Arabs of the Sahara make a pilgrimage to a spot in the desert near
Biskra, in southern Algeria. From a thousand miles around they come—by
horse and by camel and on the backs of asses—for the sake of a prayer in
the yellow desert at break of day. This “Great Prayer,” as it is called,
is one of the most impressive ceremonies that I have ever witnessed,
and I little thought that I should ever see its like again—certainly
not in my own land and among my own people. Once each year the people
of Riverside and the surrounding country also make a pilgrimage. They
set out in the darkness of early Easter morning, afoot, ahorseback, in
carriages, and in panting motor-cars, and assemble on the summit of
Mount Rubidoux in the first faint light of dawn. They group themselves,
fittingly enough, about the cross which has been erected in memory
of Padre Junipero Serra, that indomitable friar who first brought
Christianity to the Californias, and who, on his weary journeys between
the missions which he founded, not infrequently spread his blankets for
the night at the foot of this same hill. Last year upward of six thousand
people gathered under the shadow of the Serra cross to greet the Easter
morn. As sunrise approached, a group of girls from the Indian School,
standing on a rocky eminence, sang “He Is Risen,” and then, as a red
glow in the east heralded the coming of the sun, the sweet, clear notes
of a cornet rang out upon the morning air in the splendid bars of “The
Holy City.” Just as the last notes died away a spark of light—brighter
than the arc-lamps which still glared in the streets of the city
below—appeared above the San Bernardino’s topmost rim and a moment later
the full orb of the sun burst forth in all its dazzling glory, turning
the purple mountains into peaks of glowing amethyst and the sombre
valleys into emerald islands swimming in a sea of lavender haze. “Lord,
Thou hast been my dwelling-place in all generations.... I will lift up
mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help,” chanted the people in
solemn unison. And then Dr. Henry van Dyke, fittingly garbed in a Norfolk
jacket and knickerbockers, with a mammoth boulder for a pulpit, read his
“God of the Open Air.” With the Amen of the benediction there ended the
most significant and impressive service that I have ever heard under
the open sky and one which sharply refutes the frequent assertion that
America is lacking in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque observances
which make Europe so attractive to the traveller.
[Illustration: A MODERN VERSION OF THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.
The Easter sunrise service on Mount Rubidoux, near Riverside, “sharply
refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking in those quaint
ceremonies and picturesque observances which make Europe so attractive to
the traveller.”]
It is threescore miles from Riverside to Pasadena, provided you go via
Redlands, Smiley Heights, and San Bernardino, and it is flowers and
fruit-trees all the way. Just as every visitor to London asks to be
directed to Kew Gardens, so every visitor to the orange belt asks to be
shown Smiley Heights. Its late owner was a hotel proprietor of national
fame who amassed a fortune by running his great summer hostelries at
Lake Mohonk, N. Y., in conformance with the discipline of the Methodist
Church, among the rules which the guests are required to observe being
one which states that “visitors are not expected to arrive or depart
on the Sabbath.” Smiley Heights is a remarkable object-lesson in the
horticultural miracles which can be performed in California with water
and patience. When bought by Mr. Smiley it was a barren, bone-dry mesa,
whose entire six hundred acres did not have sufficient vegetation to
support a goat, but which, by the lavish use of water, and fertilisers,
and the employment of a small army of landscape architects and gardeners,
has been transformed into a beauty-spot which is worth using several
gallons of gasoline to see. In Cañon’s Crest, to give the place the
name bestowed by its owner, is epitomised the story of all southern
California, for on every side of this semitropic garden of pines, palms,
peppers, oranges, olives, lemons, figs, acacias, bamboos, deodars, and
roses, roses, roses, stretches the sage-brush-covered desert from which
it was snatched and to which, were it deprived of care and water, it
would quickly return. If you will look from the right-hand window of your
north-bound train, just before it reaches Redlands, you can see it for
yourself: a flower-smothered, tree-covered table-land rising abruptly
from an arid plain.
