Part 12
High on the slopes of the Ojai, its brown shingles almost hidden by the Gold of Ophir roses which clamber over it, is a little hotel called The Foot-hills. It is an unpretending little inn with perhaps forty rooms at most. But, shades of Lucullus and Mrs. Rorer, what meals they set before you! Brook-trout which that very morning were leaping in the Matilija, hot biscuits with honey from the Sespe, huge purple figs, grapefruit fresh-picked from the adjacent orchard, strawberries with lashings of thick yellow cream. I’ve never been able to decide which I like best about the Ojai, its scenery or its food. But as it becomes better known and more people begin to go there, I suppose the same thing will happen to it which happened to a dear little _albergo_ in Venice which I once knew and loved. For many years it stood on the Guidecca, quite undiscovered by the tourist, and in their day had sheltered the Brownings and Carlyle. It was a sure refuge from the bustle and turmoil of the big hotels, and not infrequently I used to go there for a lunch of omelet and strawberries and Chianti served under a vine-clad pergola on the edge of the canal. The first time that I took Her to Venice, I said, as we were leaving the great caravansary where we were stopping:
“I know a place where we will lunch. I haven’t been there for years and I don’t remember its name, but I think that I can find it,” and I described it in detail to Angelo, our gondolier.
“_Si, si, signor_,” he assured me, and shoved off with his long oar.
Four times we rowed up and down the Guidecca without my being able to locate my beloved little hotel.
“This must have been the place you meant, signor,” Angelo said finally, pointing to a building which was rapidly being demolished and to a staring sign which read: “A new five-story hotel with hot and cold running water, electric lights, and all modern conveniences will shortly be erected on this site. Meals _prix fixe_ or _à la carte_. Music every evening.”
And that, I suppose, is what will happen to my little hotel in the Ojai when the world comes to learn about it. So I beg you who read this not to mention it to any one.
* * * * *
Until quite recently the route from the Ojai to Santa Barbara led over the Casitas Pass by a precipice-bordered road so narrow and dangerous that the fear of it kept many motorists away. But now the Casitas is a thing of the past, for a highway has been built along the edge of the sea by what is known as the Rincon route, several miles of it lying over wooden causeways not unlike the viaducts for Mr. Flagler’s seagoing railway on the Florida keys. This portion of the coast is one long succession of _barrancas_, each with a rocky creek bed worn by the winter torrent at its bottom, so that the road builders had many obstacles with which to contend. It is a very beautiful highway, however, and reminds one at every turn of the Corniche Road along the Riviera, with the same lazy ocean on the one side and the same blue serrated mountains on the other. Through Carpinteria we ran, pausing in our flight just long enough to take a look at a grape-vine with a trunk eight feet in circumference, which has borne in a single season, so its guardian assured us, upward of ten tons of grapes; through Summerland, where the forest of derricks and the reek of petroleum suggest the hand of Rockefeller; past Miramar, as smothered in flowers as the heroine of d’Annunzio’s play; through Montecito, with its marble villas and red-roofed mansions rising above the groves of cypress and cedar; down the splendid Ocean Drive, where the great rollers from the Pacific come booming in to break in iridescent splendour on the silver strand; and so into Santa Barbara, the Newport of the West, where buildings of stone and concrete jostle elbows with picturesque hovels of adobe.
Santa Barbara presents more curious contrasts, I suppose, than any place between the oceans. Drawn up beside the curb you will see a magnificent limousine, the very latest product of the automobile builder’s art, with the strength of fourscore horses beneath its sloping hood and as luxuriously fitted as a lady’s boudoir; a Mexican vaquero, sombreroed, flannel-shirted, his legs encased in high-heeled boots and fleecy chaps, fresh from the cattle-ranges on the other side of the mountains, will rein up his wiry mustang and dexterously roll a cigarette and ask the liveried chauffeur for a match—_Muchas gracias, Señor_. On State Street stands a huge concrete office-building, the very last word in urban architecture, with hydraulic elevators and cork-paved corridors and up-to-the-minute ventilating devices, and all the rest. A man can stand in front of that building and toss an orange into the _patio_ of a long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose walls of crumbling adobe show that it dates from the period when this land was ruled from Madrid instead of Washington. Though there are plenty of buildings dating from the Spanish era left, the observing stranger will note that few if any of them retain their original roofs of hand-made, moss-grown tiles. Why? Because the old Spanish tiles will bring almost any price that is asked for them, being in great demand for roofing the houses of the rich. In fact, I know of one Santa Barbara mansion which is roofed with tiles brought from the old cathedral at Panama. Nor have I the least doubt in the world that these plutocratic philistines would strip the historic mission which is Santa Barbara’s chiefest asset of its tiles and bells and crosses if the monks could be induced to sell them.
