Part 8

From El Centro to San Diego is something over a hundred miles, but until very recently it might as well have been three hundred, so far as freight or passenger traffic between the two places was concerned, that being the approximate distance by the roundabout railway route. Though a railway is now in course of construction which will eventually give the valley towns direct communication with Yuma and San Diego, the enterprising merchants of the latter city had no intention of waiting for the completion of the railway to get the rich valley trade. So they raised a quarter of a million dollars and with that money they proceeded to build a highway into the Imperial Valley. Over that highway, which is as good as any one would ask to ride on, rolls an unending procession of motor-trucks, bearing seeds and harness and farming implements and phonographs and pianos and brass beds from San Diego stores to Imperial Valley ranches, and poultry and early fruit and grain from those ranches back to San Diego. That illustrates the sort of people that the San Diegans are. It is almost unnecessary to add that the road has already paid for itself with interest.

To understand the peculiar geography of San Diego, and of its joyous little sister Coronado, you must picture in your mind a U-shaped harbour containing twenty square miles of the bluest water you will find anywhere outside a bathtub. Strewn upon the gently sloping hillsides which form the bottom of the U are the chalk-white buildings and tree-lined, flower-banked boulevards which make San Diego look like one of those imaginary cities which scene-painters are so fond of painting for back-drops of comic operas. The right-hand horn of the U corresponds to the rocky headland known as Point Loma, where Madame Tingley and her disciples of the Universal Brotherhood theosophise under domes of violet glass; and in the very middle of the U, or, in other words, in the middle of San Diego harbor, on an almost-island whose sandy surface has been lawned and flower-bedded and landscaped into one of the beauty-spots of the world, is Coronado.

Coronado isn’t really an island, you understand, for it is connected with the mainland by a sandy shoe-string a dozen miles long and so narrow that even a duffer could drive a golf-ball across it. There is nothing quite like Coronado anywhere. It may convey something to you if I say that it is a combination of Luxor, Sorrento, and Palm Beach. And then some. It is one of those places where, unless you have on a Panama hat and white shoes and flannel trousers (in the case of ladies I don’t insist on the trousers, of course), you feel awkward and ill-dressed and out of the picture. You know the sort of thing I mean. There are miles of curving, asphalted parkways, bordered by acres of green-plush lawns; and set down on the lawns are quaint stone-and-shingle bungalows with roses clambering over them, and near-Tudor mansions of beam and plaster, and the most beautiful villas of white stucco with green-tiled roofs, which look as if they had been brought over entire from Fiesole or the Lake of Como. Over near the shore is the Polo Club, which does not confine its activities to polo, as its name would imply, but, like the Sporting Club of Cairo, caters to the golfer and the tennis player, and the racing enthusiast as well. Every afternoon during the polo season _tout le monde_ goes pouring out to the Polo Club in motors and carriages, on horseback, on street-cars, and afoot, to gossip along the side lines and swagger about in the saddling paddock and cheer themselves hoarse when eight young gentlemen in vivid silk shirts and white breeches and tan boots, and hailing from London or New York or San Francisco or Honolulu or Calgary, as the case may be, go streaking down the field in a maelstrom of dust and colour and waving mallets and flying hoofs. After it is all over and the colours of the winning team have been hoisted to the top of the flagstaff and the losers have drunk the health of the victors from a Gargantuan loving-cup, every one goes piling back to the great hostelry, whose red-roofed towers and domes and gables rising above the palm groves form a picture which is almost Oriental as they silhouette themselves, black, fantastic, and alluring, against the kaleidoscopic evening sky.