I wonder if other motorists get as much enjoyment from the signs along
the way as I do. The notices along the Californian roads struck me as
being more original and amusing than any that I had ever seen. Most
of them were worded with an after-you-my-dear-Alphonse politeness
which made acquiescence with their courteous requests a pleasure,
though occasionally we were confronted with a warning couched in such
threatening terms that it seemed to shake a metaphorical fist in our
faces. Who, I ask you, would not cheerfully slow down to lawful speed in
the face of the stereotyped request which is used on the roads between
Riverside and Pasadena: “Speed limit thirty miles an hour—a reasonable
compliance with this request will be deeply appreciated”? Another time,
however, as we were humming along one of those stretches of oiled
delight which make the speedometer needle flutter like a lover’s heart,
we were greeted, as we swept into the outskirts of some Orangeburg or
Citronville, by a great brusque placard which menaced us in staring black
letters with the threat: “Fifty dollars fine for exceeding the speed
limit.” As a result we crept through the town as sedately as though we
were following a hearse, which was, I suppose, the very effect the city
fathers aimed to produce, but as we left the limits of the municipality
our resentment was dispelled by a sign so placed as to catch the eye of
the departing motorist. It read: “So long, friend! Come again.”
There is one word that you should never, _never_ mention in the orange
belt and that is—frost. That severe frosts are few and far between
is perfectly true, as is attested by the fact that the road from
Riverside to Pasadena runs through a vast forest of treasure-bearing
trees. That there is another and less joyous side to the business of
raising breakfast-table fruit was brought sharply home to me, however,
by noting that the orchards I passed were dotted with hundreds, yes,
thousands, of little cylindrical oil-stoves—the kind that they use in
New England farmhouses to heat the bedroom enough to take a bath in on
Sunday mornings. When the weather observer in Los Angeles flashes to the
orange-growing centres a warning of an impending frost, the countryside
turns out _en masse_ as though to repel an invader, and soon the groves
are dotted with myriad pin-points of flame as the orchardists wage their
desperate battle with the cold, with stoves, braziers, smudge-pots, and
bonfires for their weapons. Though at long intervals a frost comes which
does wide-spread and incalculable damage, as in 1913, that they _are_
infrequent is best proved by the fact that automobile, phonograph, and
encyclopedia salesmen find their most profitable markets in the orange
belt.
The cultivation of citrus fruits has been so systematised of recent years
that nowadays, if one is to believe the alluringly worded prospectuses
issued by the concerns engaged in selling citrus lands, all the owner of
an orange grove has to do is to sit in a rocking-chair on his veranda,
watch his trees grow and his fruit ripen, have it picked, packed, and
marketed by proxy, and pocket the money which comes rolling in. According
to the specious arguments of the realty dealers, it is as simple as
taking candy from children. You simply can’t lose. According to them, it
works out something after this fashion. Prof. Nathaniel Nutt, principal
of a school at Skaneateles, N.Y., decides that when his teaching days are
over he would like to spend his carpet-slipper years on an orange grove
under California’s sunny skies. Lured by the glowing advertisements, he
invests in ten acres of land planted to young trees and piped for water.
The price is five hundred dollars an acre, of which he pays one fifth
down and the balance in four annual instalments. By the time that his
grove is old enough to bear, therefore, it will be fully paid for. In
its fifth year—according to the dealer, at least—Mr. Nutt’s grove will
yield him fruit to the value of five hundred dollars an acre, so that
it will pay for itself the very first year after it comes into bearing.
