long perhaps and a fifth of that in width, entirely surrounded by a
wall of purple mountains. The floor of the valley is covered with lush
green grass and dotted with thousands of gnarled and hoary live-oaks
with venerable grey beards of Spanish moss. Through the trees peep the
shingled, weather-beaten cottages of Nordhoff, which, with its leafy
lanes, its shady blacksmith shop, its cosy inn, and its collection of
country stores with the inevitable group of loungers chewing tobacco
and whittling and settling the affairs of the nation in the shade of
their wooden awnings, is as quaint and sleepy and unspoiled a hamlet
as you can find west of Cape Cod. The annual tournaments of the Ojai
Valley Tennis Club, which for nearly twenty years have been held each
spring on the pretty oak-fringed courts behind the inn, attract the crack
players of the coast, and here have been developed no less than six
national champions. As you ascend the mountain slopes the character of
the vegetation abruptly changes, the oak groves giving way to orchards
of orange, lemon, fig, and olive, which, taken in conjunction with the
palms and the veritable riot of flowers, give to the sides of the valley
an almost tropical appearance. The Ojai is said to have more varieties
of birds and flowers than any place in the United States, and I think
that the statement is doubtless true. It is like an aviary in a botanical
garden. Snuggled away in the mountains at the back of the Ojai are two
equally enchanting but much less frequented valleys: the Matilija and the
Sespe—the latter accessible only on a sure-footed horse along a mountain
trail which is precipitous in places and nowhere overwide. In the spring
and summer the streams which tumble through these mountain valleys are
alive with trout jumping-hungry for the fly. If you can accommodate
yourself to simple accommodations and plain but wholesome fare you can
eat and sleep and fish a very delightful vacation away at the rate of two
dollars a day or ten a week.
High on the slopes of the Ojai, its brown shingles almost hidden by the
Gold of Ophir roses which clamber over it, is a little hotel called The
Foot-hills. It is an unpretending little inn with perhaps forty rooms at
most. But, shades of Lucullus and Mrs. Rorer, what meals they set before
you! Brook-trout which that very morning were leaping in the Matilija,
hot biscuits with honey from the Sespe, huge purple figs, grapefruit
fresh-picked from the adjacent orchard, strawberries with lashings of
thick yellow cream. I’ve never been able to decide which I like best
about the Ojai, its scenery or its food. But as it becomes better
known and more people begin to go there, I suppose the same thing will
happen to it which happened to a dear little _albergo_ in Venice which
I once knew and loved. For many years it stood on the Guidecca, quite
undiscovered by the tourist, and in their day had sheltered the Brownings
and Carlyle. It was a sure refuge from the bustle and turmoil of the big
hotels, and not infrequently I used to go there for a lunch of omelet and
strawberries and Chianti served under a vine-clad pergola on the edge of
the canal. The first time that I took Her to Venice, I said, as we were
leaving the great caravansary where we were stopping:
“I know a place where we will lunch. I haven’t been there for years and I
don’t remember its name, but I think that I can find it,” and I described
it in detail to Angelo, our gondolier.
“_Si, si, signor_,” he assured me, and shoved off with his long oar.
Four times we rowed up and down the Guidecca without my being able to
locate my beloved little hotel.
“This must have been the place you meant, signor,” Angelo said finally,
pointing to a building which was rapidly being demolished and to a
staring sign which read: “A new five-story hotel with hot and cold
running water, electric lights, and all modern conveniences will shortly
be erected on this site. Meals _prix fixe_ or _à la carte_. Music every
evening.”
And that, I suppose, is what will happen to my little hotel in the Ojai
when the world comes to learn about it. So I beg you who read this not to
mention it to any one.