There are certain hotels which, because of the surpassing beauty of their situation or their historic or literary associations or the traditions connected with them, have come to be looked upon as institutions, rather than mere caravansaries, which it is the duty of every traveller to see, just as he should see Les Invalides and the Pantheon and the Alcazar, and, if his purse will permit, to stop at. In such a class I put Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Hermitage at Monte Carlo, the Danieli in Venice, the Bristol in Paris, the Lord Warden at Dover, the Mount Nelson at Cape Town, Raffles’s at Singapore, the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Mission Inn at Riverside, the Hotel del Monte at Monterey, and the Hotel del Coronado. It is by no means new, is the Coronado, nor is it particularly up-to-date, and from an architectural standpoint it leaves much to be desired, but it shares with the other famous hotels I have mentioned that indefinable something called “atmosphere” and it stands at one of those crossways where the routes of tourist travel meet. To find anything to equal the brilliant scene for which its great lobby is the stage you will have to go to the east coast of Florida or Egypt or the Riviera. From New Year’s to Easter its spacious corridors and broad verandas are thronged with more interesting types of people than any place I know save only Monte Carlo. Suppose we sit down for a few minutes, you and I, and watch the passing show. There are slim, white-shouldered women whose gowns bespeak the Rue de la Paix as unmistakably as though you could read their labels, and other women whose gowns are just as unmistakably the products of dressmakers in Schenectady and Sioux City and Terre Haute. There are well-groomed young men, well-groomed old men, and overgroomed men of all ages; men bearing famous names and men whose names are notorious rather than famous. There are big-game hunters, polo players, professional gamblers, adventurers, explorers, novelists, mine owners, bankers, landowners who reckon their acres by the million, and cattlemen who count their longhorns by the tens of thousands. There are English earls, and French marquises, and German counts; there are women of Society, of society, and of near-society; men and women whose features the newspapers and bill-boards have made as familiar as the faces of Dr. Woodbury and Mr. Gillette, and, mingling with all the rest, plain, every-day folk hailing from pretty much everywhere between Portland, Ore., and Portland, Me., and whose money it is, when all is said and done, which makes this sort of thing possible. They come here for rest, so they take pains to assure you, but they are never idle. They bathe in the booming breakers when the people beyond the Sierras are shivering before their bathtubs; they play golf and tennis as regularly as they take their meals; they gallop their ponies madly along the yellow beach in the early morning; they fish off the coast for tuna and jewfish and barracuda; they take launches across the bay to see the flying men swoop and circle above the army aviation school; they watch the submarines dive and gambol like giant porpoises in the placid waters of the harbour; they play auction bridge on the sun-swept verandas or poker in the seclusion of the smoking-room; and after dinner they tango and hesitate and one-step in the big ballroom until the orchestra puts up its instruments from sheer exhaustion. At Coronado no one ever lets business interfere with pleasure. If you want to talk business you had better take the ferryboat across the bay to San Diego.

San Diego’s history stretches back into the past for close on four hundred years. Her harbour was the first on all that devious coast-line which reaches from Cape San Lucas to the Straits of Juan de Fuca in which a white man’s anchor rumbled down and a white man’s sails were furled. In her soil were planted the first vine and the first olive tree. The first cross was raised here, and the first church built, and beneath the palms which were planted by the _padres_ in the valley that nestles just back of the hill on which the city sits the first lessons in Christianity were taught to the primitive people who inhabited this region when the paleface came. Here began that remarkable chain of outposts of the church which Father Junipero Serra and his indomitable Franciscans stretched northward to Sonoma, six hundred miles away. And here likewise began El Camino Real, the King’s Highway, which linked together the one-and-twenty missions and which forms to-day the longest continuous highway in the world, and, without exaggeration, the most beautiful, the most varied, and the most interesting.

I don’t know the population of San Diego, because a census taken yesterday would be much too low to-morrow. The San Diegans claim that they arrive at the number of the city’s inhabitants by the simple method of having the census enumerators meet the trains to count the people when they get off. For, as they ingenuously argue, any one who once comes to San Diego never goes away again, unless it be to hurry back home and pack his things. In a country where both population and property values have increased like guinea-pigs, the growth of San Diego is spoken of with something akin to awe. In the year that Grant was elected President, a second-hand furniture dealer named Alonzo Horton closed his little shop in San Francisco and with the savings of a lifetime—some say two hundred and sixty dollars, some eight hundred—in a belt about his waist, took passage on a steamer down the Californian coast. With this money he bought, at twenty-six cents an acre, most of what is now San Diego. Some of those lots which the shrewd old furniture dealer thus acquired could not now be bought for less than a cool half million! Two decades later came John D. Spreckels, bringing with him the millions he had amassed in sugar, and gave to San Diego a street-railway, electric lights, a water-system, one of the most beautiful theatres on the continent, and a solid mile of steel-and-concrete office-buildings of uniform height and harmonious design.