Moreover, during the five years that must of necessity intervene before
the trees can be expected to droop under their golden crop, there is no
real necessity for Mr. Nutt’s coming to California, for, by the payment
of a purely nominal sum, he can have his grove cultivated, irrigated,
and cared for under the direction of expert horticulturists while he
continues to teach the Skaneateles youngsters their three R’s. As soon as
the grove comes into bearing he will be notified, whereupon he will send
in his resignation to the School Board, pack his grip, buy a ticket to
California, and settle down as an orange grower with an assured income
of five thousand dollars a year (ten acres multiplied by five hundred
dollars, you see) for life. Simple, isn’t it? But let us suppose, just
for the sake of argument, that about the time that Prof. Nutt’s trees
come into bearing a devastating frost comes along and in a single night
wipes his orchard out. Is it likely that he will be able to stand the
financial strain of setting out another grove and irrigating it and
fertilising it and caring for it for another five years? All of which
goes to prove that orange growing is no business for people of limited
means. Like speculating in Wall Street, it is an occupation which should
only be followed by those who have sufficient resources to tide them over
serious reverses and long periods of waiting. For such as those, however,
there is no denying that gold grows on orange-trees.
Citrus growing, as I have already remarked, has been greatly simplified
of late by the organisation of growers’ unions. These unions are a result
of the long and bitter struggle the citrus growers have waged to oust
the intrenched middlemen and speculators. A few years ago the growers
found themselves facing the alternatives of organisation or bankruptcy.
They chose the former. The first to organise were the Riverside growers,
who built a common packing-house, put a general manager in charge, and
sent their fruit to it to be inspected, packed, sold, and shipped. So
successful did the experiment prove that other districts soon followed
Riverside’s example, until to-day there is no orange-growing section
in the State that does not have its own packing-house. But the growers
did not stop there. They soon found that, if they were to get the
top-of-the-market prices for their fruit, some system must be devised
for getting market quotations at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth
minute and then diverting their shipments to the highest market. Here
is an example: a car-load of oranges from Redlands might arrive in the
Milwaukee freight yards the same day as a car-load from San Bernardino,
in which case the Milwaukee market would be glutted, while in Saint Paul
there might be a shortage of the golden fruit. To meet this necessity
the local packing-houses grouped themselves together in shipping
exchanges, of which there are now in the neighbourhood of a hundred
and thirty, handling sixty per cent of California’s citrus crop. But,
as the industry grew, still another organisation was needed: a big
central fruit exchange to handle problems of transportation, to gather
information about the markets, and to supply daily quotations, and legal,
technical, and scientific information. Thus there came into being the big
central exchange, as a result of which the growers have been enabled
to market their own fruit regardless of the speculators. This central
exchange keeps a salaried agent on every important market in the country.
No commissions and no dividends are paid; there is no profit feature
whatsoever. Against each box of fruit passing through the exchange is
assessed the exact expense of handling, and the entire proceeds, less
only this expense, are remitted to the grower. The local packing-house
unions exist solely to pick, pack, and ship; the district unions exist
solely to handle the local problems of the association; the central union
exists for the purpose of gathering and supplying quotations and other
information. Each of these unions is duly incorporated and has a board of
directors, the growers electing the directors of the district union and
these in turn electing the directors of the central union. Each union is
a pure democracy—one vote a man, independent of his financial status or
his acreage.
Few outsiders appreciate the enormous proportions to which California’s
citrus industry has grown. Three of every four oranges grown in the
United States come from Californian groves, which yield a fifth of the
entire citrus production of the world. The orange and lemon groves of
California now amount to approximately a quarter of a million acres and
are increasing at the rate of twenty-five thousand acres a year, for,
as it takes a grove five years to come into bearing and nine years to
reach maturity, population multiplies faster than the groves can grow.
Notwithstanding this formidable array of facts and figures, it is open
to grave doubt whether an orange grove is a safe investment for a person
of modest means. Though a great deal of money has unquestionably been
made in citrus growing, there is no denying the fact that it is a good
deal of a gamble. One of the largest and most successful growers in
California, a pioneer in the industry, said to me not long ago: “If the
best friend I have in the world sent me a cheque for ten thousand dollars
and asked me to invest it for him in citrus property, I would send it
back to him unless I knew that there was plenty of money where that came
from. I have made money in orange growing, it is true, but only because
there has never been a time that I have not had ample resources to fall
back on.” And here is the other side of the shield. We stopped for lunch
one day at the rose-covered bungalow of a young widow whose husband had
died a few years before, leaving her with two small children and twenty
acres of oranges.
