entered the climate belt. As your train whizzes past the monument that
marks the boundary an earnest-minded passenger leans over, taps you on
the breastbone and informs you that you are now in California, and
wishes to know, as man to man, whether you don't regard the climate as
about the niftiest article in that line you ever experienced! At the
hotel the young lady of the telephone switchboard, who calls you in the
morning, plugs in the number of your room; and when you drowsily answer
the bell she informs you that it is now eight-thirty and--What do you
think of the climate? The boy who sells you a paper and the youth who
blackens your shoes both show solicitude to elicit your views upon this
paramount subject.
At breakfast the waiter finds out--if he can--how you like the climate
before finding out how you like your eggs. When you pay your bill on
going away the clerk somehow manages to convey the impression that the
charges have been remarkably moderate considering what you have enjoyed
in the matter of climate. Punching your round-trip ticket on the train
starting East, the conductor has a few well-merited words to speak on
behalf of the climate of the Glorious Southland, the same being the
favorite pet name of the resident classes for the entire lower end of
the state of California.
Everybody is doing it, including press, pulpit and general public. The
weather story--beg pardon, the climate story--is the most important
thing in the daily paper, especially if a blizzard has opportunely
developed back East somewhere and is available for purposes of
comparison. At Los Angeles, which is the great throbbing heart of the
climate belt, I went as a guest to a stag given at the handsome new
clubhouse of a secret order renowned the continent over for its
hospitality and its charities. We sat, six or seven hundred of us, in a
big assembly hall, smoked cigars and drank light drinks, and witnessed
some corking good sparring bouts by non-professional talent. There were
two or three ministers present--fine, alert representatives of the
modern type of city clergymen. When eleven o'clock came the master of
ceremonies announced the toast, To Our Absent Brothers! and called upon
one of those clergymen to respond to it.
The minister climbed up on the platform--a tall man, with a thick crop
of hair and a profile as clean cut as a cameo and as mobile as an
actor's, the face of a born orator. He could talk, too, that preacher!
In language that was poetic without being sloppy he paid a tribute to
the spirit of fraternity that fairly lifted us out of our chairs. Every
man there was touched, I think--and deeply touched; no man who believed
in the brotherhood of man, whether he practiced it or not, could have
listened unmoved to that speech. He spoke of the absent ones. Some of
them he said had answered the last rollcall, and some were stretched
upon the bed of affliction, and some were unavoidably detained by
business in the East; and he intimated that those in the last category
who had been away for as long as three weeks wouldn't know the old place
when they got back!--Applause.
This naturally brought him round to the subject of Los Angeles as a city
of business and homes. He pointed out its marvelous growth--quoting
freely from the latest issue of the city directory and other reliable
authorities to prove his figures; he made a few heartrousing predictions
touching on its future prospects, as tending to show that in a year or
less San Francisco and other ambitious contenders along the Coast would
be eating at the second table; he peopled the land clear back to the
mountains with new homes and new neighbors; and he wound up, in a burst
of vocal glory, with the most magnificent testimonial for the climate I
ever heard any climate get. Did he move his audience then? Oh, but
didn't he move them, though! Along toward the close of the third minute
of uninterrupted cheering I thought the roof was gone.
On the day after my arrival I made one very serious mistake; in fact, it
came near to being a fatal one. I met a lady, and naturally right away
she asked me the customary opening question. Every conversation between
a stranger and a resident begins according to that formula. Still it
seemed to me an inopportune hour for bringing up the subject. It was
early in March and the day was one of those days which a greenhorn from
the East might have been pardoned for regarding as verging upon the
chilly--not to say the raw. Also, it seemed to be raining. I say it
seemed to be raining, because no true Southern Californian would admit
any actual defects in the climatic arrangements. If pressed he might
concede that ostensibly an infinitesimal percentage of precipitation was
descending, and that apparently the mercury had descended a notch or two
in the tube. Further than that, in the absence of the official reports,
he would not care to commit himself.
