Chapter XV: The Map That Is Half Unrolled 419 (5)

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.

Though Los Angeles is fifteen miles from the sea as the aeroplane flies, and considerably farther by the shortest railway route, the Angelenos have done their best to mitigate this unfortunate circumstance by attempting to convert the indifferent harbour of San Pedro, twenty miles away, into a great artificial seaport. Everything that money can do has been done. The national government has dredged and improved the harbour and built a huge breakwater at enormous cost, and Los Angeles, which has extended her municipal limits so as to include San Pedro, has spent millions more in the construction of several miles of concrete quays and the installation of the most powerful and modern electric loading machinery. There is even under serious consideration a plan for digging a ship-canal from San Pedro to Los Angeles so that seagoing vessels can discharge and take on cargo in the heart of the commercial district. Though in time, as a result of the impetus provided by the completion of the Panama Canal and the astounding growth of Los Angeles, which now has a population of considerably over half a million (in 1890 it had only fifty thousand), San Pedro will doubtless develop into a port of considerable importance for coastwise commerce, its limitations are not likely to permit of its ever becoming a dangerous rival of its great sister ports of San Francisco and San Diego. The attitude of the San Franciscans toward the laudable efforts of Los Angeles to get a harbour of her own is amusingly illustrated by a story they tell upon the coast. When the big breakwater was completed and San Pedro was ready to do business, Los Angeles celebrated the great event with a banquet, among the guests of honour being a gentleman prominent in the civic life of San Francisco. Toward the close of an evening of self-congratulation and of fervid oratory on Los Angeles’s dazzling future as one of the great seaports of the world, the San Franciscan was called upon to respond to a toast.

“I have listened with the deepest interest, gentlemen,” he began, “to what the speakers of the evening have had to say regarding your new harbour at San Pedro, and I have been impressed with a feeling of regret that this magnificent harbour, which you have constructed at so great an expenditure of money and effort, is not more easy of access from your beautiful city. Now it strikes me, gentlemen, that you could overcome this unfortunate circumstance by laying a pipe-line from Los Angeles to San Pedro. Then, if you would suck as hard as you have been blowing this evening, you would soon have the Pacific Ocean at your front door.”

* * * * *

Strung along the coast of California, from Point Loma to Point Concepcion, are the Channel Islands. Counting only the larger ones, they number twelve: three Coronados, four Santa Catalinas, and five in the Santa Barbara group; but if you include them all, small as well as large, there are thirty-five distinct links in the island chain which stretches from wind-swept San Miguel to the Coronados. What the Azores, Madeira, and the Canaries are to Europe, these enchanted isles are to the Pacific Coast. They have the climatic charm of the Riviera without its summer heat; the delights of its winters without the raw, cold winds which sweep down from the Maritime Alps. With their palms and semitropic verdure they have all the appearance of the tropics, yet they have not a tropical climate, the winters having the crispness of an Eastern October and the summers being cooler than any portion of the Atlantic seaboard south of Nova Scotia.

Southernmost of the chain and not more than ten miles southwest from San Diego as the sea-gull flies is the group of rock-bound islets known as Los Coronados, which belong to Mexico. Though uninhabited and extremely rough, they are surrounded by forests of kelp and form famous fishing grounds for the big game of the deep. About a hundred miles to the northward, off the coast of Los Angeles County, is the group of which Santa Catalina is the largest and the most famous. Though Santa Catalina is only twenty-seven miles from San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, it takes the _Cabrillo_, owing to her tipsy gait and the choppy sea which generally prevails in the channel, nearly three hours to make the passage, which is as notorious for producing _mal de mer_ as that across the Straits of Dover.

The prehistoric people who inhabited Santa Catalina during the Stone Age, and of whom many traces have been found in the kitchen-middens which dot the island, were first awakened to the fact that the world contained others than themselves when the Spanish sea-adventurer Cabrillo dropped the anchors of his caravels off their shores. Nearly a century passed away and then Philip III gave the island to one of his generals as a present. Some two hundred years were gathered into the past before Pio Pico, the Mexican governor of Alta California, sold the island for the price of a horse and saddle. In later years various other transfers took place from time to time, James Lick, who lies buried under his great telescope on Mount Hamilton, being for a period lord of the island. Later it was purchased as a prospective silver mine by an English syndicate, but the ore ran out and the disgusted Britishers were glad to dispose of it to the Banning Company, which is the present owner.

