The Californiacs | Page 7

I can unfortunately say little about the State of California. For with the
exception of a few short trips away from San Francisco, and one
meager few days' trip into the South, I have never explored it. Nobody
warned me of the danger of such a proceeding, and so I innocently
went straight to San Francisco the first time I visited the coast. Stranger,

let me warn you now. If ever you start for California with the intention
of seeing anything of the State, do that before you enter San Francisco.
If you must land in San Francisco first, jump into a taxi, pull down the
curtains, drive through the city, breaking every speed law, to "Third
and 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