Three-Arch Rocks Reservation

THE fog was lifting. The thick, wet drift that had threatened us on Tillamook Bar stood clear of the shouldering sea to the westward, and in toward shore, like an upper sea, hung at the fir-girt middles of the mountains, as level and as gray as the sea below. There was no breeze. The long, smooth swell of the Pacific swung under us and in, until it whitened at the base of three dark rocks that lay in our course, and that now began to take on form out of the foggy distance. Gulls were flying over us; lines of black cormorants and crowds of murres were winging past toward the rocks; but we were still too far away from the looming piles to see that the gray of their walls was the gray of uncounted colonies of nesting birds, colonies that covered the craggy steeps as the green firs clothed the slopes of the Coast Range mountains, up to the hanging fog.

As we steamed on nearer, the sound of the surf about the rocks became audible; the birds in the air grew more numerous, their cries now faintly mingling with the sound of the sea. The hole in the Middle Rock, a mere fleck of foam at first, widened rapidly into an arching tunnel through which our boat might have run; the sea began to break before us over half-sunken ledges; and soon upon us fell the damp shadows of Three-Arch Rocks, for now we were looking far up at their sides, at the sea-birds in their guanogray rookeries,—gulls, cormorants, guillemots, puffins, murres,—incrusting the ragged walls from tide-line to pinnacle, as the crowding barnacles incrusted the bases from the tide-line down.

Me were not approaching without protest, for the birds were coming off to meet us, more and more the nearer we drew, wheeling and clacking overhead in a constantly thickening cloud of lowering wings and tongues. We rounded the Outer Rock and headed slowly in toward the yawning hole of Middle Rock as into some mighty cave, so sheer and shadowy rose the walls above us, so like to cavern thunder was the throbbing of the surf through the hollow arches, was the flapping and screaming of the birds against the highcircling walls, was the deep menacing grumble of the sea-lions, as through the muffle of surf and sea-fowl, herd after herd lumbered bellowing into the foam.

It was a strange, wild scene. Hardly a mile from the Oregon coast, but cut off by breaker and bar from the abrupt, uninhabited shore, the three rocks of the Reservation, each pierced with its resounding arch, heaved their heavy shoulders from the waves straight up, huge, towering, till our little steamer coasted their dripping sides like some puffing pigmy. They were sea rocks, of no part or lot with the dry land, their beryl basins wave-scooped, and set with purple star-fish, with green and pink anemones, and beaded many deep with mussels of amethyst and jet, a glitter in the water’s overflow; and just above the jeweled basins, like fabled beasts of old, lay the sea-lions, lumpish, uncouth forms, flippered, reversed in shape, with throats like the caves of Æolus, hollow, hoarse, discordant; and higher up, on every jutting bench and shelf, in every weathered rift, over every jog of the ragged cliffs, to their bladed backs and pointed peaks, swarmed the sea-birds, web-footed, amphibious, wave-shaped, with stormy voices given them by the winds that sweep in from the sea. And their numbers were the numbers of the sea.

Crude, crowded, weltering, such life could never have been brought forth and nurtured by the dry land; her breasts had withered at the birth. Only the bowels of the wide, wet sea could breed these heaps, these cones of life that rose volcanic from the waves, their craters clouded by the smoke of wings, their belted bases rumbling with a multi-throated thunder. The air was dank with the must of a closed room, — closed for an æon past, —no breath of the land, no odor of herb, no scent of fresh soil; but the raw, rank smells of rookery and den, saline, kelpy, fetid; the stench of fish and bedded guano; and pools of reeking ammonia where the lion herds lay sleeping on the lower rocks in the sun.

A boat’s keel was beneath me, but as I stood out on the pointed prow, barely above the water, and found myself thrust forward without will or effort among the crags and caverns, among the shadowy walls, the damps, the smells, the sounds; among the bellowing beasts in the churning waters about me, and into the storm of wings and tongues in the whirling air above me, I passed from the things I had known, and the time and the earth of man, into a period of the past, elemental, primordial, monstrous.

