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Jack London on California - From Valley of the Moon

In Search of Eden, selections from The Valley of the Moon

The main characters in The Valley of the Moon are a newlywed couple on a three month journey to explore California and find themselves a homestead they can claim from government land. They travel on foot, sleep out under the stars, meet some colorful characters, and reflect on the freedom of living on the open land and amidst the wildernesses of California.

One night before a campfire, the husband Billy, tells his wife, Saxon :

"Many's the time, when I was a little kid, I've heard my father brag about California bein' a blanket climate. He went East, once, an' staid a summer an' a winter, an' got all he wanted. Never agin' for him.

My mother said there never was such a land for climate. How wonderful it must have seemed to them after crossing the deserts and mountains. They called it a land of milk and honey. The ground was so rich that all they needed to do wa scratch it …

And wild game everywhere. The hills were full of deer, and my mother saw whole herds of elk around Santa Rosa. And when my father was a young man, somewhere up north of Sacramento, in a creek called Cadre Slough, the tules was full of grizzlies…"

Traveling in the Monterey Bay area, the couple exclaim at the majestic beauty they behold when coming down upon Carmel Bay :

" They had taken the direct county road across the hills from Monterey, instead of the Seventeen Mile Drive around by the coast, so that Carmel Bay came upon them without any fore-glimmerings of its beauty. Dropping down through the pungent pines, they passed woods-embowered cottages, quaint and rustic, of artists and writers, and went on across wind-blown rolling sandhills held to place by sturdy lupine and nodding with pale California poppies. Saxon screamed in sudden wonder of delight, then caught her breath and gazed at the amazing peacock-blue of a breaker, shot through with golden sunlight, overfalling in a mile-long sweep and thundering into white ruin of foam on a crescent beach of sand scarcely less white. How long they stood and watched the stately procession of breakers, rising from out the deep and wind-capped sea to froth and thunder at their feet, Saxon did not know. She was recalled to herself when Billy, laughing, tried to remove the telescope basket from her shoulders. "You kind of look as though you was goin' to stop a while," he said. "So we might as well get comfortable." "I never dreamed it, I never dreamed it," she repeated, with passionately clasped hands. "I. .. I thought the surf at the Cliff House was wonderful, but it gave no idea of this.--Oh! Look! LOOK! Did you ever see such an unspeakable color? And the sunlight flashing right through it! Oh! Oh! Oh!" At last she was able to take her eyes from the surf and gaze at the sea-horizon of deepest peacock-blue and piled with cloud-masses, at the curve of the beach south to the jagged point of rocks, and at the rugged blue mountains seen across soft low hills, landward, up Carmel Valley. "