“These twenty acres,” she told me, as we sat on the terrace over the
coffee, “pay for the maintenance of this house, for the education of
my two youngsters, for the up-keep of my little motor-car, and for my
annual trips back East. And I don’t have to economise by wearing cotton
stockings, either.”
I have shown you both sides of the orange question; you can decide it for
yourself.
* * * * *
Some one with a poetic fancy and an imagination that worked overtime
has asserted that Pasadena means “the Pass to Eden.” Though this is,
to say the least, a decidedly free translation, it is, nevertheless, a
peculiarly fitting one, for I doubt if there is any spot on earth where
Adam and Eve would feel more at home than in the enchanting region of
oak-studded foot-hills and poppy-carpeted valleys to which Pasadena is
the gateway. What Cannes and Mentone and Nice are to Europe, Pasadena is
to America: a place where the fortunate ones who can afford it can idle
away their winters amid the same luxurious surroundings and under the
same _cielo sereno_ that they would find on the Côte d’Azur. Enclosed
on three sides by a mountain wall which effectually protects it from
the cold land winds, Pasadena nestles amid its subtropical gardens on
the level floor of the San Gabriel Valley, ten miles from _La Puebla
de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles_, to give the second city of
California its full name. It is said, by the way, that the people of
Los Angeles have twenty-three distinct ways of pronouncing the name
of their city. Mr. Charles Lummis, the author, who is a recognised
authority on the Southwest, has attempted to secure a correct and uniform
pronunciation of the city’s name by distributing among his friends the
following:
“My Lady would remind you, please,
Her name is not ‘Lost Angy Lees’
Nor Angy anything whatever.
She trusts her friend will be so clever
To share her fit historic pride,
The _g_ should not be jellified;
Long _o_, _g_ hard and rhyme with ‘yes’
And all about Los Angeles.”
It is a Spotless Town in real life, is Pasadena. It is as methodically
laid out as a Nuremburg toy village; it is as immaculate as a new pair of
white kid gloves. At the height of the season, which begins immediately
after New York’s tin-horn-and-champagne debauch on New-Year’s Eve and
lasts until Fifth Avenue is ablaze with Easter millinery, you can find
more private cars side-tracked in Pasadena railway yards and more
high-powered automobiles on its boulevards than at any pleasure resort
in the world. It is much frequented by the less spectacular class of
millionaires, to whom the frivolity of the Palm Beach life does not
appeal, and more than once I have seen on the terrace of the Hotel Green
enough men whose names are household words to form a quorum of the
board of directors of the Steel Trust. Though dedicated to pleasure,
Pasadena has an extraordinary number of large and beautiful churches,
and, as their pulpits are frequently occupied by divines of international
reputation, they are generally filled to the doors. In fact, I have
counted upward of three hundred motor-cars parked in front of two
fashionable churches in Colorado Street.
Just as the Eastern visitor to San Francisco is invariably shown three
“sights”—Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, and the Cliff House, so, when
he goes to Pasadena, he is shown Orange Grove Avenue, taken through
the Busch Gardens, and hauled up Mount Lowe. Orange Grove Avenue is a
mile-long, hundred-foot-wide stretch of asphalt bordered throughout its
entire length by palms, pepper-trees, and plutocrats. We drove along
it quite slowly, taking a resident with us to point out the houses
and retail any odds and ends of gossip about the people who lived in
them, like the lecturers on the rubberneck coaches. It was almost as
interesting as reading the advertising pages in the magazines, for most
of the names he mentioned were familiar ones: we had seen them hundreds
of times on soap and tooth-powder and ham and corsets and safety-razors.
Then we motored over to the Busch Gardens, which were the hobby of the
late St. Louis brewer and on which he lavished the profits of goodness
knows how many kegs of beer. Though exceedingly beautiful in spots, they
are too much of a horticultural _pousse-café_ to be wholly satisfying.