I had not known what to expect, because, never having seen Three-Arch Rocks, I could not know what my friend Finley meant when he said to me, ‘Come out to the Pacific Coast, and I will take you back to your cave-days; I will show you life as it was lived at the beginning of the world.’ I had left mv Hingham garden with its woodchuck, for the coast of Oregon, a jourmy that might have been compassed by steam, that might have been measured in mere miles, had it stopped short of Three-Arch Rocks Reservation, which lay seaward off the shore. Instead of miles, it was zones, ages, worlds that were traveled as I passed into this haunt of wild sea-bird and beast. And I found myself saying over to myself, ‘Thou madest him to have dominion over the work of thy hands, Thou hast put all things under his feet’ — as if the words had never before been uttered in human ears and could not yet be understood.

For here was no man-dominion; here the trampling feet had never passed. Here was the primeval world, the fresh and unaffrighted morning of the Fifth Day. Then, as the brute in me shook itself and growled back at the brute about me, something touched my arm, and I turned to find the Warden of the Rocks at my side, — God, as it were, seeing again everything that He had made, everything that man had unmade, and saying again with a new and a larger meaning, ‘Have dominion over the fowl of the air, and over the fish of the sea, and over whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.’

And here at my side, by act of Congress, stood that Dominion, the Federal Warden, the collective, spiritual man, badged and armed to protect forever against the individual brute man, the wild life of these three rocks and the waters adjacent.

But did I fully understand the Why? Did I wholly comprehend the meaning and the value of such a sanctuary for wild life? I turned to the Warden with the question. That honest official paused a moment, then slowly answered that he’d be hanged if he knew why. He did n’t see any good in such protection, his salary notwithstanding. He had caught a cormorant (one from the Rocks) not long since, that had fortynine young salmon in its maw; and as for the sea-lions, they were an unmitigated nuisance, each one of them destroying (so it had been reckoned) five hundred pounds of fish every day.

Now the Warden’s findings are open to question, because there are good reasons for the cormorant’s catch being other than salmon fry; still I have no proof of error in his figures. I will accept them just now, — the five hundred pounds of fish a day for the sealion, and the forty-nine salmon fry of the cormorant (they would easily total, four years later, on their way up the Columbia to the canneries, a half ton), — accepting t his fearful loss of Chinook salmon then as real, is there any answer to my question, Why? Any good and sufficient reason for setting aside such a reservation as Three-Arch Rocks? for myself protecting the wild life of these barren rocks against myself?

No, perhaps not, — not if this destruction means the utter loss of the salmon as an industry and as an article of food. But there is an adequate and a paying catch of salmon being taken in the Columbia this year, in spite of the lions and the cormorants, as there will be again next year, for the state hatcheries have liberated over seven millions of young salmon this summer and sent them safely down the Columbia to the sea. No, perhaps not, — no good and sufficient reason for such protection were I an Astoria fisherman with the sea-lions pursuing the salmon into my nets (as occasionally they do), instead of a teacher of literature in Boston on the other side of the world. It is easy in Boston to believe in sealions in Astoria. It is hard anywhere not to believe in canned salmon. Yet, as sure as the sun shines, and the moon, there are some things utterly without an equivalent in canned salmon.

Among these things are Three-Arch Rocks and Malheur Lake and Klamath Lake Reservations in Oregon, and the scores of other bird and animal reserves created by Congress all the way from the coast of Maine, across the states, and over-seas to the Hawaian Islands. They were set aside only yesterday; the sportsman, the pelt hunter, the plume hunter, the pot hunter, and in some instances the legitimate fisherman and farmer, ordered off to make room for the beast and the bird. Small wonder if there is some grumbling, some law-breaking, some failure to understand. But that will pass.

