Robert found it hard to leave Calaveras Grove, not knowing when he would come again to see the giant trees. When he glanced back at the tawny bark beyond the smaller trees, his chest felt tight. He was glad, then, to be riding with William Lobb, as it forced him to look and think ahead.
They took the road down to Murphys, a route that should have taken only a few hours but with William Lobb took the whole day. He was constantly distracted by what he saw, and stopped to inspect what looked to Robert like nondescript flowers, taking quick notes and making sketches and pressing them between the pages of his notebook. Some of them Robert knew: lupines, pussypaws, cow parsnip. But others he was unfamiliar with, like the fiddleleaf, a purple-flowered plant with sticky oval leaves that Lobb was keen to collect. Still others even Lobb didn’t know. It occurred to Robert only later that this might have been the first time anyone paid real attention to some of those flowers—that Lobb was studying them and in fact would eventually give them their name.
He also had Robert dig up a few more seedlings—not of sequoias, since they had moved out of range, but of incense cedars and ponderosa pines. He watched closely as Robert placed the spade near the first cedar seedling, paused, moved it a little further away, then hesitated with his foot on the top of the blade. “Go on, lad,” Lobb said. “A firm foot and a clean slice is what you want.”
Robert cut swiftly through the duff, four slices around the seedling, and pulled it out in a square of dusty, needly soil.
“That’s right. Now, pop it in the pail.”
He directed him in digging up three more seedlings, then must have felt Robert had mastered it, for he moved on to showing him how to press flowers for drying. By the end of the day Robert was beginning to understand the rudiments of plant collecting.
From Murphys they traveled along other roads and paths that led through the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas onto the flat plain of central California. The shift from the conifer-dominated mountains down through the hills covered with dried golden grass and clumps of evergreen canyon oaks meant there were few opportunities for collecting, as the oaks were of no interest to the English. William Lobb was dismissive of them. “No reason ever to send scrubby things like these to a country famous for its oaks. Ah, the oaks of England—now there’s a tree. If redwoods are the backbone of California, oaks are of England. Huge, gnarled, full of personality. Do you know Charles II hid from soldiers in an oak tree in Shropshire? The tree was so popular that afterwards people killed it by taking bits of it as souvenirs. A lesson for Billie Lapham in that.”
It turned out William Lobb was quite a talker. He and his brother Thomas had grown up in a quiet village in Cornwall, and both had then gone on to have remarkable lives as plant collectors. Over the ride to Stockton, Robert heard all about Lobb’s travels, to the northern and southern parts of California, but also further afield, to Panama, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil—indeed, all over South America. He heard of snow and steep mountain passes, wars and assassinations, illness and delay. Robert himself had had adventures, of course; it was impossible to cross America as he had without incident. He had been thrown in jail and hidden from Indians and almost drowned crossing rivers and been stalked by wolves and wildcats. But Lobb’s travels were several notches more exotic, made even more so by the matter-of-fact way he described the harsh landscape and blizzards and brutal sun and the encounters with locals and the shootings and the government revolutions.
He underscored his stories with bitter and sarcastic remarks about James Veitch, the English nurseryman who had sent William to South America and California and Thomas Lobb to Asia to discover and collect plants. “He hasn’t got a clue what Tom and I have to go through to get plants for him—to make money for him. I doubt he’s ever set foot on a ship, or camped in snow, or ridden for twenty hours a day. He complains when the stagecoach from Exeter to London gets stuck in the mud! Dolt.”
Mostly, though, Robert heard of plants: long lists of Latin names he didn’t recognize, not even when William Lobb showed him sketches in his notebooks. Passiflora mollissima. Embothrium coccineum. Tropaeolum lobbianum. Crinodendron hookerianum. Tropaeolum azureum. Araucaria imbricata. The common names were equally exotic. Passion flower. Firebush. Lantern tree. Flame flower. Blue nasturtium. Monkey puzzle. The last name made Robert smile. “A Chilean pine,” Lobb explained. “Peculiar looking. Doesn’t have needles, but thick shiny spines grow all over the branches and on the trunk too. Someone looking at one growing in Cornwall said it would be a puzzle for a monkey to climb it—those spines are sharp, draw blood. Silly, really, as there aren’t any monkeys in Chile. But that’s how they are back in England—lump all the faraway countries together, have ’em share plants and animals. At least the name’s a good one.”