* * * * *
Until quite recently the route from the Ojai to Santa Barbara led over
the Casitas Pass by a precipice-bordered road so narrow and dangerous
that the fear of it kept many motorists away. But now the Casitas is a
thing of the past, for a highway has been built along the edge of the
sea by what is known as the Rincon route, several miles of it lying over
wooden causeways not unlike the viaducts for Mr. Flagler’s seagoing
railway on the Florida keys. This portion of the coast is one long
succession of _barrancas_, each with a rocky creek bed worn by the winter
torrent at its bottom, so that the road builders had many obstacles with
which to contend. It is a very beautiful highway, however, and reminds
one at every turn of the Corniche Road along the Riviera, with the same
lazy ocean on the one side and the same blue serrated mountains on the
other. Through Carpinteria we ran, pausing in our flight just long enough
to take a look at a grape-vine with a trunk eight feet in circumference,
which has borne in a single season, so its guardian assured us, upward
of ten tons of grapes; through Summerland, where the forest of derricks
and the reek of petroleum suggest the hand of Rockefeller; past Miramar,
as smothered in flowers as the heroine of d’Annunzio’s play; through
Montecito, with its marble villas and red-roofed mansions rising above
the groves of cypress and cedar; down the splendid Ocean Drive, where the
great rollers from the Pacific come booming in to break in iridescent
splendour on the silver strand; and so into Santa Barbara, the Newport
of the West, where buildings of stone and concrete jostle elbows with
picturesque hovels of adobe.
Santa Barbara presents more curious contrasts, I suppose, than any place
between the oceans. Drawn up beside the curb you will see a magnificent
limousine, the very latest product of the automobile builder’s art,
with the strength of fourscore horses beneath its sloping hood and as
luxuriously fitted as a lady’s boudoir; a Mexican vaquero, sombreroed,
flannel-shirted, his legs encased in high-heeled boots and fleecy chaps,
fresh from the cattle-ranges on the other side of the mountains, will
rein up his wiry mustang and dexterously roll a cigarette and ask the
liveried chauffeur for a match—_Muchas gracias, Señor_. On State Street
stands a huge concrete office-building, the very last word in urban
architecture, with hydraulic elevators and cork-paved corridors and
up-to-the-minute ventilating devices, and all the rest. A man can stand
in front of that building and toss an orange into the _patio_ of a long,
low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose walls of crumbling adobe show that it
dates from the period when this land was ruled from Madrid instead of
Washington. Though there are plenty of buildings dating from the Spanish
era left, the observing stranger will note that few if any of them retain
their original roofs of hand-made, moss-grown tiles. Why? Because the old
Spanish tiles will bring almost any price that is asked for them, being
in great demand for roofing the houses of the rich. In fact, I know of
one Santa Barbara mansion which is roofed with tiles brought from the old
cathedral at Panama. Nor have I the least doubt in the world that these
plutocratic philistines would strip the historic mission which is Santa
Barbara’s chiefest asset of its tiles and bells and crosses if the monks
could be induced to sell them.
Over in the section known as the Old Town all the houses are Mexican
in character, their walls tinted yellow, pink, bright blue. This, with
the palm-trees and the cactus in the dusty, unkempt dooryards, the
groups of brown-faced, black-eyed youngsters by the gates, and the
Spanish names—Garcias, Ortegas, Oteros, Espinosas, De la Guerras—which
one sees everywhere, makes one realise that Santa Barbara is still
Latin in everything save cleanliness. Merely to read the street
names—Cañon Perdido, Anapamu, Arellaga, Micheltorena, Pedragoso, Chapala,
Salsipuedes—makes you feel that you are in some Castilian town and not in
the United States of the twentieth century at all. Why on earth, while
they were about it, they didn’t call the town’s main thoroughfare La
Calle del Estado instead of prosaic State Street, I fail to understand.
This glaring inconsistency in nomenclature is almost compensated for,
however, by the little square down on the ocean front which is called the
Plaza del Mar. Here barelegged youngsters, guarded by anxious nurses,
gambol upon the sands; here the old folks doze contentedly upon the green
benches and look out to sea and listen to the music of La Monica’s band;
here lovers sit silently, clasping hands beneath the palms, just as other
children, other old folk, other lovers are doing in other plazas in Old
Spain.
[Illustration: “Even the imposing façade of the Arlington, with its
arches, cloisters, terraces, and _campanarios_, suggests a Spanish
monastery.”
“A long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose pottery roof and walls of
adobe show that it dates from the period when this land was ruled from
Madrid instead of Washington.”
SANTA BARBARA. A CITY OF CONTRASTS.]