Santa Catalina, which is about twenty-seven miles long, is shaped, with great appropriateness, like a fish, the smaller portion, which corresponds to the tail, being connected with the main body of the island by a sandy isthmus. The island is surrounded on all sides by a dense jungle of kelp and other marine plants, whose wonders visitors are able to view from glass-bottomed boats. The topography of the island is scarcely less striking than the sea gardens which surround it. From the mountain peaks which rise to a height of two thousand feet or more, V-shaped cañons, their ridges pitched like the roof of a Swiss chalet, sweep down, ever widening, to the silver beaches of the sea. On the southern slopes cactus and sage-brush, grim offspring of the desert, cling to the naked, sun-baked rocks; on the other, the cooler side, dense, growths of mountain lilac, manzanita, chaparral, elder and other flowering shrubs form a striking contrast. Most of the vast acreage of the island is a sheep ranch and wild-goat range, but one cañon at the eastern end is devoted to the visitor and filled by the charming town of Avalon with a winter population of seven or eight hundred, which in summer increases to that many thousand. Avalon is unlike any other place that I know. It is built on the shore of a crescent-shaped bay at the mouth of a deep cañon which almost bisects the island. At the upper end of this cañon a great wall formed by a mountain ridge protects the town from ocean winds and gives it what is probably the nearest approach in the world to the “perfect climate.” The quaint houses of the town, many of them of charming and distinctive design, cling to the rocky hillsides and dot the slopes of the cañons, adapting themselves, with characteristic Americanism, to circumstances and conditions. Along the water-front are the large hotels, a concert pavilion, and the aquarium—which, by the way, has a larger variety of marine animals than the famous aquarium at Naples; farther up the beach is a large and handsome bath-house where hundreds bathe daily, and in the cañon at the back of the town are the picturesque and sporting golf-links and the tennis-courts. Though the island offers the visitor an extraordinary diversity of amusements, Avalon’s _raison d’être_ is angling with rod and reel and everything is subservient to that. To it, as big-game hunters go to Africa, come fishermen from the farthermost corners of the world in quest of the big game of the sea. From the south side of the Bay of Avalon a long pier wades out into the water. Just as the bridge across the Arno in Florence is the resort of the gold and silver smiths, so this pier is the resort of the professional tuna boatmen. Along it, on either side, are ranged their booths or stands, each with its elaborate display of the paraphernalia of deep-sea fishing; a placard over each booth bears the owner’s name and his power-boat is anchored close by. At the end of the pier is a singular object which resembles a gallows. Beside it is a locked scales. On the gallows-like affair the great game-fish are hung and photographed, and on the scales all the fish taken in the tournaments are weighed by the official weighers of the Tuna Club.

If you will glance to starboard as the _Cabrillo_ steams slowly into Avalon Harbour, you will notice a modest, brown frame building, with a railed terrace dotted with armchairs, built on piles above the water. This is the Tuna Club, the most famous institution of its kind in the world. To become eligible to membership in this unique club one must take on a rod of not over sixteen ounces or under six feet and with a line of not more than twenty-four threads, a fish weighing over one hundred pounds. If elected one receives the coveted blue button, which is the angler’s Legion of Honour and to obtain which has cost many fishermen thousands of dollars and years of patience, while others have won it in a single day. The club holds organised tournaments throughout the fishing season, offering innumerable trophy cups and medals of gold, silver, and bronze for the largest tuna, albacore, sea-bass, yellowtail, and bonito caught by its members. I might mention, in passing, that the largest tuna ever taken was caught off Santa Catalina by Colonel C. P. Morehouse, of Pasadena, in 1899; when placed on the official scales the indicator registered two hundred and fifty-one pounds. I know of no more interesting way in which to pass an evening than to sit on the terrace of the Tuna Club, looking out across the moonlit bay, and listen to the tales told by these veterans of rod and reel: of Judge Beaman, who hooked a tuna off Avalon and was towed by the angry monster to Redondo, a distance of thirty miles, or of Mr. Wood, who played a fish for seven hours before it could be brought to gaff. I have yarned with professional elephant and lion hunters in the clubs at Mombasa and Zanzibar, and I give you my word that their stories were not a whit more fascinating than the tales of battles with marine monsters which I listened to on the terrace of the Tuna Club at Avalon.