As he listened, Robert began to understand how limited his knowledge of plants and trees was. He knew birches from aspens, beeches from hornbeams, maples from sycamores. But he could not tell all of the Californian pines apart, the gray pine from the coulter, the bishop from the knobcone from the Monterey. William Lobb spent a long time by the fire that night describing the pyramid shape of the bristlecone fir, its beautiful dark green color, its singular cones with their leafy bristles. Robert had never even heard of it, much less seen one.
That night he lay wrapped in his blanket, head on his saddle, and let the names stream through him. Begonia. Rhododendron. Amaryllis. Mallow. Fuchsia. He didn’t know any of them, and wanted to.
By the time they reached Stockton they had lost one of the sequoia saplings, which snapped off when the buckskin shied at a partridge fluttering out from the undergrowth. Lobb was sanguine about the loss. “I fully expect to lose the other one as well,” he said. “If we don’t lose it on the way to San Francisco it’ll likely die on board the ship taking it to England. The seedlings stand a better chance. But seeds are best.”
From Stockton they took a steamboat down the San Joaquin River to San Francisco. Robert had seen these steamers going up and down the rivers between Sacramento or Stockton and San Francisco, but never been on one himself. Nor had the gray. Predictably, he rebelled against the floating sensation under his feet, rearing and kicking as Robert led him on board and managing to knock over the other sequoia sapling and trample it. “That’s one to your horse, one to mine,” William Lobb remarked, throwing the broken tree into the river.
The gray continued to buck and kick in the rickety stalls until Robert held him around the neck and put a sack over his eyes. At last the horse grew calm, and Robert was able to rejoin Lobb on deck.
As the boat paddled down the river, they stood together and watched the scenery pass by. Miles and miles of flat, fertile land stretched out before them: grasses browned from the long summer sun, broken by oases of green where there was water and people had settled and built farms. Occasionally they saw groups of Indians walking with baskets full of acorns, or riding in groups, a long string of horses paralleling the river. They stopped and watched the boat, which was still a novelty even though there had been steamers up and down the San Joaquin for several years now. Young boys fishing abandoned their poles and ran along the bank, racing the steamer. Robert could feel himself being pulled west, a sensation he’d had for much of his life.
“Where do you stay when you’re in San Francisco?” Lobb asked as they watched the boys on the bank grow tired and turn back.
“I’ve never been.” Robert was ashamed to admit that he had been in California almost four years and not yet been to its biggest city. Gold had been like a magnet that held him fast to the Sierra Nevadas, even when he was no longer mining it.
“Ha! You’ll either love it or hate it. I can guess which.”
They crossed the San Francisco Bay and headed towards the shore, Robert marveling at the wide water, the hills, and the hint of ocean beyond. Landing at one of the quays, he and William Lobb were swept up into the bustle of hundreds of men loading and unloading ships from all over the world. They did not linger, however; Lobb led them away
from the docks and into the city.
Riding through the streets, Robert discovered that of all the cities he had been to—Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Salt Lake City—San Francisco was by far the worst. Its geography should have made it beautiful and eye-catching, for it was shaped by hills and water so that every part of it boasted a dramatic view. Instead it turned out to be a rough, muddy, smelly place, stripped of trees because they got in the way of the rapid building needed to house the burgeoning population, which had grown from one thousand to thirty-five thousand in four years. Buildings were laid out in a rough grid pattern and crammed together in rows that tiled up and down the slopes. There was no grace to all of these right angles so at odds with the city’s natural surroundings.