You never saw such touching loyalty anywhere! Those scoffing neighbors
of Noah who kept denying on there was going to be any flood right up to
the moment when they went down for the third time were rank amateurs
alongside a seasoned resident of Los Angeles. I was newly arrived,
however, and I hadn't acquired the ethics yet; and, besides, I had
contracted a bad cold and had been taking a number of things for it and
for the moment was, as you might say, full of conflicting emulsions. So,
in reply to this lady's question, I said it occurred to me that the
prevalent atmospheric conditions might for the nonce stand a few
trifling alterations without any permanent ill effects.
I repeat that this was a mistake; for this particular lady was herself a
recent arrival, and of all the incurable Californians, the new ones are
the most incurable. She gave me one look--but such a look! From a
reasonably solid person I became first a pulp and then a pap; and then,
reversing the processes of creation as laid down in Genesis, first
chapter, and first to fifth verses, I liquefied and turned to gas, and
darkness covered me, and I became void and without form, and passed off
in the form of a vapor, leaving my clothes inhabited only by a blushing
and embarrassed emptiness. When the outraged lady abated the intensity
of her scornful gaze and I painfully reassembled my astral body out of
space and projected it back into my earthly tenement again, I found I'd
shrunk so in these various processes that nothing I wore fitted me any
longer.
I shall never commit that error again. I know better now. If I were a
condemned criminal about to die on a gallows at the state penitentiary,
I would make the customary announcement touching on my intention of
going straight to Heaven--condemned criminals never seem to have any
doubt on that point--and then in conclusion I would add that after
Southern California, I knew I wouldn't care for the climate Up There.
Then I would step serenely off into eternity, secure in the belief that,
no matter how heinous my crime might have been, all the local papers
would give me nice obituary notices.
I'd be absolutely sure of the papers, because the papers are the last to
concede that there ever was or ever will be a flaw in the climate
anywhere. In a certain city out on the Coast there is one paper that
refuses even to admit that a human being can actually expire while
breathing the air of Southern California. It won't go so far as to say
that anybody has died--"passed away" is the term used. You read in its
columns that Medulla Oblongata, the Mexican who was kicked in the head
by a mule last Sunday afternoon, has passed away at the city hospital;
or that, during yesterday's misunderstanding in Chinatown between the
Bing Bangs and the Ok Louies, two Tong men were shot and cut in such a
manner that they practically passed away on the spot. When I was there I
traveled all one day over the route of an unprecedented cold snap that
had happened along a little earlier and mussed up the citrus groves;
and, though I will not go so far as to say that the orange crop had
died or that it had been killed, it did look to me as though it had
passed away to a considerable extent.
This sort of visitation, however, doesn't occur often; in fact, it never
had occurred before--and the chances are it never will occur again. Next
to taxes and the high cost of living, I judge the California climate to
be about the most dependable institution we have in this country--yes,
and one of the most satisfactory, too. To its climate California is
indebted for being the most extravagantly beautiful spot I've seen on
this continent. It isn't just beautiful in spots--it is beautiful all
over; it isn't beautiful in a sedate, reserved way--there is a prodigal,
riotous, abandoned spendthriftiness to its beauty.
I don't know of anything more wonderful than an automobile ride through
one of the fruit valleys in the Mission country. In one day's
travel--or, at most, two--you can get a taste of all the things that
make this farthermost corner of the United States at once so diversified
and so individual--sky-piercing mountain and mirage-painted desert;
seashore and upland; ranch lands, farm lands and fruit lands; city and
town; traces of our oldest civilization and stretches of our newest;
wilderness and jungle and landscape garden; the pines of the snows, the
familiar growths of the temperate zone, the palms of the tropics; and
finally--which is California's own--the Big Trees. All day you may ride
and never once will your eye rest upon a picture that is commonplace or
trumpery.