Over in the section known as the Old Town all the houses are Mexican in character, their walls tinted yellow, pink, bright blue. This, with the palm-trees and the cactus in the dusty, unkempt dooryards, the groups of brown-faced, black-eyed youngsters by the gates, and the Spanish names—Garcias, Ortegas, Oteros, Espinosas, De la Guerras—which one sees everywhere, makes one realise that Santa Barbara is still Latin in everything save cleanliness. Merely to read the street names—Cañon Perdido, Anapamu, Arellaga, Micheltorena, Pedragoso, Chapala, Salsipuedes—makes you feel that you are in some Castilian town and not in the United States of the twentieth century at all. Why on earth, while they were about it, they didn’t call the town’s main thoroughfare La Calle del Estado instead of prosaic State Street, I fail to understand. This glaring inconsistency in nomenclature is almost compensated for, however, by the little square down on the ocean front which is called the Plaza del Mar. Here barelegged youngsters, guarded by anxious nurses, gambol upon the sands; here the old folks doze contentedly upon the green benches and look out to sea and listen to the music of La Monica’s band; here lovers sit silently, clasping hands beneath the palms, just as other children, other old folk, other lovers are doing in other plazas in Old Spain.
[Illustration: “Even the imposing façade of the Arlington, with its arches, cloisters, terraces, and _campanarios_, suggests a Spanish monastery.”
“A long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose pottery roof and walls of adobe show that it dates from the period when this land was ruled from Madrid instead of Washington.”
SANTA BARBARA. A CITY OF CONTRASTS.]
To understand the charm of Santa Barbara as a place of residence, you should stroll down State Street on a winter’s morning. Like Bellevue Avenue in Newport, it is the meeting-place for all the town. Youths in tweed jackets and flannel trousers stand beside the curbs chatting with pretty girls in rakish, vivid-coloured motor-cars. Dowagers descend from stately limousines and enter the shops to order sweetbreads and cotillion favours and the latest novels. Young men astride of mettlesome ponies trot by on their way to polo practice. Prosperous-looking, well-groomed men of years, who look as though they might be bank presidents and railway directors and financiers and probably are, pause to discuss the wretched weather prevailing in the East and to thank their lucky stars that they are out of it and to challenge each other to a game of golf. Slim young girls in riding-boots and beautifully cut breeches patronise the soda-fountains and hang over the fiction counters in the bookstore and chatter volubly about tennis and theatres and tango teas. It is one big reception, at which every one knows every one else and every one else’s business. Though there is a great deal of wealth and fashion in Santa Barbara, there is likewise a great deal of informality, which makes it a pleasant contrast to Pasadena, which is so painfully conscious of its millionaires that life there possesses about as much informality as a court ball.
The ancient mission, which with the climate is Santa Barbara’s chief attraction, provides the _motif_ for the city’s architecture, and the citizens have made a very commendable effort to live up to it, or rather to build up to it, even the imposing façade of the Arlington, with its arches, cloisters, terraces and _campanarios_, suggesting a Spanish monastery far more than a great tourist hotel. It is the monks themselves, however, who have been the most flagrant offenders against the canons of architectural good taste, for within a stone’s throw of their beautiful old mission they have erected a college which looks for all the world like a shoe factory surmounted by a cupola and a cross. No matter from what point upon the encircling hills you look down upon the city, that atrocious college, as angular, uncompromising, and out of the picture as a New England schoolmarm at a _thé dansant_, comes up and hits you in the eye.
[Illustration: THE MISSION OF SANTA BARBARA.
“The sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches of the ancient sycamores, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon the crumbling, weather-worn façade.”]
Perhaps you were not aware that about one out of every ten plays which flicker before your fascinated eyes on the motion-picture screen were taken in or near Santa Barbara, for the country round about the town is a moving-picture producer’s paradise and several companies have built their studios there and make it their permanent headquarters. Within a five-mile radius of the Plaza del Mar are settings in which can be enacted scenes laid anywhere between Cancer and Capricorn. There are sandy beaches which might have been made expressly for shipwrecks and buccaneering exploits and similar “water stuff”; there are Greek and Spanish villas hidden away in subtropical gardens which would provide backgrounds for anything from the “Odyssey” to “The Orchid-Hunter”; and back of them are tawny foot-hill ranges where bands of cow-punchers, spectacularly garbed, pursue horse thieves or valorously defend wagon-trains attacked by Indians, taking good care, however, to keep within the focal radius of the camera.