The people of San Diego are adamantine in their conviction that theirs is a city of destiny. They assert that within a single decade the name of San Diego will be as familiar on maps, and newspapers and bills of lading as New Orleans or Genoa or Yokohama or Calcutta or Marseilles. And they have some copper-riveted facts with which to back up their assertions. In the first place, so they will tell you, they have the harbour; sixteen miles long, forty to sixty feet deep, and protected from storms or a hostile fleet by a four-hundred-foot wall of rock. When the fortifications now in course of construction are completed San Diego will be as safe from attack by sea as though it were on the Erie Canal. Secondly, San Diego is the first American port of call for westbound vessels passing through the Panama Canal, and one of these days, unless the plans of the Naval Board of Strategy miscarry, it will become a great fortified coaling station and naval base, for it is within easy striking distance of the trans-Pacific lanes of commerce. Thirdly, it is the logical outlet for the newly developed sections of the Southwest, the grade between Houston and San Diego, for example, being the lowest on the continent—and commerce follows the lines of least resistance. Fourthly (this sounds like a Presbyterian sermon, doesn’t it?), San Diego will soon have a rich and prosperous hinterland, without which all her other advantages would go for nothing, to supply and to draw from. Experts on agricultural development have assured me that the day is coming when the Imperial Valley, of which San Diego is already the recognised _entrepôt_, will support as many inhabitants as the Valley of the Nile. Nor is this assertion nearly as visionary as it sounds, for the zone of cultivation in the Nile country is, remember, only a few miles wide. Beyond the Imperial Valley lie the constantly spreading orchards and alfalfa fields which are the result of the Yuma and Gila River projects. East of Yuma is the great region, of which Phœnix is the centre, which acquired prosperity almost in a single night from the Roosevelt Dam. East of Phœnix again the Casa Grande irrigation scheme is converting good-for-nothing desert into good-for-anything loam. Beyond Casa Grande the great corporation known as Tucson Farms is redeeming a large area by means of its canals and ditches, while still farther eastward the titanic dam at Elephant Butte, which the government is building to conserve the waters of the Rio Grande, will snatch from the clutches of the New Mexican desert a region as large as a New England State. And these are not paper projects, mind you. Some of them are completed and in full swing; others are in course of construction, so that by 1920 an almost continuous zone of irrigated, cultivated, and highly productive land will stretch from San Diego as far eastward as the Rio Grande. And, as the San Diegans gleefully point out, the settlers on these new lands will find San Diego nearer by from one hundred to two hundred miles than any other port on the Pacific Coast as a place to ship their products and to do their shopping. But the people of San Diego are such notorious boosters that before swallowing the things they told me I sprinkled them quite liberally with salt. In fact, I wasn’t really convinced of the genuineness of San Diego’s prospects until I happened to meet one evening on a hotel terrace a member of America’s greatest banking-house—a house whose credit and prestige are so unquestioned that its support is a hall-mark of financial worth.

“What do you think about this San Diego proposition?” I asked him carelessly, as we sat over our cigars. “Is it another Egyptian bubble which will shortly burst?”

“That was what I thought it was when I came out here,” he answered, “but since investigating conditions I have changed my mind. It looks so good to us, in fact, that we intend to back up our judgment by investing several millions.”

So far as attracting visitors is concerned, San Diego’s most valuable asset is her climate. Though the southernmost of our Pacific ports and in the same latitude as Syria and the North African littoral, it has the most equable climate on the continent, the records of the United States Weather Bureau showing less than one hour a year when the mercury is above 90 or below 32. According to these same official records, the sun shines on three hundred and fifty-six days out of the three hundred and sixty-five, so that rain is literally a nine days’ wonder. San Diego’s climate is that of Alaska in summer and of Arabia in winter, and, if you don’t believe it, the San Diegans will prove it by means of a temperature chart, zigzagging across which are two lines, one bright red, the other blue, which denote summer and winter climates circling the globe and which converge at only one point on it—San Diego. As a result of these unique climatic conditions, San Diego, unlike most resort cities, has two seasons instead of one. The Eastern tourists have hardly taken their departure in the spring before the hotels and boarding-houses begin to fill up with people who have come here to escape the torrid heat of a Southwestern summer. Many of these summer visitors are small ranchers from Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and from across the line in Chihuahua and Sonora, to whom the rates charged at the hotels would be prohibitive. To accommodate this class of visitors there has sprung into being on the beach at Coronado a “tent city.” The “tents” consist for the most part of one or two room bungalows with palm-thatched roofs and walls and wooden floors and equipped with running water, sanitary arrangements, and cooking appliances. The Coronado Tent City contains nearly two thousand of these dwellings which can be rented at absurdly low figures. For those who do not care to do their own cooking the management has provided a restaurant where simple but well-cooked meals can be had at nominal prices; there is a dancing pavilion for the young people, a casino on whose verandas the mothers can gossip and sew and at the same time keep an eye on their children playing on the sand, and a club house with pool-tables and reading-matter for the men. The place is kept scrupulously clean, it is thoroughly policed, hoodlumism is not tolerated, and, everything considered, it seemed to me a most admirable and inexpensive solution of the perennial summer-vacation problem for people of modest means.