Going either North or South, your road lies between mountains. To the
eastward, shutting out the deserts from this domain of everlasting
summer, are the Sierras--great saw-edged old he-mountains, masculine as
bulls or bucks, all rugged and wrinkled, bearded with firs and pines
upon their jowls, but bald-headed and hoar with age atop like the
Prophets of old. But the mountains of the Coast Range, to the westward,
are full-bosomed and maternal, mothering the valleys up to them; and
their round-uddered, fecund slopes are covered with softest green. Only
when you come closer to them you see that the garments on their breasts
are not silky-smooth as they looked at a distance, but shirred and
gored, gathered and smocked. I suppose even a lady mountain never gets
too old to follow the fashions!
Now you pass an orchard big enough to make a hundred of your average
Eastern orchards; and if it be of apples or plums or cherries, and the
time be springtime, it is all one vast white bridal bouquet; but if it
be of almonds or peaches the whole land, maybe for miles on end, blazes
with a pink flame that is the pinkest pink in the world--pinker than the
heart of a ripe watermelon; pinker than the inside of a blond cow.
Here is a meadowland of purest, deepest green; and flung across it, like
a streak of sunshine playing hooky from Heaven, is a slash of wild
yellow poppies. There, upon a hillside, stands a clump of gnarly,
dwarfed olives, making you think of Bible times and the Old Testament.
Or else it is a great range, where cattle by thousands feed upon the
slopes. Or a crested ridge, upon which the gum trees stand up in long
aisles, sorrowful and majestic as the funereal groves of the ancient
Greeks--that is, provided it was the ancient Greeks who had the funereal
groves.
Or, best of all and most striking in its contrasts, you will see a hill
all green, with a nap on it like a family album; and right on the top of
it an old, crumbly gray mission, its cross gleaming against the skyline;
and, down below, a modern town, with red roofs and hipped windows, its
houses buried to their eaves in palms and giant rose bushes, and huge
climbing geraniums, and all manner of green tropical growths that are
Nature's own Christmas trees, with the red-and-yellow dingle-dangles
growing upon them. Or perhaps it is a gorge choked with the enormous
redwoods, each individual tree with a trunk like the Washington
Monument. And, if you are only as lucky as we were, up overhead, across
the blue sky, will be drifting a hundred fleecy clouds, one behind the
other, like woolly white sheep grazing upon the meadows of the
firmament.
Everywhere the colors are splashed on with a barbaric, almost a
theatrical, touch. It's a regular backdrop of a country; its scenery
looks as though it belonged on a stage--as though it should be painted
on a curtain. You almost expect to see a chorus of comic-opera brigands
or a bevy of stage milkmaids come trooping out of the wings any minute.
Who was the libelous wretch who said that the flowers of California had
no perfume and the birds there had no song? Where we passed through
tangled woods the odors distilled from the wild flowers by the sun's
warmth were often almost suffocating in their sweetness; and in a
yellow-tufted bush on the lawn at Coronado I came upon a mocking-bird
singing in a way to make his brother minstrel of Mobile or Savannah feel
like applying for admission to a school of expression and learning the
singing business all over again.
[Illustration: OUT FROM UNDER A ROCK SOMEWHERE WILL CRAWL A REAL ESTATE
AGENT]
At the end of the valley--top end or bottom end as the case may be--you
come to a chain of lesser mountains, dropped down across your path like
a trailing wing of the Indians' fabled thunder-bird, vainly trying to
shut you out from the next valley. You climb the divide and run through
the pass, with a brawling river upon one side and tall cliffs upon the
other; and then all of a sudden the hills magically part and you are
within sight--almost within touch--of the ocean; for in this favored
land the mountains come right down to the sea and the sea comes right up
to the mountains. It may be upon a tiny bay that you have emerged, with
the meadows sloping straight to tidemark, and out beyond the wild fowl
feeding by the kelp beds.
Or perhaps you have come out upon a ragged, rugged headland, crowned
belike with a single wind-twisted tree, grotesquely suggesting a frizzly
chicken; and away below, straight and sheer, are the rocks rising out of
the water like the jaws of a mangle. Down there in that ginlike reef
Neptune is forever washing out his shirt in a smother of foamy lather.
And he has spilled his bluing pot, too--else how could all the sea be so
blue? On the outermost rocks the sea-lions have stretched themselves,
looking like so many overgrown slugs; and they lie for hours and sun
themselves and bellow--or, at least, I am told they do so on occasion.