To understand the charm of Santa Barbara as a place of residence, you
should stroll down State Street on a winter’s morning. Like Bellevue
Avenue in Newport, it is the meeting-place for all the town. Youths in
tweed jackets and flannel trousers stand beside the curbs chatting with
pretty girls in rakish, vivid-coloured motor-cars. Dowagers descend from
stately limousines and enter the shops to order sweetbreads and cotillion
favours and the latest novels. Young men astride of mettlesome ponies
trot by on their way to polo practice. Prosperous-looking, well-groomed
men of years, who look as though they might be bank presidents and
railway directors and financiers and probably are, pause to discuss the
wretched weather prevailing in the East and to thank their lucky stars
that they are out of it and to challenge each other to a game of golf.
Slim young girls in riding-boots and beautifully cut breeches patronise
the soda-fountains and hang over the fiction counters in the bookstore
and chatter volubly about tennis and theatres and tango teas. It is one
big reception, at which every one knows every one else and every one
else’s business. Though there is a great deal of wealth and fashion in
Santa Barbara, there is likewise a great deal of informality, which makes
it a pleasant contrast to Pasadena, which is so painfully conscious of
its millionaires that life there possesses about as much informality as a
court ball.
The ancient mission, which with the climate is Santa Barbara’s chief
attraction, provides the _motif_ for the city’s architecture, and the
citizens have made a very commendable effort to live up to it, or
rather to build up to it, even the imposing façade of the Arlington,
with its arches, cloisters, terraces and _campanarios_, suggesting a
Spanish monastery far more than a great tourist hotel. It is the monks
themselves, however, who have been the most flagrant offenders against
the canons of architectural good taste, for within a stone’s throw of
their beautiful old mission they have erected a college which looks for
all the world like a shoe factory surmounted by a cupola and a cross. No
matter from what point upon the encircling hills you look down upon the
city, that atrocious college, as angular, uncompromising, and out of the
picture as a New England schoolmarm at a _thé dansant_, comes up and hits
you in the eye.
[Illustration: THE MISSION OF SANTA BARBARA.
“The sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches of the
ancient sycamores, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon the crumbling,
weather-worn façade.”]
Perhaps you were not aware that about one out of every ten plays which
flicker before your fascinated eyes on the motion-picture screen were
taken in or near Santa Barbara, for the country round about the town is
a moving-picture producer’s paradise and several companies have built
their studios there and make it their permanent headquarters. Within
a five-mile radius of the Plaza del Mar are settings in which can be
enacted scenes laid anywhere between Cancer and Capricorn. There are
sandy beaches which might have been made expressly for shipwrecks and
buccaneering exploits and similar “water stuff”; there are Greek and
Spanish villas hidden away in subtropical gardens which would provide
backgrounds for anything from the “Odyssey” to “The Orchid-Hunter”; and
back of them are tawny foot-hill ranges where bands of cow-punchers,
spectacularly garbed, pursue horse thieves or valorously defend
wagon-trains attacked by Indians, taking good care, however, to keep
within the focal radius of the camera.
Of the many things in and about Santa Barbara which appeal to the
imagination, I think that I liked best the miniature caravels which
surmount the massive gate-posts at the entrance to the Arlington. To most
visitors I suppose that they are only puppet vessels, quaintly rigged
and strangely shaped, to be sure, but nothing more. But to me they stand
for something very definite indeed, do those little carven craft. They
represent the _San Salvador_ and the _Vittoria_, the little caravels in
which Juan Rodrigues Cabrillo, the intrepid Portuguese sea adventurer
who hired his sword and services to Spain, sailed up this storied
coast upward of three centuries ago and whose anchors rumbled down off
these very shores. From out the mist of fiction, romance, legend, and
fairy-tale which beclouds the early history of California, the certain
and authenticated voyage of this Portuguese sailor of fortune stands out
sharp and clear as the one fact upon which we can rely. Though he never
returned from the land which he discovered, though he has been overlooked
by History and forgotten by Fame, his adventure has become immortal, for
he put California on the map.