Santa Catalina’s nearest neighbour is San Clemente, twenty miles long, whose northern shore is a wonderland of grottoes, caves, and cliffs and on whose rolling upland pastures browse many thousand head of sheep. A hundred miles or so to the northward are the islands composing the Santa Barbara group: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. The coast of Anacapa—“the ever-changing”—is a maze of strange caverns gnawed from the rock by the hungry sea, one of them, of vast size, having once served as a retreat for the pirates who formerly plied their trade along this coast, and now for sea-lions and seals, a skipper from Santa Barbara doing a thriving business in capturing these animals and selling them for exhibition purposes, the seals of Santa Cruz being in demand by showmen all over the world because of their intelligence and willingness to learn. The island, which is arid and deserted, is a sheep ranch; the fact that there is little or no water on it apparently causing no discomfort to the sheep, as their coats become so soaked at night as a result of the dense fogs that by morning each animal is literally a walking sponge.

Barring Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz is by far the most interesting and attractive of the Channel Islands, being worthy of a visit if for no other reason than to see its painted caves, which have been worn by the waves into the most fantastic shapes and dyed by the salts gorgeous and varied colors. Viewed from the sea, Santa Cruz appears to be but a jumble of lofty hills, sheer cliffs, and barren, purple mountains, gashed and scarred by cañons and gorges in all directions. But once you have crossed this rocky barrier which hems the island in, you find yourself in the loveliest Valley that the imagination could well conceive, with palms and oleanders and bananas growing everywhere and a climate as perfect and considerably milder than that of Avalon. The island is the property of the Caire estate; its proprietor is a Frenchman, and French and Italian labourers are employed exclusively on the ranch and in the vineyards which cover the interior of the island. When you set foot within the valley you leave America behind. The climate is that of southern France. The vineyard is a European vineyard. The brown-skinned folk who work in it speak the patois of the French or Italian peasantry. The ranch-houses, of plastered and whitewashed brick, with their iron balconies and their quaint and brilliant gardens, might have been transplanted bodily from Savoy, while the great flocks of sheep grazing contentedly upon the encircling hills complete the illusion that you are in the Old World instead of within a hundred miles of the newest metropolis in the New. There are two distinct seasons at Santa Cruz—the sheep-shearing and the vintage—when the French and Italian islanders are reinforced by large numbers of Barbareños, from Santa Barbara across the channel, who pick the grapes in September and twice yearly shear the sheep. Though the surface of the island is cut in every direction by cañons, gulches, and precipices, the Barbareño horsemen, who are descended from the old Mexican vaquero stock, mounted on the agile island ponies, in rounding up the sheep, ride at top speed down precipitous cliffs and along the brinks of giddy chasms which an ordinary mortal would hesitate to negotiate with hobnailed boots and an alpenstock. It is a thrilling and hair-raising exhibition of horsemanship and nerve and, should you ever happen to be along that coast at shearing time, I would advise you to obtain a permit from the Caire family and go over to Santa Cruz to see it.

Sport in the Channel Islands is not confined to fishing, for there is excellent wild-goat shooting on Santa Catalina and wild-boar shooting on Santa Cruz. Though both goats and boars are doubtless descended from domestic animals introduced by the early Spaniards, they have lived so long in a state of freedom that they provide genuinely exciting sport. These wild pigs are dangerous beasts for an unmounted, unarmed man to meet, however, for they combine the staying qualities of a Georgia razor-back with the ferocity of a Moroccan boar and will charge a man without the slightest hesitation.

Taking them by and large, the Channel Islands are, I believe, unique. Where else, pray, within a half day’s sail of a city of six hundred thousand people, can one explore pirates’ caves, pick bananas from the trees, shoot wild goat and wild boar, angle for the largest fish in existence, and, no matter what the season of the year, dwell in a climate of perpetual spring?

VI

THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND

“All in the golden weather, forth let us ride to-day,
You and I together on the King’s Highway.
The blue skies above us, and below the shining sea;
There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road for me.

...

It’s a long road and sunny, it’s a long road and old,
And the brown _padres_ made it for the flocks of the fold;
They made it for the sandals of the sinner folk that trod
From the fields in the open to the mission-house of God.

...

