective.

Outside the men walked the boards two by two by awkward lingering one, as groups of odd numbers on thin walks must. Tonight Mr. G was left to speed up or hang back as the two conversations in advance and behind him required. When left to his lonesome he dreamily looked around at the scant buildings modeled after those of San Francisco. They had an austere loveliness heightened by their being cut into this slim valley. They huddled like a brilliant group of settlers in the early days of the west, surrounded on all side by encroaching savagery and none the less holding their heads up high. Rightly or wrongly thought Mr. G. Who while a homme social to the highest degree also held deep sympathies for the land and those who had so much better tended it before civilization's arrival. Their lack of records, of course, was their defining fault. One he meant to correct. In his surveys, he stressed not only intense accuracy to the land, but also did his best to discover every last ounce of traditional lore—names, myths, traditional uses—about any and all distinctive features therein. He'd worked within the limits of scientific accuracy and decorum to include as much of this information as possible. Whenever there was no new name for a landmark, he would insert the original name transliterated as best he could. Even when there were more modern names, he would occasionally sneak in the former names as the labels of various other local peaks and outcroppings which stood more as the precise details of the place rather than their overarching names. He'd also recently begun including, as in maps of old, small caricatures of native legends at the edges of his maps. These he would label and pawn off as simply a reference to maps of less scientific times—a history he was terribly proud of.

Diablo, were they were headed now, had a complex history that both vexed and perplexed him. It figured so prominently in the myth of the local natives and yet seemed to carry no name at all. Its current moniker as well, coming from California's spanish times, was simply an amalgam of misinterpreted tales. The tale that had stuck embedded this misinterpretation within it and seemed simply not to regard it as a trouble. It went that natives early in the Spanish conquest had seen an fully regaliaed conquistador emerging from the thickets and thought him—metal clad and ferocious—the very devil. The colonialists laughed at the native simplicity, tho they perhaps missed the clear implication against the invaders in the figuring of that simplicity. The name stuck, but unfortunately on the wrong locale. Bad translation had moved the story from thickets to the grand mountain that lumbered well beyond them. Perhaps the centrality of the mountain for the natives lent the air of authority and fear implicit in the name Diablo to the mountain. No matter how it occurred, three cultures converged into an embedded pattern of error. G did not know what to make of it. His desire to correct it ran strong, but he had no sense of how.

His current hope was for some bit of inspiration to direct him once in the mountain's presence. It had remained hidden throughout the ferry ride despite its persistent visibility from so many other approaches. If they had come from the north or the east, it would have been their landmark for the entire voyage. Now it was only a too near spectre sitting in wait for them. Even crooked in this ravine now they could make out nothing of the swelling behemoth whose foothills they were already amongst. He felt the need to correct himself even now. The mountain was no towering giant. Its massiveness lay in its sprawl. It was indeed a fat mountain that slinkily let onto its surrounding foothills without notice. Essentially it never transcended its landscape. Instead it consumed it. It was a pinnacle only in the sense that it swallowed up the region. The greek omphalos rang in his mind. The only word he really knew for a mystical center of this sort. A word that then gave onto images of umbilical feeding.

These were the thoughts, growing ever more magnificent, that caused him to jumble his part in both the conversations to his fore and aft. The two sets were appropriately mismatched and could both use G's social lubricant to make their conversations go. This was better for everyone, however, than the appearance of closed ranks the reverse order would of produced. Their natural pairings would easily have splintered the group leading inevitably to one set or the other fearing some sort of social coup or conspiracy. As such X and B strolled side by side with Y and H trotting slowly behind. The only other possible division—besides the aforementioned which would have put newsmen in one place and speculators on the other, natural enemies those—would have split the party by age and youth. While a less volatile combination, nonetheless divisive for someone.

"H, you're a young devil taking our world by storm. It makes me proud in a ridiculous way. I've only felt fatherly about one thing in life and that's being able to get on." Evident in Y's tone was the landman's natural aversion to publicity and all those associated with its being brought out. But H's brilliance had won his reluctance acceptance. H'd awed quite a lot of people in his coming to the fore. He held himself with perfect poise as he straddled the myriad fissures of the social, intellectual and greater public worlds. He never wrote gossip, never traded at all on the caché of his associations. Nor did he bully anyone with his intellectual acumen, tactfully grasping that the social world's limits were not sound, reasonable logical boundaries, but rules of the game.

"I've always only done what I can. I've had help every set of the way. B has been a pure patron for me, of the kind that seem to have died out long ago."

"You're right I'm sure. But help was never free and many a better man than I threw it away without making the slightest use of it. You've got an eye for these things, or a fire more likely. And that's what I like to see. No man ever made himself, but more than a few have unmade themselves with one fool move or another." Y pulled on his long cigar whose plume hovered along the boards in a general accumulation with the expiring smoke of every other cigar. Not a small exhaust hung over the entire time from simply this activity. One grew used to it like anything else. San Francisco, of course, was permanently stained from its fabrics to brick facades with the scent. Out here, however, it took on the masculine aroma of conquer, a small chimney stack in the wilds billowing forth the still faint emanations of a culture on the move. Both Y and H had philosophies of the cigar and despite the fact that it could never have been a topic of their conversation they were more or less in general accord with each other. Cigars were democracy par excellence. They were the right of every man and existed in such ways that every man could have one from the lowliest beggar to the highest born, from the fiery desperado to driest bookkeeper. What made this availability possible, however, was the grandest variety. A mean cigar could be got up from the cheapest of leavings and do its job. Or, as Y dragged and sputtered out smoke, one could be produced of any particular rare strains, any delicate tannings and dryings, any propitious blend, all kept of course at the height of freshness. The danger of course, that was not one in the eyes of Y, was that availability of one kind was not equivalent to availability of the whole or of choice. Y could of course have anything he wanted at any quantity he wanted. This seemed right enough to him and he was happy just to know that even the destitute could have something, tho he'd no wish to limit himself or help them much further than that. H, not having come from money or as yet having much himself, felt perhaps more liberal in his consideration of the differences between excess and privation, but at the same time liked it when his metaphors lined up as neatly as this. For him, cigars offered a clear visible representation of the real state of things in democracy that was more likely to hide behind the niceties of political and humanitarian speech. And so he was pleased seeing it even if the sight itself belied something slightly ghastly.

