Roughing it De Luxe

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.

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 cañon 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 cañons 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.

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.

The unconquerable determination of the Eastern tourist to have Southern California conform to his back-home standards is responsible for the fact that many of the tourist hotels out there are not so typical of the West as they might be—and as in my humble judgment they should be—but are as Eastern as it is possible to make them—Eastern in cuisine, in charges and in their operating schedules. Here, again, there are some notable exceptions.

In the supposedly wilder sections of the West, lying between the Rockies and the Sierras, the situation is different. It is notably different in Arizona and New Mexico in the South, and in Utah, Montana and Wyoming in the North. There the person who serves you for hire is neither your menial nor your superior; whereas in the East he or she is nearly always one or the other, and sometimes both at once. This particular type of Westerner doesn't patronize you; neither does he cringe to you in expectation of a tip. He gives you the best he has in stock, meanwhile retaining his own self-respect and expecting you to do the same. He ennobles and dignifies personal service.

Out on the Coast, however—or at least at several of the big hotels out on the Coast—the system, thanks to Eastern influence, has been changed. The whole scheme is patterned after the accepted New York model. The charges for small services are as exorbitant as in New York, and the iniquities of the tipping system are worked out as amply and as wickedly as in the city where they originated.

Somebody with a taste for statistics figured it out once that if a man owned a three-dollar hat and wore it for two months, lunching every day at a New York café, and if he dined four nights a week at a New York restaurant and attended the theater twice a week, his hat at the end of those two months would cost him in tips eighteen dollars and seventy cents! No, on second thought, I guess it was a pair of earmuffs that would have cost him eighteen-seventy.

A hat would have been more.

It would be more in Southern California—I'm sure of that. There the tipping habit is made more expensive by reason of the prevalent spirit of Western generosity. The born Westerner never has got used to dimes and nickels. To him quarters are still chicken-feed and a half dollar is small change. So the tips are just as numerous as in New York and for the same service they are frequently larger.

A lot has been said and written about the marvelous palms of Lower California and a lot more might be said—for they are outstretched everywhere; and if you don't cross them with silver at frequent intervals you would do well to try camping out for a change. Likewise a cursory glance at the prices on some of the menus is calculated to make a New Yorker homesick—they're so familiarly and unreasonably steep. And frequently the dishes you get aren't typical of the country; they are—thanks again be to the Easterner—mostly transplanted imitations of the concoctions of the Broadway and the Fifth Avenue chefs.

There are compensations, though. There are some hotels that are operated on admirably different lines, and there are abundant opportunities for escaping altogether from hotel life and seeing this Land of the Living Backdrop where it is untainted and unspoiled; where the hills are clothed in green and yellow; where little Spanishy looking towns nestle below the Missions, and the mocking-birds sing, and the real-estate boomer leaps from crag to crag, sounding his flute-like note. And don't forget the climate! But that is unnecessary advice. You won't have a chance to forget it—not for a minute you won't!

IN THE HAUNT OF THENATIVE SON

There are various ways of entering San Francisco, and the traveling general passenger agent of any one of half a dozen trunklines stands ready to prove to you—absolutely beyond the peradventure of a doubt—that his particular way is incomparably the best one; but to my mind a very satisfactory way is to go overland from Monterey.

The route we followed led us lengthwise through the wonderful Santa Clara country, straight up a wide box plait of valley tucked in between an ornamental double ruffle of mountains. I suppose if we passed one ranch we passed a thousand—cattle ranches, fruit ranches, hen ranches, chicken ranches, bee ranches—all the known varieties and subvarieties.

In California you mighty soon get out of the habit of speaking of farms; for there are no farms—only ranches. The particular ranch to which you have reference may be a ten-thousand-acre ranch, where they raise enough beef critters to feed a standing army, or it may be a half-acre ranch, where somebody is trying to make things home-like and happy for eight hens and a rooster; but a ranch it always is, and usually it is a model of its kind, too. The birds in California do not build nests. They build ranches.

Most of the way along the Santa Clara Valley our tires glided upon an arrow-straight, unbelievably smooth stretch of magnificent automobile road, which—when it is completed—will extend without a break from the Oregon line to the Mexican line, and will be the finest, costliest, best thoroughfare to be found within the boundaries of any state of the Union, that being the scale upon which they work out their public-utility plans in the West.

Eventually the road changes into a paved and curbed avenue, lined with seemingly unending aisles of the tall gum trees. Soon you begin to skitter past the suburban villas of rich men, set back in ornamental landscape effects of green lawns and among tropical verdure. You emerge from this into a gently rolling plateau, upon which flower gardens of incomparable richness are interspersed with the homely structures that inevitably mark the proximity of any great city. There, rising ahead of you, are the foothills that protect, upon its landward side, San Francisco, the city that has produced more artists, more poets, more writers, more actors, more pugilists, more sudden millionaires—cries of Question! Question! from the Pittsburgh delegation—more good fiction and more Native Sons than any community in the Western Hemisphere.

You aren't there yet, however. Next you round a sloping shoulder of a hill and slide down into a shore road, with the beating, creaming surf on one side, and on the other a long succession of the sort of architectural triumphs that have made Coney Island famous. You negotiate another small ridge and there, suddenly spread out before you, is the Golden Gate, with the city itself cuddled in between the ocean and the friendly protecting mountains at its back. The Seal Rocks are there, and the Cliff House, and the Presidio, and all. New York has a wonderful harbor entrance; Nature did some of it and man did the rest. San Francisco has an even more wonderful one, and the hand of man did not need to touch it. When Nature got through with it, it was a complete and satisfactory job.