In to-day’s news, cabled from Copenhagen, I read,—

‘Americans of Danish descent have purchased a tract of 300 acres of typical and virgin Danish heather landscape, which is to be preserved for all ages to come as a national park. The wonderful, picturesque Danish heath, which for ages has furnished inspiration to national artists and poets, has been disappearing fast before the onslaught of the thrifty Danish farmers, who are bringing every available square inch of Denmark’s soil under cultivation. One day it dawned upon the Danish people that soon there would be nothing left of this typical landscape, and while the good people of Denmark were discussing ways and means of preserving this virgin soil, Americans of Danish descent had already had a representative on the spot who had bought up from a number of small landowners the 300-acre tract known as Rebild Bakkar [Rebild Hills], considered the most beautiful part of the heath, besides having historical associations dating hundreds of years back.’

I am sending the cablegram to the Warden of Three-Arch Rocks and to the Astoria Fisherman, and to myself, underscoring these lines, —

‘The wonderful, picturesque Danish heath, which for ages has furnished inspiration to national artists and poets, has been disappearing fast before the onslaught of the thrifty Danish farmers, who are bringing every available square inch of Denmark’s soil under cultivation.’

Three hundred acres of inspiration to artists and poets (and to common people, too), or three hundred acres more of vegetables, — which will Denmark have?

Now, I have a field of vegetables. I was born and brought up in a field of vegetables—in the sweet-potato and cabbage fields of southern New Jersey. To this day I love — with my heart and with my hoe — a row of stonemason cabbages; but there are cabbages on both sides of the road all the way home, not fewer cabbages this year, but more, and ever more and more, with less and ever less and less of the virgin heather in between.

The heather is for inspiration, for pictures and poems; the cabbages are for cold-slaw and sauerkraut. Have any complained of our lack of coldslaw and sauerkraut? No. Have any watched, as they who watch for the morning, for the coming of our great painter and poet? Yea, and they still watch.

Cold-slaw and sauerkraut and canned salmon let us have; but let us also have the inspiration of the virgin heath, and the occasional restoration to our primitive, elemental, animal selves, in a returning now and then to the clangor and confusion of wild life on ThreeArch Rocks. The body feeds on cabbage. The spirit is sustained by heather. Denmark has fifteen thousand square miles devoted to her body, and has saved three hundred acres for her soul! What have we saved?

I have not convinced the Warden, doubtless; but if I have encouraged him to perform his duty, then that is something. And well he knows the need for his guard. The sea was without a sail when we steamed in toward the Rocks. We had scarcely landed, however, when a boat hove in sight, and bearing down upon us, dropped anchor within rifle-range of the lion herds, the men on board pulling their guns for an hour’s sport!

‘Thou hast put all things under his feet’; and the feet have overrun and trampled down all things except in the few scattered spots where the trespass sign and the Warden are keeping them off. I have been following these feet over the last-left miles of wild Canadian prairie, over a road so new that I could still see crossing it the faint, grass-grown trails of the buffalo. I followed the feet on over the Coast Range Mountains, through the lastremaining miles of first-growth timber, where the giant holies, felled for the road, lay untrimmed and still green beside the way — a straight, steelbordered way, for swift, steel-shod feet that shake the mountain and the prairie in their passing, and leave behind them down the trail the bones of herds and forests, the ripped sod, the barbed wire, the shacks that curse the whole horizon, the heaps of gutted tins, and rags, and scrap — unburied offal, flung from the shanty doors with rose-slip and grain of wheat, to blossom later in the wilderness and make it to rejoice.

Only it will not be the wilderness then, or the solitary place; it will not be prairie or forest. The fir tree will never follow the rose, nor the buffalograss the great gasoline tractor. I have seen the last of the unploughed prairies, the last of the virgin forests. It was only six weeks ago that I passed through the mountain forest, and to-day, as I am writing, those age-old trees are falling as the summer grass falls across the blade of the mower.