Of the many things in and about Santa Barbara which appeal to the imagination, I think that I liked best the miniature caravels which surmount the massive gate-posts at the entrance to the Arlington. To most visitors I suppose that they are only puppet vessels, quaintly rigged and strangely shaped, to be sure, but nothing more. But to me they stand for something very definite indeed, do those little carven craft. They represent the _San Salvador_ and the _Vittoria_, the little caravels in which Juan Rodrigues Cabrillo, the intrepid Portuguese sea adventurer who hired his sword and services to Spain, sailed up this storied coast upward of three centuries ago and whose anchors rumbled down off these very shores. From out the mist of fiction, romance, legend, and fairy-tale which beclouds the early history of California, the certain and authenticated voyage of this Portuguese sailor of fortune stands out sharp and clear as the one fact upon which we can rely. Though he never returned from the land which he discovered, though he has been overlooked by History and forgotten by Fame, his adventure has become immortal, for he put California on the map.
* * * * *
Were you to turn your back on the Pacific at some point between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo and strike due eastward, you would find athwart your path, shortly before reaching the Nevada line, the crudest and most forbidding of the earth’s waste places—Death Valley. At the very back of California, paralleling the eastern boundary of Inyo County, sandwiched between the great wall formed by the High Sierras and the burning sands of the Colorado Desert, this seventy-five-mile-long gash in the earth’s surface—the floor of the valley is two hundred and ten feet below the level of the sea—is one of the most extraordinary regions in the world. It is a place of contrasts and contradictions. Though in summer it is probably the hottest place on earth, in winter the cold becomes so great that the thermometer cannot record it. Its aridity is so extreme that men have died from lack of moisture with water at their lips. Though rain is virtually unknown, the lives of the inhabitants are frequently menaced by the floods which result from cloudbursts. A mountain range, whose rocks are of such incredibly vivid colours that even a scene-painter would hesitate to depict them as they are, is called the Funeral Range. Though nearly a score of lives were lost when the valley was christened, and though its history from that day to this has been one of hardship, peril, and death, with little to relieve its harshness, for fully half the year Death Valley is as healthy a spot as any on the continent. During the other half, however, it is a sample package of that fire-and-brimstone hell of which the old-time preachers were wont to warn us. Indeed, the hereafter could hold no terrors for a man who was able to survive a summer in Death Valley.
The valley first became known by the tragedy which gave it its name. The year following the discovery of gold in California a party of thirty emigrants, losing their heads in their mad lust for the yellow metal, left the well-travelled Overland Trail and struck south through this region in the hope of finding a short cut to the gold-fields. But they found a short cut to death instead, for they lost their way in the valley and eighteen of them perished horribly from thirst. The valley, which runs almost due north and south, is about seventy-five miles long, and at its lowest point, where the climate is the worst, it is not over eight miles in width. To the west the Panamints reach their greatest altitude, while on the east the Funeral Range is practically one huge ridge, with almost a vertical precipice on the side next the valley. To the south another range, running east and west, shuts in the foot of the valley and turns it into a _cul-de-sac_. Seen from the summit of the Panamint Range, the valley looks for all the world like a huge grey snake marked with narrow bands of dirty white, which are the borax deposits. Far to the north, gleaming in the sunlight like a slender blade of steel, is the Amargosa River, while on either side of the valley the ranges rear themselves skyward in strata of such gorgeous colours that beside them the walls of the Grand Cañon would look cold and drab. The vegetation is scant, stunted, and unhappy; the thorny mesquite shrub takes on a sickly yellowish tinge; the sage-brush is the colour of ashes; even the cactus, which flourishes on the inhospitable steppes of the adjacent Mohave Desert, has given up the struggle to exist in Death Valley in despair. But, arid as the valley is, it has two streams running through it. One, the Amargosa, comes in at the north end, where it forms a wash that gives out volumes of sulphuretted hydrogen which poisons the air for miles around. The other is Furnace Creek, whose waters are drinkable though hot. Everything considered, it is not exactly a cheerful place, is Death Valley.