They passed dozens of saloons, with men staggering in and out of them, and riding fast up and down the streets like water pouring through a sluice. Robert recognized the greedy, impatient, desperate, careless character of miners on a spree, here to spend their earnings since there was little to do up at the mining camps. They seemed to need to match the speed of their spending with their earning, and had come to San Francisco to drink and whore and gamble ferociously; then, pockets empty, they would clear off back to the camps in the hills and on the rivers in pursuit of gold once more. Robert was not sure it was a good idea for a city to be so full of deluded dreamers.
William Lobb clearly had no interest in the city apart from its docks. He was not a gambler or a drinker, and he had given the few women they’d come into contact with little more than a glance. Indeed, he did not seem to like people much. “This city is a horror show,” he announced as they rode, “but its docks are essential. Two or three times a year I pack up seeds and seedlings and saplings and dry samples to ship to England.”
“Where are we going?”
“Corner of Montgomery and California. I’ve got an arrangement at a boardinghouse where I can store equipment and seeds and plants. Here it is.”
They pulled up in front of a house where a woman was leaning in the doorway, smoking a cigar. Tall and broad-shouldered, with red cheeks and scrubby, colorless hair, she wore a filthy pinafore that managed to make her look less rather than more feminine, and she did not wear a cap or hat or bonnet. There were few women living in California, and one way to do it was to ignore what was expected of you. The rules were different here: there were none. That was why many people were tempted to stay: the strict boundaries set by their families and communities and churches back east were nonexistent here. Robert had met many husbands who had decided not to return to their waiting wives, who reveled in the gambling and the whoring and the freedom.
The woman did not move, but let the men get down from the wagon and come to her.
“Hello, Mrs. Bienenstock,” William Lobb said. “Is there a bed available for this lad? He’s helping me.”
“No vomit on my stairs,” Mrs. Bienenstock directed at Robert. “You get sick inside my house, you’re out.”
Robert nodded; there was no other response to such a statement.
“We’ve got a special consignment,” Lobb continued. “It won’t be here for long—just till I find a steamer heading for Central America.”
Mrs. Bienenstock puffed on her cigar. “The Uncle Sam leaves for Nicaragua in two days. Market Wharf.”
“Not the Nicaragua route. Panama’s more reliable.”
“The Columbus, then. Pacific Wharf in four days.”
“Excellent. We’ll just get these in, then I’ll go down to the docks and sort it out. Thank you, Mrs. B.,” William Lobb added deferentially. Robert suspected his landlady was one of the few people he treated with such respect.
Lobb’s room was at the back of the house, with a north-facing window. It was naturally dim, made darker by black cloth hung over the window, and was stacked with tin cases sealed with wax. Robert looked around the room, baffled. Lobb chuckled. “Here,” he said, breaking open a case so Robert could see the contents: hundreds of labeled packets of plant seeds. “Some hold dried specimens as well,” he explained. “I’ll send all this off to England shortly. Look, the cases are lead-lined to keep out moisture and light so the seeds don’t germinate. That’s why I keep it dark in here too.”
He took Robert next to the small yard at the back of the house, a scruffy patch of land full of scrap and garbage that smelled of shit from the outhouse. Mrs. Bienenstock clearly focused her energy on the inside where the rooms were clean, there were no fleas, and the guests were cowed by her enough to behave. “I keep seedlings and saplings I’ve collected back here,” he said, gesturing to rows of pails of tiny trees. “Mrs. B. waters them for me—easy money for her.”
Once they had added the pails of sequoias to the others out back, and brought the sacks of cones to Lobb’s room, the Englishman left to go back to the docks, and Robert was free to explore the city. The saloons and brothels did not appeal, however; instead he asked Mrs. Bienenstock where he could go to see the ocean.
“Seal Rocks,” she replied as she ran a heated iron across dried sheets in the kitchen. “Take Broad Street west and keep going even when it turns into a track.” She nodded her approval. “You can’t get up to much mischief there!”
