The Californiacs | Page 8

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 are obsessed with the flowers,
the abundant callas, the monstrous roses, the giant geraniums. But I
never ceased to wonder at the beauty of the trees. And remember, I
have not as yet seen what they call the "big" trees.
Yes, California is quite as beautiful as her poets insist and her painters
prove. It turns everybody who goes there into a poet, at least
temporarily. Babes lisp in numbers and those of the native population
who don't actually write poetry, talk it - no matter what the subject is.
Take the case of Sam Berger. Sam Berger - I will explain for the
benefit of my women readers - was first a distinguished amateur
heavyweight boxer who later became sparring partner for Bob
Fitzimmons and manager to Jim Jeffries. In an interview on the subject
of boxing, Mr. Berger said, "Boxing is an art - just as much so as music.
To excel in it you must have a conception of time, of balance, of
distance. The man who attempts to box without such a conception is
like a person who tries to be a musician without having an ear for
music."
Is it not evident from this that Mr. Berger would have become a poet if
a more valiant art had not claimed him?
In that ideal future state in which all the world-parts are assembled and
perfectly coordinated into one vast self-governing machine, I hope that
California will be turned into a great international reservation, given
over entirely to poets, lovers and honeymoon couples. It is too beautiful
to waste on mere bromidic residential or business interests.
So much for the State of California. I confess with shame that that is all
I know about it, although I reiterate that that ignorance is not my fault.
So now for San Francisco.
San Francisco!
San Francisco!
Many people do not realize that San Francisco tips a peninsula
projecting west and north from the coast of California. Between that
peninsula and the mainland lies a blue arm of the blue San Francisco
bay. So that when you have bisected the continent and come to what
appears to be the edge of the western world, you must take a ferry to
get to the city itself.
I hope you will cross that bay first at night, for there is no more

romantic hour in which to enter San Francisco; the bay spreading out
back of you a-plash with all kinds of illuminated water craft and the
city lifting up before you ablaze with thousands of pin point lights; for
San Francisco's site is a hilly one and the city lies like a jewelled
mantle thrown carelessly over many peaks. You land at the Ferry
building - surely the most welcoming station in the world - walk
through it, come out at the other side on a circular place which is one
end of Market street, the main artery of the city. If this is by day, you
can see that the other end of Market street is Twin Peaks - a pair of hills
that imprint bare, exquisitely shaped contours of gold on a blue sky -
with the effect somehow of a stage-drop. If you come by night, you
will find Market street crowded with people, lighted with a display of
electric signs second only in size, number, brilliancy and ingenuity to
those on Broadway. But whether you come by day or by night, the
instant you emerge from the Ferry building, San Francisco gets you.
Market street is one of the most entertaining main-traveled urban roads
in the world. Newspaper offices in a cluster, store windows flooded
with light, filled with advertising devices of the most amusing
originality, cars, taxis, crowds, it has all the earmarks of the main street
of any big American city, with the addition, at intervals, of the pretty
"islands" so typical of the boulevards of Paris and with, last of all, a zip
and a zest, a pep and a punch, a go and a ginger that is distinctively
Californian.