A friend of mine once wrote an article on motoring in Southern
California for one of the smart Eastern magazines. In it she said that
often a motor would be followed by a trailer loaded with a camp outfit.
What was her surprise and amusement to read her own article later,
dressed for company, so to speak. "A trailer goes ahead with the
servants and outfit, so that when the motoring party arrives on the
scene all is in readiness for their comfort." Great care must be taken
that the sensibilities of the elect should not be offended by the horrid
thought that ladies and gentlemen actually do make their own camp at
times! So the trailer has to go ahead, and that is just where the lure
and magic of Southern California slips through the fingers.
Most of us have a few drops, at least, of gypsy blood in us, and in
this land of sunshine and the open road we all become vagabonds as far
as our conventional upbringing will let us. When you know that it won't
rain from May to October, and the country is full of the most lovely
and picturesque spots, how can you help at least picnicking whenever
you can?
Trains are becoming as obsolete in our family as the horse. We wish to
take a trip: out purrs the motor; in goes the family lunch-box, a
thermos bottle, and a motor-case of indispensables, and we are off. No
fuss about missing the train, no baggage, no tickets, no cinders--just
the open road.
I had heard that every one deteriorated in Southern California, and
after the first year I began earnestly searching my soul for signs of
slackening. Perhaps my soul is naturally easy-going, for somehow I can't
feel that the things we let slip matter so greatly.
This much I will admit. There is no deadlier drug habit than fresh air!
The first summer on our Smiling Hill-Top kind ladies used to ask me to
tea-parties and card-parties, but I could never come indoors long enough
to be anything but a trial to my partners at bridge, so now I don't even
make believe I'm a polite member of society. Of course, there are people
who carry it further than I do, and can't be quite happy except in their
bathing-suits. I'm not as bad as that. I can still enjoy the sea breezes
and the colors and the sound of the waves with my clothes on. I don't
even wear my bathing-suit to market, which is one of the customs of the
place. It is a picturesque little village; half the houses are mere
shacks, a kind of compromise between dwelling and bath-houses, everyone
being much too thrifty to pay money to the Casino when they can drip
freely on their own sitting-room floor, without the least damage to the
furnishings. Life for many consists largely of a prolonged bath and bask
on the beach, with dinner at a cafeteria and a cold bite for supper at
home or on the rocks. It is surely an easy life and yet a great deal of
earnest effort and strenuous thinking goes on, too, women's clubs, even
an "open forum," and there are many delightful people who live there all
the year for the sake of the perfect climate. Also, there are a few
charming houses perched on the cliffs, most suggestive of Sorrento and
Amalfi. An incident J---- is fond of telling gives the combined
interests of the place. He was on his way to the post-office when he met
two women in very scanty jersey bathing-suits with legs bare, wearing,
to be sure, law-fulfilling mackintoshes, but which, being unbuttoned,
flapped so in the breeze that they were only a technical covering. The
ladies were in earnest conversation as he passed. J---- heard one say,
"I grant all you say about the charm of his style, but I consider his
writing very superficial!"
It is a wonderful life for small boys. My sons are the loveliest shades
of brown with cheeks of red, and in faded khaki and bare legs are as
good an example of protective coloring on the hillside as any zebra in a
jungle. Quite naturally they view September and the long stockings of
the city with dislike.
There is a place on the beach by the coast road between Pasadena and San
Diego where we always have lunch on our journeys to and from town. Just
after you leave the picturesque ruins of the Capistrano Mission in its
sheltered valley, you come out suddenly on the ocean, and the road runs
by the sand for miles. With a salt breeze blowing in your face you can't
resist the lunch box long. With a stuffed egg in one hand and a sandwich
in the other, Joedy, aged eight, observed on our last trip south, "This
is the bright side of living." I agree with him.
One late afternoon a friend of ours was driving alone and offered a lift
to two young men who were swinging along on foot. "Your price?" they
asked. "A smile and a song," was the reply. So in they got, and those
last fifty miles were gay. That is the sort of thing which fits so
perfectly into the atmosphere of this land. Perhaps it is the orange
blossoms, perhaps it is that we have extra-sized moons, perhaps it is
the old Spanish charm still lingering. All I know is that it is a land
of glamour and romance. J---- said he was going to import a pair of
nightingales. I said that if he did he'd have a lot to answer for.
Places are as different as people. The East, and by that I mean the
country east of the Alleghanies and not Iowa and Kansas, which are
sometimes so described out here, has reached years of discretion and is
set in its way. California has temperament, and it is still very young
and enthusiastic and is having a lot of fun "growing up." I love the
stone walls, huckleberry pies, and johnny cakes of Rhode Island, and I
love the associations of my childhood and my family tree, but there is
something in the air of this part of the world that enchants me. It is a
certain "Why not?" that leads me into all sorts of delightful
experiences. Conventionality does not hold us as tightly as it does in
the East, and a certain tempting feeling of unlimited possibilities in
life makes waking up in the morning a small adventure in itself. It
isn't necessary to point out the dangers of an unlimited "Why not?"
cult--they are too obvious. "Why not?" is a question that one's
imagination asks, and imagination is one of the best spurs to action. I
will give an example of what I mean: When war was declared J----
suggested putting contribution boxes with red crosses on the collars
of "Rags" and "Tags," the boys' twin Yorkshire terriers, and coaxing
them to sit up on the back of the motor. I never had begged on a
street corner, but I thought at once, "Why not?" The result was much
money for the Red Cross, an increased knowledge of human nature for me,
as well as some delightful new friends. I should never have had the
courage to try it in New York--let us say; I should have been afraid
I'd be arrested.
