“UNENDING SAMENESS” WAS WHAT THEY SAID
Of course you can’t see the Fair in a day, or two days, or three. And
if you stay long in San Francisco, you won’t want to leave at all. Up
and down and around the hills, you constantly see houses that you wish
you could immediately go and live in. For in what other city can you sit
on a hillside—only millionaires sit on hilltops—with a view of sea and
mountains below and beyond you? Where else, outside of a Maxfield Parrish
picture, is there a city rising gayly on steep sugar-loaf hills, and
filled with people whose attitude of mind exactly matches their hilltops?
In many other cities people live in long narrow canyons called streets,
under a blanket of soot, signifying industry, and they scurry around like
ants carrying great mental loads, ten times as big as they are, up steep
hills of difficulty, only to tumble down with them again. The people of
countless other cities are valley people, their perception bounded by the
high walls of the skyscrapers they have themselves erected in the name of
progress. The San Franciscans, too, are building in the valley towering
office buildings in which they work as earnestly for their living as any
others elsewhere, but in spirit they are still hill-people, and their
horizon is rimmed not by acquisitive ambition, but by sea and sky.
When we started, I had an idea that, keen though we were to undertake
the journey, we would find it probably difficult, possibly tiring, and
surely monotonous—to travel on and on and on over the same American road,
through towns that must be more or less replicas, and hearing always
the same language and seeing the same types of people doing much the
same things. Everyone who had never taken the trip assured us that our
impression in the end would be of an unending sameness. Sameness! Was
there ever such variety?
Beginning with New York, as that is the point we started from, New York
was built, is building, will ever be building in huge blocks of steel and
stone, and the ambitious of every city and country in the world will keep
pouring into it and crowding its floor space and shoving it up higher
and higher into towering cubes. New York dominates the whole of the
Western Hemisphere and weights securely the Eastern coast of the map, and
because of all this weight and importance, New Yorkers fancy they are the
Americans of America, but New York is not half as typically American as
Chicago; and that is where you come to your first real contrast.
_Omnipotent_ New York, in contrast to _ambitious_ Chicago. Chicago is
American to her backbone—active, alive and inordinately desiring,
ceaselessly aspiring. Between New York and Chicago is strung a chain of
cities that have many qualities, like mixed samples of these two terminal
points. But beyond Chicago, no trace of New York remains. Every city is
spunky and busy, ambitious and sometimes a little self-laudatory. (New
York is not self-laudatory; she is too supremely self-satisfied to think
any remarks on the subject necessary.) Leaving the country of fields and
woods and streams, you traverse that great prairie land of vast spaces,
and finally ascend the heights of the mighty Rocky Mountains.
The next contrast is in Colorado Springs, which is as unlike the rest of
America as though St. Moritz itself had been grafted in the midst of our
continent. All through New Mexico and Arizona you are in a strange land,
far more like Asia than anything in the United States or Europe. A baked
land of blazing sun, dynamic geological miracles, a land of terrible
beauty and awful desolation, and then the sudden sharp ascent to the
height of steep snow and conifer-covered mountains, looking even higher
than the Rockies because of their abrupt needle-pointed heights. And
finally, the greatest contrast climax of all, the sudden dropping down
into the tropically blooming seacoast gardens of the California shore.
It goes without saying that only those who love motoring should ever
undertake such a journey, nor is the crossing of our continent as
smoothly easy as crossing Europe. But given good weather, _and the right
kind of a machine_, there are no difficulties, in any sense, anywhere.
There couldn’t be a worse tenderfoot than I am, there really couldn’t.
I’m very dependent upon comfort, have little strength, less endurance,
and hate “roughing it” in every sense of the word. Yet not for a moment
was I exhausted or in any way distressed, except about the unfitness
of our car and its consequent injuries, a situation which others,
differently equipped, would not experience.
I suppose the metamorphosis has come little by little all across our
wide spirit-awakening country, but I feel as though I had acquired from
the great open West a more direct outlook, a simpler, less encumbered
view of life. You can’t come in contact with people anywhere, without
unconsciously absorbing a few of their habits, a tinge of their point of
view, and in even a short while you find you have sloughed off the skin
of Eastern hidebound dependence upon ease and luxury, and that hitherto
indispensable details dwindle—at least temporarily—to unimportance.