Robert was relieved to find that Seal Rocks was well out of the city, away from the miners and the dirt and the noise. There were no buildings there at all, just the beginnings of a fort being built further along the point. Robert and the gray followed the track till it ended and the ground fell away and the Pacific opened out below him like a vast watery sheet reflecting an equally vast sky. Robert had seen the ocean before but it always astonished him. After thousands of miles locked into a land sucked dry of water, here was more water than he could ever imagine in one place.
The gray was not so astonished, but responded to the wide open space as he had at the sight of the sequoias: he neighed and bucked and kicked out until Robert turned him around and led him a few hundred yards inland, where he left him to graze.
He came back and sat on the cliff edge and watched the ocean for over an hour. Off the shore there were large rocks sticking out of the water that looked like giant seals’ heads with their pointy noses facing the sky. Real seals lay on them, lolling in the sun and barking.
Little by little, Robert’s awe at the sight of the ocean was joined by an undertow of sadness. He had reached the end of the country, and was as far from Ohio as he could get; he could go no further. The thought of having to turn around and face east filled him with such guilt and despair that he felt sick with it. Robert had tried to lead an honest life, even when surrounded by dishonest people, but no matter how cleanly he lived now, he knew he had made one mistake that he could never escape. That knowledge would follow him, east or west. All of this running made no difference.
Suddenly there was a roiling and spraying about a mile from shore, and an enormous tail appeared, fanning out and dipping below the water. He gasped, and watched the tail come and go as the whale swam towards the horizon that Robert himself would never reach. It was another reminder that he had to stop now and find a way to live with himself out here, or go back east and face what he had done.
Robert and William Lobb spent the next three days preparing and packing the specimens, mostly out in the yard with the weather fine—though Lobb first spent his own money on a sack of lime for the outhouse so that they could work without gagging.
He demonstrated to Robert how to lay the sequoia cones on a canvas sheet in the sun to let them dry. Each held dozens of tiny flat seeds which would be much easier to transport once shaken from the dried cones. “I’m showing you how, but I’m not going to do that with these cones,” Lobb said. “We can’t wait for these to dry—that’s three weeks of waiting when someone else might send some sequoias off to England before us.”
“Are there other tree collectors?”
“A few. Some I’ve even worked with here and there. Andrews and Parry are all right. I’m not worried about them. It’s Bridges or Beardsley or the Mu
rray brothers who are more likely to beat me to it.”
“Have any of them been up to Calaveras Grove?”
“Not that I know of—but I wouldn’t put it past them! They could have gone up there just after us, and arrived back today and be on the Columbus tomorrow, same as us.” Clearly it was a matter of honor for Lobb to land sequoias on English soil first.
Given how casually they had handled the cones while collecting them at Calaveras Grove, William Lobb was unexpectedly fastidious about packing them. “The success of plant collecting lies primarily in the packing,” he proclaimed. “Doesn’t matter what you’ve collected if it arrives in England dead or rotten.”
First they padded the lead-lined tin cases with old newspaper Mrs. Bienenstock had saved for them. Then they put in the sequoia cones. Robert would have dumped them in by the handful, but Lobb placed each cone until they made an even layer, then put another layer on top of those, and another layer. When the box was full, he took a sack of sand he’d dug up from a beach and kept in his room, and poured it into the box so that it filled all the spaces between the cones. “Absorbs damp,” he explained. “These cases’ll be around water for a few months. If the seeds get damp they’ll rot or germinate. Can’t have that.” Finally they sealed the cases with wax.
William Lobb decided the seedlings must be shipped in a Ward’s case, and brought the wood and glass materials into the yard to build a small one. If it was constructed properly any plants inside were protected from wind and sea spray and could be brought on the ship deck to get some sun. They filled the bottom of the case with soil, then planted the sequoia seedlings, as well as a few other plants Lobb had growing. They watered them, then shut the glass lid. The Ward’s case would not be opened again until it reached England.
Robert puzzled over this for some time. “How do they stay moist?” he finally asked as William Lobb dripped a lighted candle along the seams of the case.