Weather Bureau officials would tell you, should you ask them, that when there is ninety per cent of humidity in the air the weather is insufferably oppressive; that air with seventy per cent of humidity is about right; that sixty or fifty per cent, as when a room is overheated by a stove or furnace, will produce headaches; while, should the percentage be reduced to thirty, or even forty, the air would become positively dangerous to health. Imagine, then, what existence must be like in Death Valley in midsummer, when the air, raised to furnace heat by its passage over the deserts, is kiln-dried in the pit below sea-level until its percentage of moisture is _less than one half of one per cent_! Effects of this ultrararefied air are observed on every hand. Men employed in ditch digging on the borax company’s ranch were compelled to sleep in the running water with their heads on stones to keep their faces above the surface—and this was not in the hottest weather, either. Furniture built elsewhere is quickly and utterly ruined. Tables warp into fantastic shapes. Chairs split and fall apart. Water barrels incautiously left empty lose their hoops in an hour. Eggs are boiled hard in the sand. A handkerchief taken from the tub and held up in the sun will dry more quickly than it would before a red-hot stove. One end of a blanket that is being washed will dry while the other is still in the tub. Meat killed at night and cooked at six in the morning is spoiled by nine. A man cannot go without water for an hour without becoming insane. A thermometer, hung in the coolest place available, for forty-eight hours never dropped below 104, repeatedly registered 130, and occasionally climbed to 137. A borax driver died, canteen in hand, atop his wagon. “He was that parched that his head cracked open over the top,” said a man who saw the body.
But in October, strange as it may seem, Death Valley becomes a dreamy, balmy, _dolce far niente_ land, the home of the Indian summer. Later in the season snow falls in the mountains to the west to a depth of three feet or more. At the Teels Marsh borax works the thermometer has registered 120 in the shade of the house in August and yet before the winter was over the mercury froze and the temperature dropped to 50 below zero! There is no place on earth, so far as I am aware, where so wide a variation has been recorded. Though it rarely if ever rains in the valley, cloudbursts frequently occur amid the adjacent mountain tops—usually in the hottest weather and when least expected—and in the face of the roaring floods which follow the people in the valley fly to the foot-hills for their lives. More appalling than the floods, however, are the sand-storms which are a recognised feature of life (existence would be a better term) in Death Valley. A sand-storm sweeping down that vale of desolation is a never-to-be-forgotten sight. The wind shrieks by with the speed of an express train. A dense brown fog completely blots the landscape out. Sand augers rise like slender stems joining sand and sky, whirling madly hither and thither through the burning atmosphere like genii suddenly gone mad. The air is filled with flying pebbles, sand, and dust. It is like a Dakota blizzard with the grit of broken volcanic rock in place of snow. These sand-storms commonly last for three days; then they end as suddenly as they began, leaving the desert swooning amid its shifting waves of heat. Mirages raise up spectral cities, groves, tree-bordered rivers, lush, green fields as though by the sweep of a magician’s wand. In the rarefied air the ruins of an adobe hut are magnified into a sky-scraper; arrow weeds become stately palms; a crow walking on the ground appears to be a man on horseback.
The borax deposits for which the valley is famous are exactly alike in their general appearance: a bowl-shaped depression hemmed in by barren hills and at the bottom of this bowl an expanse that looks like water or salt or dirty snow or chalk, according to the distance, but which is really the boracic efflorescence on the bed of a dried-up lake. Walking out upon the marsh, one finds it covered with a sandy-looking crust through which the feet generally break, clay or slime being found beneath. To reach the railway the borax has to be hauled half a hundred miles by wagon under a deadly sun. The wagons used are huge affairs with wheels seven feet in diameter and tires eight inches wide, each carrying ten tons. Two tremendous Percherons are harnessed to the pole and ahead of them, fastened by double-trees to a steel chain that stretches from the forward axle, are nine pairs of mules, the driver from his lofty seat controlling his twenty animals by means of a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot jerk line, a bucket of stones, and a complete assortment of objurgations. The next time, therefore, that you chance to see a package of borax, stop and think what it has cost—insufferable heat, bitter cold, sand-storms, agonizing thirst, sunstroke—yes, sometimes even death.
* * * * *
From Santa Barbara, El Camino Real, ever glowing, ever luring, bids _adios_ to the sea for a time and sweeps inland again through a land of oak groves and olive orchards and frequent outcroppings of rock, which, with the bleak purple mountains rising up behind it, bears so startling a resemblance to Andalusia that the homesick Spanish friars must have rubbed their eyes and wondered whether they were really in the New World after all. Our road, winding steadily upward under the shadow of giant oaks and sycamores, crossed the Santa Ynez Range by the Gaviota Pass (_gaviota_, I might note in passing, meaning sea-gull in the Spanish tongue), the car, its engines humming the monotone which is the motorist’s lullaby, taking the long, steep grades like a hunted cat on the top of a back-yard fence.