There was unfortunately no bellowing going on the day I was there.
The unearthly beauty of the whole thing overpowers you. The poet that
lives in nearly every human soul rouses within you and you feel like
withdrawing to yon dense grove or yon peaked promontory to commune with
Nature. But be advised in season. Restrain yourself! Carefully refrain!
Do not do so! Because out from under a rock somewhere will crawl a
real-estate agent to ask you how you like the climate and take a dollar
down as first payment on a fruit ranch, or a suburban lot, or a seaside
villa--or something.
Climate did it and he can prove it. Only he doesn't have to prove
it--you admit it. I had never seen the Mediterranean when I went West;
but I saw the cypresses of Del Monte, and the redwood grove in the canyon
just below Harry Leon Wilson's place, down past Carmel-by-the-Sea; and
that was sufficient. I had no burning yearning to see Naples and die, as
the poet suggested. I felt that I would rather see Monterey Bay again on
a bright March day and live!
And for all of this--for fruit, flowers and scenery, for real-estate
agents, and for a race of the most persistent boosters under the
sun--the climate is responsible. Climate advertised is responsible for
the rush of travel from the East that sets in with the coming of winter
and lasts until well into the following spring; and climate realized is
responsible for the string of tourist hotels that dot the Coast all
along from just below San Francisco to the Mexican border.
Both externally and internally the majority of these hotels are
singularly alike. Mainly they are rambling frame structures done in a
modified Spanish architecture--late Spanish crossed on Early
Peoria--with a lobby so large that, loafing there, you feel as though
you were in the waiting-room of the Grand Central Terminal, and with a
dining room about the size of the state of Rhode Island, and a sun
parlor that has windows all round, so as to give its occupants the
aspect, when viewed from without, of being inmates of an aquarium; and a
gorgeous tea room done in the style of one of the French Louies--Louie
the Limit, I guess. There are some notable exceptions to the rule--some
of the places have pleasing individualities of their own, but most of
them were cut off the same pattern. Likewise the bulk of their winter
patrons are cut off the same pattern.
The average Eastern tourist is a funny biped anyhow, and he is at his
funniest out in California. Living along the Eastern seaboard are a
large number of well-to-do people who harken not to the slogan of See
America First, because many of them cannot see America at any price;
they can just barely recognize its existence as a suitable place for
making money, but no place for spending it. What makes life worth living
to them is the fact that Europe is distant only a four-day run by the
four-day boat, the same being known as a four-day boat because only four
days are required for the run between Daunt's Rock and Ambrose Channel,
which is a very convenient arrangement for deep-sea divers and
long-distance swimmers desiring to get on at Daunt's Rock and get off in
Ambrose Channel, but slightly extending the journey for passengers who
are less amphibious by nature.
These people constitute one breed of Eastern tourists. There is the
other breed, who are willing to see America provided it is made over to
conform with the accepted Eastern model. Those who can afford the
expense go to Florida in the winter; but it requires at least a million
in small change to feel at home in that setting, and so a good many who
haven't quite a million to spare, head for Southern California as the
next best spot on the map. Arriving there, they endeavor to reproduce on
as exact a scale as possible the life of the ultra fashionable Florida
resorts; the result is what a burlesque manager would call a Number Two
Palm Beach company playing the Western Wheel.
Up and down the Coast these tourists traipse for months on end,
spending a week here and two weeks there, and doing the same things in
the same way at each new stopping place. You meet them, part from them,
and meet them again at the next stand, until the monotony of it grows
maddening; and always they are intently following the routine you saw
them following last week or the week before, or the week before that.
They have traveled clear across the continent to practice such
diversions as they might have had within two hours' ride of Philadelphia
or New York; and they are going to practice them, too, or know the
reason why.