Roses and orchids and pansies and morning-glories and geraniums and
asters are exquisite by themselves, but they don’t look particularly
well crowded into the same vase. That is the trouble with the Busch
Gardens. The profusion of subtropical vegetation is characteristically
Californian; the sweeping greensward, overshadowed by gnarled and hoary
live-oaks, recalls the manor parks of England; the prim, clipped hedges
and the _jets d’eau_ suggest Versailles; the gravelled promenades,
bordered by marble seats and rows of stately cypress, bear the
unmistakable stamp of Italy; while the cast-iron dogs and deer and gnomes
which are scattered about in the most unexpected places could have come
from nowhere on earth save the Rhineland.
The climax of a stay in Pasadena is the trip up Mount Lowe. You can no
more escape it and preserve your self-respect than you can go to Lucerne
and escape going up the Rigi. From Rubio Cañon, near the city limits, a
cable incline which in Switzerland would be called a funicular, climbs
up the mountainside at a perfectly appalling grade. All the way up you
speculate as to what would happen if the cable _should_ break. When two
thirds of the way to the summit the passengers are transferred to an
electric car which, alternately clinging like a spider to the mountain’s
precipitous face or creeping across giddy cañons by means of cobweb
bridges, twists and turns its hair-raising way upward to the Alpine
Tavern, a mile above the level of the valley floor. The far-flung orange
groves with the sun shining upon them, the white villas of Pasadena and
Altadena peeping coquettishly from amid the live-oaks, the rounded,
moleskin-coloured foot-hills splotched with yellow poppies, the double
rows of blue-grey eucalyptus (in Australia they call them blue-gums)
and the white highways which run between them, in the distance the
towering sky-line of Los Angeles beneath its pall of smoke, and, farther
still, the islands of San Clemente and Santa Catalina rising, violet and
alluring, from the sun-flecked sea, combine to form a picture the Great
Artist has but rarely equalled.
Different people, different tastes. Those who prefer the whoop-and-hurrah
of popular seaside resorts can gratify their tastes to the limit at any
one of the long and beautiful beaches—Long Beach, Redondo, Santa Monica,
Venice—which adjoin Los Angeles. Here the amusements which await the
visitor are limited only by his pocketbook and his endurance. The scenes
along this coast of joy in summer beggar description. The splendid sands
are alive with bathers; the promenades, lined with all the peripatetic
shows of a popular seaside resort, swarm with good-natured, jostling,
happy-go-lucky crowds. There is no rowdyism, as is the rule rather than
the exception at similar resorts in the East, and there is amazingly
little vulgarity, the boisterous element which prevails, say, at Coney
Island, being totally lacking, this being due, no doubt, to the fact
that several of the beaches have “gone dry.” At Long Beach the really
beautiful Virginia, than which there are not half a dozen finer seaside
hotels in the United States, provides accommodation for those who wish to
combine the hurly-burly of Manhattan Beach with the more sedate pleasures
of Marblehead or Narragansett. At Redondo you can risk your neck on the
largest scenic railway in the world (they called them roller-coasters
when I was a boy), or you can bathe in the largest indoor swimming pool
in the world, or you can go down on the beach and disport yourself in the
surf of the largest ocean in the world, though it is only fair to add
that this last is not the exclusive property of Redondo. At Santa Monica
you can sit on a terrace overlooking the sea and eat fried sand-dabs—a
fish for which this portion of the Californian littoral is famous and
which is as delicious as the pompano of New Orleans. At Venice you can
lean back in a gondola, while a gentleman of Italian extraction in white
ducks and a red sash pilots you through a series of lagoons and canals,
and, if you have a sufficiently vigorous imagination, you may be able
to make yourself believe that you are in the city of the Doges. Though
somewhat noisy and nearly always crowded—which is, of course, precisely
what their promoters want—the Los Angeles beaches provide the cleanest
amusements and the most wholesome atmosphere of any places of their kind
that I know.