Mr X and Mr B conversed as well. Tho their discussion were of lighter stuff. X was an inward man, at least this early in a business.
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In the morning they rose early expecting a hot day. After taking coffee and laying on their expedition clothes—leaving at the hotel the transitional finery they'd worn on the previous modes of travel—they descended to the board, where, in the street, there was a small produce market. Miss A advised they load up on comestibles with such a bevy before them. Of course they had food enough already. But it was the dry ratty stuff of long western exhibitions suited better for long stays in the mountains than brief jaunts to the foothills. As happy as A was to get back into the outer world, this journey seemed fated to be more of pleasure fête unable to leave behind the real trappings of the city than any true escape from it. Along with their food and the mules to carry it and the horses to carry them, there were also two or three cook/guide/everymen who would be tending to the particular side of things. This took so much joy out of the thing for A. Luckily they were hearty men and she hoped late to loosen their tongues on their own stories, to share with them the distain for things so delicate, fine and false. That would have to wait of course until the civilized world has sloughed off at least a little more of its delicacies.

The day was indeed hot. Even by eight in the morning you could snuff it in the air, that world as oven scent, the faint earthen nose. The smell was also dust, for they were entering into the dry grass hills and every clop of hooves shot up more plumes of the stuff. They were to ride in the foothills for some time before dropping into the valley. The logic of this had nothing to do with ease or even the beauty of the landscape—tho these mild hills cut a languorous impression of easy and immense natural freedom—but for some small business Mr. X had with the rancher who owned the majority of them. Perhaps too it was in attempt to avoid the increasingly seedy business regions surrounding Martinez, which while indelicate for the ladies, might also have brought both Mr X and Mr Y in contact with quite a few unfriendly competitors.

The party moved along quietly on their mounts. They had been warned against rattlesnakes by their guides but had as yet not had a moment of trouble. Indeed the day was all stillness and the hot buzz of crickets like electric current passing always at the distant edge of your step. The ladies—Mrs B and Miss C that is—were already showing a faint disappointment at not seeing any wildlife. When it came out that they had expected the outside world to be just teeming with creatures large and small the party had a friendly laugh. No, they were told, animals were by nature skittish of people, but we were bound—once settled into a camp further into the wilds—to glimpse the stray creatures unaware or untroubled by our presence. Soon after, however, they met with a group of grazing cattle. These, tho not wild, beasts were enough to content the ladies that they were indeed in a wilder place than San Francisco. At least as far as creatures go.

They soon descended into a grassy plain, empty in itself and giving over in nearly all directions to increasing foothills and, tho beyond there vision, the numerous inlets of the delta—that last faint grasp of the Pacific ocean. The emptiness of the valley struck them with a coddled beneficence. Those earlier peoples, now scattered to the wind—a kind metaphor to replace 'driven by the bloody point of a spear—must have felt in these valleys a satisfied motherly embrace. Tho dry, there was near consistent temperature and the perpetual presence of water. G was gone in imagining les petits villages indigène. He had romantic notions of their simple egalitarian world, free from ascendant mobility and the charades of social grace. The limits of his thinking would make him blush it pushed to examine them. He was a rational enough man, but there were certain fantasy spaces that we had over-invested himself in, perhaps in his earliest youth, when at the edge of his cultural horizon he knew there still existed an alternative world to his youth. In his fantasy still, he let the kind metaphors will out, letting himself imagine that nomadic as the people were, they had simply moved on into some unseen distance in which they could not be squeezed onto thinner and thinner tracts, in which indeed he might on day follow if he found himself severely broken on the social, civil scene of his own world. A was more a realist, H a critic. Somehow the valley had reminded them too of the earlier populations and they took up a conversation amongst themselves of the people.

A'd met any number of natives out in the wide world under various conditions. She'd been witness mostly to the 'reservations,' which seemed to her empty of all things preservative. H rejoined this with an argument to the very nature of the preservative. Why, he opined, are we so convinced that we can stay things simply by setting a fence around them, cordoning off a specific subset as if it could in anyway maintain the semblance of the whole. It is the particular disease of our time to believe anything can live which is represented. Anything can be saved 'neath the bell jar. A in retort spoke of the beauty of bell jars, tho primarily in an attempt to rile H. They were indeed immaculate creations worthy in their own right...perhaps she mused, even deserving of their own bell jars. Both laughed at the image of the matryoshka jars. But quite seriously, H continued, as we reinvent the world with machines, we allay our fear of change by demonstrating this ability to preserve. But all is just delay and falsehood. Does the caged beast of a zoological preserve retain, transmit and continue its life as such? Certainly it can't. Tho you might say it is capable of producing offspring who might. But isn't that just a pure vision of the machination of the whole world? Ten centuries of tigers bred in cages cannot in one day return to all their wildness. They are house cats. The ancestors of house cats. It is as if we believe the beast were an organic clockwork capable of remaking itself exact in its kin and that is all that is needed to retain precisely that machine. The same for these people, gone. Tho we, we, are granted exception.

They'd traversed in valley in good time and at its edge where the foothills begin to roil, they laid camp. They would be three days in the mountain and environs and this camp was the start of that world and that time, their own petit village.