* * * * *
Were you to turn your back on the Pacific at some point between Santa
Barbara and San Luis Obispo and strike due eastward, you would find
athwart your path, shortly before reaching the Nevada line, the crudest
and most forbidding of the earth’s waste places—Death Valley. At the very
back of California, paralleling the eastern boundary of Inyo County,
sandwiched between the great wall formed by the High Sierras and the
burning sands of the Colorado Desert, this seventy-five-mile-long gash
in the earth’s surface—the floor of the valley is two hundred and ten
feet below the level of the sea—is one of the most extraordinary regions
in the world. It is a place of contrasts and contradictions. Though in
summer it is probably the hottest place on earth, in winter the cold
becomes so great that the thermometer cannot record it. Its aridity is
so extreme that men have died from lack of moisture with water at their
lips. Though rain is virtually unknown, the lives of the inhabitants
are frequently menaced by the floods which result from cloudbursts. A
mountain range, whose rocks are of such incredibly vivid colours that
even a scene-painter would hesitate to depict them as they are, is
called the Funeral Range. Though nearly a score of lives were lost when
the valley was christened, and though its history from that day to this
has been one of hardship, peril, and death, with little to relieve its
harshness, for fully half the year Death Valley is as healthy a spot as
any on the continent. During the other half, however, it is a sample
package of that fire-and-brimstone hell of which the old-time preachers
were wont to warn us. Indeed, the hereafter could hold no terrors for a
man who was able to survive a summer in Death Valley.
The valley first became known by the tragedy which gave it its name. The
year following the discovery of gold in California a party of thirty
emigrants, losing their heads in their mad lust for the yellow metal,
left the well-travelled Overland Trail and struck south through this
region in the hope of finding a short cut to the gold-fields. But they
found a short cut to death instead, for they lost their way in the valley
and eighteen of them perished horribly from thirst. The valley, which
runs almost due north and south, is about seventy-five miles long, and at
its lowest point, where the climate is the worst, it is not over eight
miles in width. To the west the Panamints reach their greatest altitude,
while on the east the Funeral Range is practically one huge ridge, with
almost a vertical precipice on the side next the valley. To the south
another range, running east and west, shuts in the foot of the valley
and turns it into a _cul-de-sac_. Seen from the summit of the Panamint
Range, the valley looks for all the world like a huge grey snake marked
with narrow bands of dirty white, which are the borax deposits. Far to
the north, gleaming in the sunlight like a slender blade of steel, is
the Amargosa River, while on either side of the valley the ranges rear
themselves skyward in strata of such gorgeous colours that beside them
the walls of the Grand Cañon would look cold and drab. The vegetation is
scant, stunted, and unhappy; the thorny mesquite shrub takes on a sickly
yellowish tinge; the sage-brush is the colour of ashes; even the cactus,
which flourishes on the inhospitable steppes of the adjacent Mohave
Desert, has given up the struggle to exist in Death Valley in despair.
But, arid as the valley is, it has two streams running through it. One,
the Amargosa, comes in at the north end, where it forms a wash that gives
out volumes of sulphuretted hydrogen which poisons the air for miles
around. The other is Furnace Creek, whose waters are drinkable though
hot. Everything considered, it is not exactly a cheerful place, is Death
Valley.
Weather Bureau officials would tell you, should you ask them, that
when there is ninety per cent of humidity in the air the weather is
insufferably oppressive; that air with seventy per cent of humidity is
about right; that sixty or fifty per cent, as when a room is overheated
by a stove or furnace, will produce headaches; while, should the
percentage be reduced to thirty, or even forty, the air would become
positively dangerous to health. Imagine, then, what existence must be
like in Death Valley in midsummer, when the air, raised to furnace heat
by its passage over the deserts, is kiln-dried in the pit below sea-level
until its percentage of moisture is _less than one half of one per
cent_! Effects of this ultrararefied air are observed on every hand. Men
employed in ditch digging on the borax company’s ranch were compelled
to sleep in the running water with their heads on stones to keep their
faces above the surface—and this was not in the hottest weather, either.