Of course they are not all constituted this way; I am speaking now of
the impression created in California by tourists in bulk. They decline
to do the things for which this country is best adapted; they will not
see the things for which it is most famous. Few of them take the
roughing trips up into the mountains; fewer still visit the desert
country. All about them the tremendous engineering contracts that have
made this land a commercial Arabian Nights' Entertainment are being
carried out--the mighty reclamation schemes; the irrigation projects;
the damming up of canyons and the shoveling away of mountains--but your
average group of Eastern tourists pass these by with dull and glazed
eyes, their souls being bound up in the desire to reach the next hotel
on the route with the least possible waste of time, and take up the
routine where it was broken off at the last hotel.
They tennis and they golf, and some go horseback riding and some take
drives; and at one or two places there is polo in the season. Likewise,
in accordance with the rules laid down by the Palm Beach authorities,
the women change clothes as often as possible during the course of the
day; and in the evening all hands appear in full dress for dinner, the
same being very wearing on men and very pleasing to women--that is, all
of them do except a few obstinate persons who defy convention and remain
comfortable. After dinner some of the younger people dance and some of
the older ones play bridge; but the vast majority sit round--and then
sit round some more and wonder whether eleven o'clock will ever come so
they can go to bed!
A good many take the wrong kind of clothes out there with them. They
have read in the advertisements that Southern California is a land of
perpetual balm, where flowers bloom the year round; and they pack their
trunks with the lightest and thinnest wearing apparel they own, which is
a mistake. The natives know better than that. The all-wool sweater is
the national garment of the Western Coast--both sexes and all ages go to
it unanimously. Experience proves it the ideal thing to wear; for in
Southern California in the winter it is never really hot in the sun and
it is often exceedingly cool in the shade. Besides, there is a sea wind
that blows pretty regularly and which makes a specialty of working
through the crannies in a silk shirt or a lingerie blouse. The
chilliest, most pallid-looking things I ever saw in my life were a pair
of white linen trousers I found in the top tray of my trunk when I
reached the extreme lower end of California. I had to cover them under
two blankets and a bedspread that night to keep the poor things from
freezing stiff.
The medium-weight garments an Easterner wears between seasons are
admirably suited for the West Coast in the winter; but the guileless
tenderfoot who is making his first trip to California usually doesn't
learn this until it is too late. If he is wise he studies out the
situation on his arrival, and thereafter takes his overcoat with him
when he goes riding and his sweater when he goes walking; but there are
many others who will be summer boys and girls though they perish in the
attempt.
At Coronado I witnessed a mighty pitiable sight. It was a cool day,
cooler than ordinary even, with a stiff wind blowing skeiny shreds of
sea fog in off the gray ocean; and a beating rain was falling at
frequent intervals. The veranda was full of Easterners trying to look
comfortable in summer clothes and not succeeding, while the road in
front was dotted with Westerners, comfortable and cozy in their thick
sweaters. There emerged upon the wind-swept porch a youth who would have
been a sartorial credit to himself on a Florida beach in February or
upon a Jersey board-walk in August; but he did not coincide with the
atmospheric scheme of things on a rainy March day down in Southern
California.
[Illustration: HE FELT HE WAS PROPERLY DRESSED FOR THE TIME, THE PLACE
AND THE OCCASION]
To begin with, he was a spindly and fragile person, with a knobby
forehead and a fade-away face. Dressed in close-fitting black and turned
sidewise, with his profile to you, he would instantly suggest a neatly
rolled umbrella with a plain bone handle. But he was not dressed in
black; he was dressed in white--all white, like a bride or a bandaged
thumb; white silk shirt; white flannel coat, with white pearl buttons
spangled freely over it; white trousers; white Panama hat; white socks;
white buckskin shoes, with white rubber soles on them. He was, in short,
all white except his face, which was a pinched, wan blue, and his nose,
which was a suffused and chilly red. If my pencil had had an eraser
on it I'm satisfied I could have backed him up against the wall and
rubbed him right out; but he bore up splendidly.
It was plain he felt that he was properly dressed for the time, the
place and the occasion; and to him that was ample compensation for his
suffering. I heard afterward that he lost three sets of tennis and had a
congestive chill--all in the course of the same afternoon.