Part 11

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.