Part 2

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 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. I repeat that California throws her first tentacle into your heart as you stand there wondering whether you'll go to your hotel or, plunging headforemost into the crowds, swim with the current.

Imagine a city built not on seven but a hundred hills. I am sure there are no less than a hundred and probably there are more. Certainly I climbed a hundred. On three sides the sea laps the very hem of this city and on one side the forest reaches down to its very toes. That is, when all is said, the most marvelous thing about San Francisco--that the sea and forest come straight to its borders. And as, because of its peninsula situation they form the only roads out, sea and forest are integral parts of the city life. It accounts for the fact that you see no city pallor in the faces on the streets and perhaps for the fact that you see so little unhappiness on them. On Sundays and holidays, crowds pour across the bay all day long and then, loaded with flowers and greens, pour back all the evening long. As for flowers and greens, the hotels, shops, cafes, the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants are full of them. They are so cheap on the streets that everybody wears them. Everybody seems to play as much as possible out of doors. Everybody seems to sleep out of doors. Everybody has just come from a hike or is just going off on one. Imagine a climate rainless three-quarters of the year, which permits the workingman to tramp all through his vacation with the impedimenta only of a blanket, moneyless if he will, but with the certainty always that the orchards and gardens will provide-him with food.

Through the city runs one central hill-spine. From this crest, by day, you look on one side across the bay with its three beautiful islands, bare Yerba Buena, jeweled Alcatraz and softly-fluted Angel Island, all seemingly adrift in the blue waters, to Marin county. The waters of the bay are as smooth as satin, as blue as the sky, and they are slashed in every direction with the silver wakes left by numberless ferryboats. Those ferryboats, by the way, are extremely graceful; they look like white peacocks dragging enormous white-feather tails. By night the bay view from the central hill-spine shows the cities of Berkeley and Oakland like enormous planes of crystal tilted against the distance, the ferryboats illuminated but still peacock-shaped, floating on the black waters like monster toys of Venetian glass. In the background, rising from low hills, peaks the blue triangle of Mt. Diablo. In the foreground reposes Tamalpais--a mountain shaped in the figure of a woman-lying prone. The wooded slopes of Tamalpais form the nearest big playground for San Franciscans--and Tamalpais is to the San Franciscan what Fujiyama is to the Japanese. Would that I had space to tell here of the time when their mountain caught fire and thousands--men, women and children--turned out to save it! Everybody helped who could. Even the bakers of San Francisco worked all night and without pay to make bread for the fire-fighters.

By day, on the city side of the crest, you catch glimpses of other hills, covered for the most part with buildings, like lustrous pearl cubes; for San Francisco is a pearl-gray city. At night you can look straight down the side streets to Market street on a series of illuminated restaurant signs which project over the sidewalk at right angles to the buildings. It is as though a colossal golden stairway tempted your foot.

Perhaps after all the most breath taking quality about San Francisco is these unexpected glimpses that you are always getting of beautiful hill-heights and beautiful valley-depths. Sunset skies like aerial banners flare gold and crimson on the tops of those hills. City lights, like nests of diamonds, glitter and glisten in the depths of those valleys. Then the fogs! I have stood at my window at night and watched the ragged armies of the air drift in from the bay and take possession of the whole city. Such fogs. Not distilled from pea soup like the London fogs; moist air-gauzes rather, pearl-touched and glimmering; so thick sometimes that it is as though the world had veiled herself in mourning, so thin often that the stars shine through with a delicate muffled lustre. By day, even in the full golden sunshine of California, the view from the hills shows a scene touched here and there with fog.

As for the hills themselves, steep as they are, street cars go up and down them. What is more extraordinary, so do automobiles. The hill streets are cobbled commonly; but often, for the better convenience of vehicles, there is a central path of asphalt, smoothly finished. I have seen those asphalt planes by day when a flood, first of rain and then of sun, turned them to rivers of molten silver; I have seen them by night when an automobile, standing at the hilltop and pouring its light over them, turned them to rivers of molten gold.

Within walking distance of the ferry is the heart of the city. Here are the newspaper buildings, many big and little hotels, numberless restaurants, the theatres and the shopping district. The region about Union Square, Geary street, Grant Avenue, Post and Sutter streets, is a busy and attractive area. You could live in San Francisco for a month and ask no greater entertainment than walking through it. Beyond are various foreign quarters and districts inevitably growing colder and more residential in aspect as they get farther away from the city heart. Beyond the heights where one catches glimpses of the ocean, the city slopes to abrupt cliffs along the outer harbor, and here are mansions whose windy gardens overhang the surf. Beyond Market street is the area described in the phrase, "south of the slot". Superficially drab and gray in aspect, it has been celebrated again and again in song and story. From this region have come the majority of San Francisco's champion athletes. Near here beats the red heart of the labor world. And not far off still stands that exquisite gem of Spanish catholicism--Mission Dolores.

Here and there--and it is a little like meeting a ghost in a crowded street--through all the beauty and freshness of the new city project the bones of the old: the lofty ruins, ivy-hung, of a huge Nob Hill Palace here; the mere foundation, bush-encircled, of a big old family mansion there; elaborate rusty fences of Mid-Victorian iron which enclose nothing; wide low steps of Mid-Victorian marble which lead nowhere. The San Franciscan speaks always with a tender, regretful affection of that dead city, but, as is natural, he speaks of it less and less. For myself, I am glad now that I never saw the city that was; for I can love the city that is with no arriere pensee.

They serve, however--those bones of a dead past--to remind the stranger of a marvelous rebuilding feat, to accent the virility and vitality, the courage and enterprise of a people who, before a half decade had passed, had eliminated almost every trace of the greatest disaster of modern time.

Perhaps, after the beauty of its situation, the stranger is most struck with the picturesqueness given to the city by its cosmopolitan atmosphere. For San Francisco, serving as one of the two main great gateways to an enormous country, a front entrance to America from the Orient, a back entrance from Europe and a side entrance from South America, standing halfway between tropics and polar regions, a great port of the greatest ocean in the world, becomes naturally one of the world's main caravanseries, a meeting place of nations.

Chinatown is not far off from the heart of the city. And Chinatown pervades San Francisco. It is as though it distilled some faint oriental perfume with which constantly it suffuses the air. You meet the Chinese everywhere. The men differ in no wise from the men with whom the smaller Chinatowns of the East have acquainted us. The women make the streets exotic. Little, slim-limbed creatures, amber-skinned, jewel-eyed, dressed in silk of black or pastel colors, loosely coated and comfortably trousered, their jet-black shining hair filled with ornaments, they go about in groups which include old women and young matrons, half-grown girls slender as forsythia branches, babies arrayed like princes. You are likely to meet groups of Hindus, picturesquely turbaned, coffee-brown in color, slight-figured, straight-featured, black-bearded. You see Japanese and Filipinos. And as for Latins--French, Italians and Spanish flood the city. There are eight thousand Montenegrins alone in California. I never suspected there were eight thousand in Montenegro. And our own continent contributes Canadians, Mexicans, citizens from every State in the Union. In addition, you run everywhere into soldiers and sailors. The bits of talk you overhear in the street are so exciting that you become a professional eavesdropper, strong-languaged, picturesquely slangy, pungent narrative. Sometimes the speaker has come up from Arizona, or New Mexico or Texas, sometimes down from Alaska, Washington or Oregon, sometimes across from Nevada or Montana or Wyoming. And with many of them--at least with those that live west of the rocky mountains--San Francisco is always (and I never failed to respond to the thrill of it) "the city". Not a city or any city, but the city--as though there were no other city on the face of the earth.