At first to an Easterner the summer landscape seems dry and dusty, but
after living here one grows to love the peculiar soft tones of tan and
bisque, with bright shades of ice plant for color, and by the sea the
wonderful blues and greens of the water. No one can do justice to the
glory of that. Sky-blue, sea-blue, the shimmer of peacocks' tails and
the calm of that blue Italian painters use for the robes of their
madonnas, ever blend and ever change. Trees there are few, the graceful
silhouette of a eucalyptus against a golden sky, occasional clumps of
live oaks, and on the coast road to San Diego the Torry pines, relics of
a bygone age, growing but one other place in the world, and more
picturesque than any tree I ever saw. One swaying over a canyon is the
photographer's joy. It has been posing for hundreds of years and will
still for centuries more, I have no doubt.
Were I trying to write a sort of sugar-coated guide-book, I could make
the reader's mouth water, just as the menu of a Parisian restaurant
does. The canyons through which we have wandered, the hills we have
circled, Grossmont--that island in the air--Point Loma, the southern tip
of the United States, now, alas, closed on account of the war (Fort
Rosecrans is near its point), and further north the mountains and orange
groves--snow-capped Sierras looming above orchards of blooming
peach-trees!
Even the names add to the fascination, the Cuyamaca Mountains meaning
the hills of the brave one; Sierra Madre, the mother mountains; even Tia
Juana is euphonious, if you don't stop to translate it into the plebeian
"Aunt Jane," and no names could be as lovely as the places themselves.
So much beauty rather goes to one's head. For years in the East we had
lived in rented houses, ugly rented houses, always near the station, so
that J---- could catch the 7.59 or the 8.17, on foot. To find ourselves
on a smiling hill-top--our own hill-top, with "magic casements opening on
the foam"--seemed like a dream. After three years it still seems too
good to be true.
They say that if you spend a year in Southern California you will never
be able to leave it. I don't know. We haven't tried. The only possible
reason for going back would be that you aren't in the stirring heart of
things here as you are in New York, and the _Times_ is five days old
when you get it. Your friends--they all come to you if you just wait
a little. What amazes them always is to find that Southern California
has the most perfect summer climate in the world, if you keep near the
sea. No rain--many are the umbrellas I have gently extracted from the
reluctant hands of doubting visitors; no heat such as we know it in the
East. We have an out-of-door dining-room, and it is only two or three
times in summer that it is warm enough to have our meals there. In the
cities or the "back country" it is different. I have felt heat in
Pasadena that made me feel in the same class with Shadrach, Meshach
and Abednego, but never by the sea.
One result of all this fresh air is that we won't even go indoors to be
amused. Hence the outdoor theatre. Why go to a play when it's so lovely
outside? But to go to a play out-of-doors in an enchanting Greek theatre
with a real moon rising above it--that's another matter. I shall never
forget "Midsummer Night's Dream" as given by the Theosophical Society at
Point Loma. Strolling through the grounds with the mauve and amber domes
of their temples dimly lighted I found myself murmuring: "In Xanadu did
Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree." In a canyon by the sea we
found a theatre. The setting was perfect and the performance was worthy
of it. Never have I seen that play so beautifully given, so artistically
set and delightfully acted, though the parts were taken by students
in the Theosophical School. After the last adorable little fairy had
toddled off--I hope to bed--we heard a youth behind us observe, "These
nuts sure can give a play." We echoed his sentiments.
I should make one exception to my statement that people won't go indoors
to be amused. They go to the "movies"--I think they would risk their
lives to see a new film almost as recklessly as the actors who make
them. The most interesting part of the moving-picture business is
out-of-doors, however. You are walking down the street and notice an
excitement ahead. Douglas Fairbanks is doing a little tightrope walking
on the telegraph wires. A little farther on a large crowd indicates
further thrills. Presently there is a splash and Charley Chaplin has
disappeared into a fountain with two policemen in pursuit. Once while we
were motoring we came to a disused railway spur, and were surprised to
find a large and fussy engine getting up steam while a crowd blocked
the road for some distance. A lady in pink satin was chained to the
rails--placed there by the villain, who was smoking cigarettes in the
offing, waiting for his next cue. The lady in pink satin had made a
little dugout for herself under the track, and as the locomotive
thundered up she was to slip underneath--a job that the mines of
Golconda would not have tempted me to try. Moving-picture actors have a
very high order of courage. We could not stay for the denouement, as we
had a nervous old lady with us, who firmly declined to witness any such
hair-raising spectacle. I looked in the paper next morning for railway
accidents to pink ladies, but could find nothing, so she probably pulled
it off successfully.
Every year new theatres are built. We have seen Ruth St. Denis at the
Organ Pavilion of the San Diego Exposition, and Julius Cæsar with an
all-star cast in the hills back of Hollywood, where the space was
unlimited, and Cæsar's triumph included elephants and other beasts,
loaned by the "movies," and Brutus' camp spread over the hillside as
it might actually have done long ago. There is a place in the back
country near Escondido, where at the time of the harvest moon an
Indian play with music is given every year. At Easter thousands
of people go up Mount Rubidoux, near Riverside, for the sunrise
service. Some celebrated singer usually takes part and it is very
lovely--quite unlike anything else.
So we have come to belong to what the French would call the school
of "pleine air." I once knew an adorable little boy who expressed
it better than I can:
"Sun callin' me, sky callin' me,
Comin' sun--comin' sky."
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