This, I know, must needs be. All of this was implied, delegated, in the command, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it.’ No, not all of this needs to be; nor ought to be.

The river is right, though the child can hardly understand; and the child, too, is right, — will the river ever understand? The mills of men must be turned, their ships must be taken to sea, but the child, the eternal child, must be told a story, must be sung a song. For what does a child know of mills? It cannot live by wheaten bread alone.

The river is turning my mill, for I (a part of me) and my children (a part of them) need bread; but the heart of me, the soul of me, the eternal child of me and of my children, craves something that the harnessed river cannot grind for us, something that only the wild, free river can tell to us under the fir trees, at its far-off headwaters, can sing to us as its clear cascades leap laughing down from pool to boulder, in its distant mountain home. The river is turning my mill. I must grind and the river must help me grind. But I must play too, and be told a story and be sung a song. Am I not a child? and do I not owe the child something? Must I put the child in the mill to grind? There are children in our mills, — little children, yes, and big children; young children, and old children, — more old children than young; grinding, grinding, grinding as our dank, dark rivers go turning on, too hurried now to tell a story, too thicktongued to sing a song.

Here was still the story and the song, here on Three-Arch Rocks; a story as naked as birth and death; a song as savage as the sea, —

These were the Isles of Life. Here, in these rocky caverns, life was conceived and brought forth, life as crude and raw and elemental as the rock itself. It covered every crag. I clutched it in my hands; I crushed it under my feet; it was thick in the air about me. My narrow path up the face of the rock was a succession of sea-bird rookeries, of crowded eggs, and huddled young, hairy or naked or wet from the shell. Every time my fingers felt for a crack overhead they touched something warm that rolled or squirmed; every time my feet moved under me, for a hold, they pushed in among top-shaped eggs that turned on the shelf or went over far below; and whenever I hugged the pushing wall I must bear off from a mass of squealing, struggling, shapeless things, just hatched. And down upon me, as rookery after rookery of old birds whirred in fright from their ledges, fell crashing eggs and unfledged young, that the greedy gulls devoured ere they touched the sea.

An alarmed wing-beat, the excited turn of a webbed foot, and the murre’s single egg or its single young was sent over the edge, so narrow was the footing for Life, so yawning the pit below. But up out of the churning waters, up from crag to crag, clambers Life, by beak, by claw, falling, clinging, climbing, with the odds forever favoring Death, with Life forever finding wings.

I was mid-way in my climb, at a bad turn, edging inch by inch along, my face hard-pressed to the face of the cliff, my fingers gripping a slight seam overhead, my feet feeling blindly at the brink beneath, when there came up to me, small and smothered, the wash of the waves, — the voice of space and nothingness and void, the call of the chasm out of which I was so hardly climbing. A cold hand clasped me from behind.

With an impulse as instinctive as the unfledged murre’s, I flattened against the toppling rock, fingers and feet, elbows, knees, and chin clinging desperately to the narrow chance, — a falling fragment of shale, a gust of wind, the wing-stroke of a frightened bird, enough to break the hold and swing me out over the water, washing faint and far below. A long breath, and I was climbing again.

We were on the Outer Rock, our only possible ascent taking us up the sheer south face. With the exception of an occasional western gull’s and pigeon guillemot’s nest, these steep sides were occupied entirely by the California murres, — penguin-shaped birds about the size of a wild duck, chocolate-brown above, with white breasts, that literally covered the sides of the three great Rocks wherever they could find a hold. If a million meant anything, I should say there were a million murres nesting on this Outer Rock; not nesting either, for the egg is laid upon the bare ledge, as you might place it upon a mantel, a single sharppointed egg, as large as a turkey’s, and just as many of them on the ledge as there is standing-room for the birds. The murre broods her egg by standing straight up over it, her short legs, by dint of stretching, allowing her to straddle the big egg, her short tail propping her securely from behind.