We will take the road together through the morning’s golden glow,
And we’ll dream of those who trod it in the mellowed long ago;
We will stop at the Missions where the sleeping _padres_ lay,
And we’ll bend a knee above them for their souls’ sake to pray.

We’ll ride through the valleys where the blossom’s on the tree,
Through the orchards and the meadows with the bird and the bee,
And we’ll take the rising hills where the manzanitas grow,
Past the grey tails of waterfalls where blue violets blow.

Old conquistadores, O brown priests and all,
Give us your ghosts for company when night begins to fall;
There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road to-day,
With the breath of God above us on the King’s Highway.”

VI

THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND

Following the example of the late J. Cæsar, Esquire, the well-known Roman politician, who districted Gaul into three parts, California might be divided into three provinces of pleasure: the Sierras, the Sequoias, and the Sands. Though nowhere separated by a journey of more than a single day at most, these three zones are as dissimilar in their physical and climatical characteristics and in the recreations they offer to the visitor as the coast of Brittany is from the Engadine, as the Black Forest is from the Italian Lakes, or, coming nearer home, as unlike each other as the White Mountains are unlike Atlantic City, as Muskoka is unlike Bar Harbour. Within the confines of a region five hundred miles long and barely two hundred wide may be found as many varieties of climate, scenery, and recreation as are provided by all the resorts of eastern America and Europe put together.

That California’s summer climate is even more delightful than its whiter climate is a fact which not one outlander in a hundred seems able to comprehend. Because the paralysing cold of an Eastern winter is equalised by a correspondingly sweltering summer, your average Easterner, who has heard all his life of California’s winter climate, finds it impossible to disabuse himself of the conviction that a region which is so climatically blessed by Nature during one half of the year must, as a matter of course, be cursed with intolerable weather during the other half, so as to strike, as it were, an average. A climate which is equally inviting in January and in July is altogether beyond his comprehension. He fails to understand why Nature does not treat California as impartially as she does other regions, making her pay for balmy, cloudless winter days with summers marked by scorching heat and torrential rains. Summer in California is really equivalent to an Eastern June. The nights are always cool, and the blankets, instead of being packed away in moth balls, cover you to the chin. There is no humidity and the air, which in most summer climates is about as invigorating as lemonade, is as crisp and sparkling as dry champagne. Nor is there any rain. This is literal. There is, I repeat, no rain. Each August the Bohemian Club of San Francisco produces its famous Grove Play in a natural amphitheatre formed by the rocks and redwoods of the Californian forest. The cost of the production runs into many thousands of dollars and involves many months of effort, but the preparations are made with the absolute assurance that the performance will be unmarred by rain. In a quarter of a century the club members have not been disturbed by so much as a sprinkle. Did you ever plan a motor trip or a picnic or a fishing excursion during an Eastern summer only to be awakened on the morning of the appointed day by the rain pattering on the roof? That sort of thing doesn’t happen in California any more than it does in Egypt. Pick out your midsummer day, no matter whether it is a week or a month or a year ahead, and on that morning you will find the weather waiting for you at the front door. This absence of rain is not an entirely unmitigated blessing, however, for it means dust. And such dust! I have never seen any region so intolerably dusty as is the Great Valley of California in midsummer except the Attic Plain. A jack-rabbit scurrying across the desert sends up a column of dust like an Indian signal-fire. Along the coast, however, the dust nuisance is ameliorated to some extent by the summer fogs which come rolling in from the sea at dawn, leaving the countryside as fresh and sparkling as though it had been sprinkled by a heavy dew. The farther up the coast you go, the heavier these fogs become, until, north of Monterey, they resemble the driving mists so characteristic of the Scottish highlands. For the benefit of golfers I might add that these moisture-laden fogs make possible the chain of splendid turf golf-links which begin at Monterey, the courses farther south, where there is but little moisture during the summer, being characterised by greens of oiled sand and fairways which during six months of the year are as dry and hard as a bone. Artists will tell you that the summer landscapes of California are far more beautiful than its winter ones, and I am inclined to believe that they are right, for in June the countryside, with its unnumbered _nuances_ of green and purple, is transformed, as though by the wave of a magician’s wand, into a dazzling land of russets and burnt oranges and chromes and yellows.