The first convincing impression the newcomer gets of San Francisco is that here is a permanent city—a city that has found itself, has achieved its own personality, and is satisfied with it. Perhaps, because they are growing so fast, certain of the other Coast cities strike the casual observer as having just been put up. I was told that a man who lives on a residential street of San Diego has to mark his house with chalk when he leaves of a morning in order to know it when he gets home at night. A real-estate agent told me so, and I do not think a Southern California real-estate agent would deceive anybody—more particularly a stranger from the East. So it must be true. And Los Angeles' main business district is like a transverse slice chopped out of the middle of Manhattan Island. It isn't Western. It is typically New Yorky—as alive as New York and as handsomely done. You can almost imagine you are at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street.

San Francisco, it seems to me, isn't like any city on earth except San Francisco. Once you get away from the larger hotels, which are accurate copies of the metropolitan article of the East, even to the afternoon tea-fighting mêlées of the women, you find yourself in a city that is absolutely individual and distinctive. It impresses its originality upon you; it presents itself with an air of having been right there from the beginning—and this, too, in spite of the fact that the ravages of the great fire are still visible in old cellar excavations and piles of débris. Practically every building in the main part of the town has been rebuilt within eight years and is still new. The scars are fresh, but the spirit is old and abides.

This same essence of individuality tinctures the lives, the manners and the conversations of the people. They do not strike you as being Westerners or as being transplanted Easterners; they are San Franciscans. Even when all other signs fail you may, nevertheless, instantly discern certain unfailing traits—to wit, as follows: 1—A San Franciscan shudders with ill-concealed horror when anybody refers to his beloved city as Frisco—which nobody ever does unless it be a raw alien from the other side of the continent; 2—He does not brag of the climate with that constancy which provides his neighbor of Los Angeles a never-failing topic of congenial conversation; and 3—He assures you with a regretful sighing note in his voice that the old-time romance disappeared with the destruction of the old-time buildings, the old-time resorts and the old-time neighborhoods.

It has been my experience that romance is always in the past tense anyhow. Romance is a commodity that was extremely plentiful last week or last year or last century, but for the moment they are entirely out of it, and can't say with any degree of certainty when a fresh stock will be coming in. This is largely true of all the formerly romantic cities I know anything about, and it appears to be especially true of San Francisco. Romance invariably acquires added value after it has vanished; in this respect it is very much like a history-making epoch. An epoch rarely seems to create any great amount of excitement when it is in process of epoching, or at least the excitement is only temporary and soon abates. Afterward we look back upon it with a feeling of longing, but when it was actually coming to pass we took it—after the first shock of surprise—as a matter of course.

No doubt our children and our children's children will read in the text-books that the first decade of the twentieth century was distinguished as the age when the auto and tango came into use, and people learned to fly, and grown men wore bracelet watches and carried their handkerchiefs up their cuffs; and they will repine because they, too, did not live in those stirring times. But we of the present generation who recently passed through these experiences have already accepted them without undue excitement, just as our forefathers in their day accepted the submarine cable, the galvanic battery and the congress gaiter.

Age and antiquity give an added value to everything except an egg. In my own case I know how it was with regard to the Egyptian scarab. For years I felt that I could never rest satisfied until I had gone to Egypt and had personally broken into the tomb of some sleeping Pharaoh or some crumbly old Rameses, and with my own hands had ravished from it a mummified specimen of that fabled beetle which the ancients worshiped and buried with them in their tombs. But not long ago I made the discovery that, in coloring, habits, customs and general walk and conversation, the scarab of the Egyptians was none other than the common tumblebug of the Southern dirt roads. Right there was where I lost interest in the scarab. He was no novelty to me—not after that he wasn't. As a boy I had known him intimately.

So, when I was repeatedly assured that the old-time romance had vanished from San Francisco, and with it the atmosphere that bred Bohemianism and developed literature and art, and kept alive the spirit of the Forty-niner times, and all that, I made my own allowances. Those who mourned for the fire-blasted past may have been right, in a measure. Certainly the old-time Chinatown isn't there any more—or, at any rate, isn't there in its physical aspects. The rebuilt Chinatown of San Francisco, though infinitely larger, isn't so picturesque really or so Chinesey looking as New York's Chinatown.

I did not dare to give utterance to this treasonable statement until I was well away from San Francisco, but it is true all the same. I cruised the shores of the far-famed and much-written-about Barbary Coast; and it seemed to me that in its dun-colored tiresomeness and in its miserable transparent counterfeit of joy it was up to the general metropolitan average—that it was just as tiresome and humdrum as the avowedly wicked section of any city always is.

However, I was told that I had arrived just one week too late to see the Barbary Coast at its best—meaning by that its worst; for during the week before the police, growing virtuous, had put the crusher on the dance-halls and the hobble on the tango-twisters. Even the place where the turkey trot originated—a place that would naturally be a shrine to a New Yorker—was trotless and quiet—in mourning for its firstborn.

The so-called French restaurants, which for years gave an unwholesome savor to certain phases of San Francisco life, had likewise been sterilized and purified. I wished I might have got there before the housecleaning took place; but, even so, I should probably have been disappointed. What makes the vice of ancient Babylon seem by contrast more seductive to us than the vice of the Bowery is that Babylon is gone and the Bowery isn't.