On, up along the narrow back, or blade, of the Rock, and over the peak, were the well-spaced nests of the brandt cormorants, nests the size of an ordinary straw hat, made of sea-grass and the yellow-flowered sulphur-weed that grew in a dense mat over the north slope of the top, each nest holding four long, dirty, blue eggs or as many black, shivering young; and in the low sulphur-weed, all along the roof-like slope of the top, built the gulls and the tufted puffins; and, with the burrowing puffins, often in the same holes, were found the stormy petrels; while down below them, as up above them, — all around the rock rim that dropped sheer to the sea, — stood the cormorants, black, silent, statuesque; and everywhere were nests and eggs and young, and everywhere were flying, crying birds — above, about, and far below me, a whirling, whirring vortex of wings that had caught me in its funnel.

So thick was the air with wings, so clangorous with harsh tongues, that I had not seen the fog moving in, or noticed that the gray wind of the morning had begun to growl about the crags. It was late, and the night that I had intended to spend on the summit would be dark and stormy, would be too wet and wild for watching, where one must hold on with his hands so close to the edge, or slip and go over.

I had hoped to wrap up in my blankket and, in the dark of the night, listen for the return of the petrels, the Kaeding petrels, that built all over the top. The earthy, north slope of the top is honeycombed with their burrows, yet never a petrel is seen about the rock. I had dug out the brooding bird and its single white egg during the afternoon, but I knew that I must wait until after dark if I would hear the winnowing of the wings and the chittering of the voices as the mate in the burrow gave greeting and place to the mate that had been all day, and all night, at sea. But the cold driving fog, and the drizzle that was setting in, made a night on the top impossible; so we got over the rim and by rope down along the south face of the cliff, up which we had climbed, to a small shelf under an overhanging ledge about forty feet above the waves. Here, protected from the north-west wind, and from much of the rain, we rolled up in our blankets, while night crept down upon us and out over the sea.

It was a gray, ghostly night of dusk and mist that swam round and round the crags and through the wakeful caverns in endless undulations, coiling its laving folds over the sunken ledges, and warping with slow, sucking sounds its mouthing tentacles round and through the rocks. Or was it only the wash of its waves? only the gray of the mist and the drip of the rain? Or was it the return of the waters? the resolving of firmament and rock back through the void of night into the flux of the sea?

It was a long night of small, distinct, yet multitudinous sounds. The confusion caused by our descent among the birds soon subsided; the large colony of murres close by our heads returned to their rookery; and with the rain and thickening dark there spread everywhere the quiet of a low murmurous quacking. Sleep was settling over the rookeries.

Down in the water below us rose the bulk of a sea-lion, an old lone bull, whose den we had invaded. He, too, was coming back to his bed for the night. He rose and sank in the half light, blinking dully at the cask and other things that we had left below us on the ledge belonging to him. Then he slowly clambered out and hitched up toward his bed. My own bed was just above his, so close that I could hear him blow, could see the scars on his small head, and a long open gash on his side. We were very near.

I drew back from the edge, pulled the blanket and sail-cloth over me, and turned my face up to the slanting rain. Two young gulls that had hidden from us in a cranny came down and nestled quite close to my head, their parents, one after the other, perching an instant on the rock just out of reach, and all through the night calling to them with a soft nasal quack to still their alarm. In the murre colony overhead there was a constant stir of feet and a soft, low talk; and over all the Rock, through all the darkened air, there was the silent coming and going of wings, shadow-wings of the stormy petrel, some of them, that came winnowing in from afar on the sea.

The drizzle thickened; the night lengthened. I listened to the wings about me, to the murmur among the birds above me, to the stir of the sea beneath me, to the breathing of the sleeping men beside me; to the pulse of the life enfolding me, of which I was part and heart; and under my body I felt a narrow shelf of rock dividing the waters from the waters. The drizzle thickened; the night lengthened; and — darkness was upon the face of the deep.