* * * * *

Because I wanted to see something more than that narrow coastwise zone which comprises all that the average winter tourist ever sees of California; because I wanted to obtain a more intimate knowledge of the country and its people than comes from a car-window point of view; because I wanted to penetrate into those portions of the back country still undisturbed by the locomotive’s raucous shriek and eat at quaint inns and sleep in ranch-houses and stop when and where I pleased to converse with all manner of interesting people, I decided to do my travelling by motor-car. And so, on a winter’s sunny morning, when the flower vendors in the plaza of San Diego were selling roses at ten cents a bunch and the unfortunates who dwelt beyond the Sierras, rim were begging their janitors for goodness’ sake to turn on more steam, I turned the nose of my car northward and stepped on her tail, and with a rush and roar we were off on a journey which was to end only at the borders of Alaska. As, with engines purring sweet music, the car breasted the summit of the Linda Vista grade our breath was almost taken away by the startling grandeur of the panorama which suddenly unrolled itself before us. At our backs rose the mountains of Mexico, purple, mysterious, forbidding, grim. Spread below us, like a map in bas-relief, lay the orchard-covered plains of California; to the left the Pacific heaved lazily beneath the sun; to the right the snow-crowned Cuyamacas swept grandly up to meet the sky, and before us the beckoning yellow road stretched away ... away ... away.

I have never been able to resist the summons of the open road. I always want to find out what is at the other end. It goes somewhere, you see, and I always have the feeling that, far off in the distance, where it swerves suddenly behind a wood or disappears in the depths of a rock-walled cañon or drops out of sight quite unexpectedly behind a hill, there is something mysterious and magical waiting to be found. About the road there is something primitive and imperishable. Did it ever occur to you that it has been the greatest factor in the making of history, in the spread of Christianity, in the march of progress? Some one has said, and truly, that the rate and direction of human progress has always been determined by the roads of a people. For a time the marvel of modern inventions caused the road to be forgotten. The steamship sailed majestically away in contempt of the road upon the shore and the locomotive sounded its jeering screech at every crossing along its right of way. But still the road stayed on. But now the miracle of the motor-car has brought the road into its own again and started me ajourneying in the latest product of twentieth-century civilisation, with the strength of threescore horses beneath its throbbing hood, up that historic highway which has been travelled in turn by Don Vasquez del Coronado and his steel-clad men-at-arms, by Padre Serra in his sandals and woollen robe, by Jedediah Smith, the first American to find his way across the ranges, by Frémont the Pathfinder, by the Argonauts, by Spanish _caballeros_ and Mexican _vaqueros_ and American pioneers, by priests afoot and soldiers on horseback and peasants on the backs of patient burros, by lumbering ox-carts and white-topped prairie-schooners and six-horse Concord stages—and now by automobiles. In El Camino Real is epitomised the history and romance of the West. It is to western America what the Via Appia was to Rome, the Great North Road to England. It has been in turn a trail of torture, a course of conquest, a road of religion, a route to riches, a path of progress, a highway to happiness. He who can traverse it with no thought for anything save the number of miles which his indicator shows and for the comforts of the hotel ahead; who is so lacking in imagination that he cannot see the countless phantom shadows who charge it with their unseen presence; who is incapable of appreciating that in it are all the panorama and procession of the West, had much better stay at home. The only thing that such a person would understand would be a danger-signal or a traffic policeman’s club.

I am convinced that if the several thousand Americans who go on annual motor trips through Europe, either taking their cars with them or hiring them on the other side, could only be made to realise that on the edge of the Western ocean they can find roads as smooth and well built as the English highways or the _routes nationales_ of France, and mountains as high and sublimely beautiful as the Alps or the Pyrenees, and scenery more varied and lovely than is to be found between Christiania and Capri, and vegetation as luxuriant and hotels more luxurious than on the Côte d’Azur, and a milder, sunnier, more equable climate than anywhere else on the globe, they would come pouring out in such numbers that there wouldn’t be garages enough to hold their cars. In 1913 the legislature of California voted eighteen millions of dollars for the improvement of the roads, and that great sum is being so judiciously expended in conjunction with the appropriations made by the other coast states that by early in 1915 a motorist can start from the Mexican border and drive northward to Vancouver—a distance considerably greater than from Cherbourg to Constantinople—with as good a road as any one could ask for beneath his tires all the way.