Furniture built elsewhere is quickly and utterly ruined. Tables warp into
fantastic shapes. Chairs split and fall apart. Water barrels incautiously
left empty lose their hoops in an hour. Eggs are boiled hard in the
sand. A handkerchief taken from the tub and held up in the sun will dry
more quickly than it would before a red-hot stove. One end of a blanket
that is being washed will dry while the other is still in the tub. Meat
killed at night and cooked at six in the morning is spoiled by nine.
A man cannot go without water for an hour without becoming insane. A
thermometer, hung in the coolest place available, for forty-eight hours
never dropped below 104, repeatedly registered 130, and occasionally
climbed to 137. A borax driver died, canteen in hand, atop his wagon.
“He was that parched that his head cracked open over the top,” said a man
who saw the body.
But in October, strange as it may seem, Death Valley becomes a dreamy,
balmy, _dolce far niente_ land, the home of the Indian summer. Later
in the season snow falls in the mountains to the west to a depth of
three feet or more. At the Teels Marsh borax works the thermometer has
registered 120 in the shade of the house in August and yet before the
winter was over the mercury froze and the temperature dropped to 50
below zero! There is no place on earth, so far as I am aware, where so
wide a variation has been recorded. Though it rarely if ever rains in
the valley, cloudbursts frequently occur amid the adjacent mountain
tops—usually in the hottest weather and when least expected—and in the
face of the roaring floods which follow the people in the valley fly to
the foot-hills for their lives. More appalling than the floods, however,
are the sand-storms which are a recognised feature of life (existence
would be a better term) in Death Valley. A sand-storm sweeping down that
vale of desolation is a never-to-be-forgotten sight. The wind shrieks by
with the speed of an express train. A dense brown fog completely blots
the landscape out. Sand augers rise like slender stems joining sand and
sky, whirling madly hither and thither through the burning atmosphere
like genii suddenly gone mad. The air is filled with flying pebbles,
sand, and dust. It is like a Dakota blizzard with the grit of broken
volcanic rock in place of snow. These sand-storms commonly last for
three days; then they end as suddenly as they began, leaving the desert
swooning amid its shifting waves of heat. Mirages raise up spectral
cities, groves, tree-bordered rivers, lush, green fields as though by the
sweep of a magician’s wand. In the rarefied air the ruins of an adobe hut
are magnified into a sky-scraper; arrow weeds become stately palms; a
crow walking on the ground appears to be a man on horseback.
The borax deposits for which the valley is famous are exactly alike in
their general appearance: a bowl-shaped depression hemmed in by barren
hills and at the bottom of this bowl an expanse that looks like water
or salt or dirty snow or chalk, according to the distance, but which
is really the boracic efflorescence on the bed of a dried-up lake.
Walking out upon the marsh, one finds it covered with a sandy-looking
crust through which the feet generally break, clay or slime being found
beneath. To reach the railway the borax has to be hauled half a hundred
miles by wagon under a deadly sun. The wagons used are huge affairs with
wheels seven feet in diameter and tires eight inches wide, each carrying
ten tons. Two tremendous Percherons are harnessed to the pole and ahead
of them, fastened by double-trees to a steel chain that stretches from
the forward axle, are nine pairs of mules, the driver from his lofty seat
controlling his twenty animals by means of a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot
jerk line, a bucket of stones, and a complete assortment of
objurgations. The next time, therefore, that you chance to see a package
of borax, stop and think what it has cost—insufferable heat, bitter cold,
sand-storms, agonizing thirst, sunstroke—yes, sometimes even death.
* * * * *
From Santa Barbara, El Camino Real, ever glowing, ever luring, bids
_adios_ to the sea for a time and sweeps inland again through a land
of oak groves and olive orchards and frequent outcroppings of rock,
which, with the bleak purple mountains rising up behind it, bears so
startling a resemblance to Andalusia that the homesick Spanish friars
must have rubbed their eyes and wondered whether they were really in
the New World after all. Our road, winding steadily upward under the
shadow of giant oaks and sycamores, crossed the Santa Ynez Range by the
Gaviota Pass (_gaviota_, I might note in passing, meaning sea-gull in the
Spanish tongue), the car, its engines humming the monotone which is the
motorist’s lullaby, taking the long, steep grades like a hunted cat on
the top of a back-yard fence.