California may best be described as a great walled garden with one side facing on the sea. It is separated from those unfortunate regions which lie at the back of it by the most remarkable garden wall in all the world. This wall, which is, on an average, two miles high, is five hundred miles long, having Mount San Jacinto for its southern and Mount Shasta for its northern corner. At the back of the garden rises, peak on peak, range on range, the snow-clad Sierra Nevada. Gradually descending, the high peaks give way to lesser ones, the ranges dwindle to foot-hills, the foot-hills run out in cañons and grassy valleys, the valley slopes become clothed with forests, the forests merge into groves of gnarled, fantastic live-oaks, and these in turn to gorse-covered dunes which sweep down to meet the sea. The whole of this vast garden—mountain, forest, and shore—is dotted with accommodations for the visitor which are adapted to all tastes and to all purses and which range all the way from huge caravansaries which rival those of Ostend and Aix-les-Bains, of Narragansett and Lake Placid, to tented cities pitched beneath the whispering redwoods or beside the murmuring sea.

Unless you have seen the Lago di Garda at its bluest, unless you have loitered beneath the palms which line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, unless you have bathed on the white sands of Waikiki, unless you have motored along the Corniche Road, with the sun-flecked Mediterranean on the one hand and the dim blue outline of the Alps upon the other, you cannot picture with any degree of accuracy the beauties of this enchanted littoral. From Cannes, where the Mediterranean Riviera properly begins, to San Remo, where it ends, is barely one hundred miles, every foot of which is so built over with hotels and villas and straggling villages that you feel as though you were passing through a city, the impression being heightened by the gendarmes who stare at you suspiciously and by the admonitory notices which confront you at every turn. From Coronado, where the Californian Riviera begins, to the Golden Gate, where it ends, is six hundred miles, and every foot of that six hundred miles is through a veritable garden of the Lord. Along this coast date-palms and giant cacti give place to citrus groves ablaze with golden fruit and these, in turn, merge into the grey-green of the olive; the olive groves change to orchards of peach and apricot and prune, and these lose themselves in time in hillsides green with live-oaks, and the live-oaks turn to redwoods and the redwoods yield to pines. Bordering this historic coastal highway—El Camino Real, it is still called—are vast ranches whose hillsides are alive with grazing flocks and herds; great estates, triumphs of the landscape-gardener’s skill, with close-clipped hedges and velvet lawns from amid which rise Norman châteaux and Italian villas and Elizabethan manor-houses; quaint bungalows with deep, cool verandas, half hidden by blazing gardens; and, of course, hotels—dozens and dozens of them, with roses tumbling in cascades of colour over stucco walls and cool terraces shaded by red-striped awnings. It is indeed an enchanted coast, and I, who had always boasted to myself that I had seen too many of the world’s beauty-spots to give my allegiance to any one of them, have—I admit it frankly—fallen victim to its spell.

* * * * *

Between Los Angeles and Ventura lies one of the most flourishing agricultural regions in the State, the districts through which we sped on the wings of the winter morning being variously noted for their production of hay, walnuts, olives, beets, and beans. Ventura is the railroad brakeman’s contraction of San Buenaventura—it is obvious that a trainman could not spare the time to enunciate so long a name—the picturesque coast town and county-seat owing its origin to the mission which the Franciscan _padres_ founded here a year after the Battle of Yorktown and which is still in daily use. From Ventura we made a detour of fifteen miles or so for the purpose of visiting the Ojai Valley (it is pronounced “O-hi” if you please), a little place of surpassing beauty which not many people know about, like Thun in the Bernese Oberland, or Annecy, near Aix-les-Bains. The road to the Ojai strikes directly inland from the coast, following the devious course of the Matilija, climbing up and up and up, through forests of live-oaks and mountain meadows carpeted with wild flowers, until it suddenly debouches into the valley itself. Because the Ojai is so very beautiful, and is at the same time so simple and sylvan and unpretending, it is a little difficult to give an accurate idea of it in words. Though Mount Topotopo, the highest of the peaks which hem it in, is not much over six thousand feet, it can best be compared, I think, to some of the Alpine valleys, such as Andermatt, for example, or the one below Grindelwald. I do not particularly like the idea of continually dragging in Europe as a standard of comparison for things American, but so many of our people have come to know Europe better than they do their own country that it is the only means I have of making them realise the beauties and wonders on which, with the coming of each summer, they habitually turn their backs.

To visualise the Ojai you must imagine a boat-shaped valley, ten miles 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.

“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.

“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.

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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.

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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.