The Californiacs | Page 7

Townsend," sit in the station until a train, - some train, any train - pulls out, and go with it. If in crossing Market street, you raise that taxi-curtain as much as an inch, believe me, stranger, it's all off; you're lost. You'll never leave San Francisco. Myself, both times I have gone to California, I have vowed to see Yosemite, the big trees, the string of beautiful old missions which dot the state, some of the quaint, languid, semi-tropical towns of the south, some of the brisk, brilliant, bustling towns of the north. But I have never really done it because I saw San Francisco first.
I treasure my few impressions of the state, however. Towns and cities, comparatively new, might be three centuries old, so beautifully have they sunk into the colorful, deeply configurated background that the country provides. Even a city as thriving and wide-awake as Stockton has about its plaza an air so venerable that it is a little like the ancient hill-cities of Italy; more like, I have no doubt, the ancient plain-cities of Spain. And San Juan Bautista - with its history-haunted old Inn, its ghost-haunted old Mission and its rose-filled old Mission garden where everything, even the sundial, seems to sleep - is as old as Babylon or Tyre.
You will be constantly reminded of Italy, although California is not quite so vividly colored, and perhaps of Japan, for you are always coming on places that are startlingly like scenes in Japanese prints. Certain aspects from the bay of the town of Sausalito, with strangely shaped and softly tinted houses tumbling down the hillside, certain aspects of the bay from the heights of Berkeley, with the expanses of hills and water and the inevitable fog smudging a smoky streak here and there, are more like the picture-country of the Japanese masters than any American reality.
If I were to pick the time when I should travel in California, it would be in the early summer. All the rest of the world at that moment is green. California alone is sheer gold. One composite picture remains in my memory-the residuum of that single trip into the south. On one side the Pacific - tigerish, calm, powerfully palpitant, stretching into eternity in enormous bronze-gold, foam-laced planes. On the other side, great, bare, voluptuously - contoured hills, running parallel with the train and winding serpentinely on for hours and hours of express speed; hills that look, not as though they were covered with yellow grass, but as though they were carved from massy gold. At intervals come ravines filled with a heavy green growth. Occasionally on those golden hill-surfaces appear trees.
Oh, the trees of California!
If they be live-oaks - and on the hills they are most likely to be live-oaks - they are semi-globular in shape like our apple trees, only huge, of a clamant, virile, poisonous green. They grow alone, and each one of them seems to be standing knee-deep in shadow so thick and moist that it is like a deep pool of purple paint.
Occasionally, on the flat stretches, eucalyptus hedges film the distance. And the eucalyptus - tall, straight, of a uniform slender size, the baby leaves of one shape and color, misted with a strange bluish fog-powder, the mature leaves of another shape and color, deep-green on one side, purple on the other, curved and carved like a scimitar of Damascus steel, the blossoms hanging in great soft bunches, white or shell-pink, delicate as frost-stars - the eucalyptus is the most beautiful tree in the world. Standing in groups, they seem to color the atmosphere. Under them the air is like a green bubble. Standing alone, the long trailing scarfs of bark blowing away from their bodies - they are like ragged, tragic gypsy queens.
Then there is the madrone. The wonder of the madrone is its bole. Of a tawny red-gold - glossy - it contributes an arresting coppery note to green forest vistas. Somebody has said that in the distance they look like naked Indians slipping through the woods.
Last, there is the redwood tree! And the redwood is more beautiful even than the stone-pine of Italy. Gray lavender in color, hard as though cut from stone, swelling at the base to an incredible bulk, shooting straight to an incredible height and tapering exquisitely as it soars, it drops not foliage but plumage. To walk in a redwood forest at night and to look up at the stars tangled in the tree-tops, to watch the moonlight sift through the masses of soft black-green feathers, down, down, until strained to a diaphanous tenuity it lies a faint silver gossamer at your feet, is to feel that you are living in one of the old woodcuts which illustrate Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream."
Most people in first visiting California