Emily Post

“ From Riverside we made a loop back to Los Angeles and drove to San Diego along the edge of the ocean all the way. The coast was one long succession of big ocean resort hotels on a boulevard that seemed too smooth and perfect to be true. We had forgotten that such road smoothness existed for our poor long-tortured engine to glide over.
The Fair at San Diego was a little Exposition Beautiful! The composite impression was of a garden of dense, shiny green. Great masses and profusions of orange-trees and vines against low one-storied buildings of gray-white. ”

“ The Country Club is most charming, and in it a big room so appealing in color and furnishing that you feel irresistibly like settling yourself in the corner of one of the chintz-covered sofas and staying indefinitely. Yet the same people whose own houses are so attractive will seriously take you to admire a horticultural achievement that, in its magentas and scarlets, purples and heliotrope, orange, Indian red and Paris green, lacks no element of discord except an out-of-tune German band to play among its glass globes. ”

“ With straight black Indian hair piled high under a lace mantilla, with necklaces of gold and silver and coral and turquoise as big as hens’ eggs, with her modern American dress barely showing under her Indian blanket of holiest red, her head pillowed against the mountains of the North, and her little pueblo feet in the high-heeled Spanish slippers stretched out upon the plains of the South, Santa Fé sits dreaming in the golden sunlight. ”

“ On a corner is an Indian wrapped in his bright blanket. Two Mexicans in high-crowned wide-brimmed sombreros lean against a door frame and smoke cigarettes. Cowboys in flannel shirts have vivid bandannas around their throats, and there is more color yet in women’s dresses, in flowers, in fruits, in awnings—color, color rioting everywhere. Over everything the sun bakes just as it does in Spain or Northern Africa, and the people all look as silent and dreamy as the town. ”

“ And if you stay long in San Francisco, you won’t want to leave at all. Up and down and around the hills, you constantly see houses that you wish you could immediately go and live in. For in what other city can you sit on a hillside—only millionaires sit on hilltops—with a view of sea and mountains below and beyond you? Where else, outside of a Maxfield Parrish picture, is there a city rising gayly on steep sugar-loaf hills, and filled with people whose attitude of mind exactly matches their hilltops? ”

“ In many other cities people live in long narrow canyons called streets, under a blanket of soot, signifying industry, and they scurry around like ants carrying great mental loads, ten times as big as they are, up steep hills of difficulty, only to tumble down with them again. The people of countless other cities are valley people, their perception bounded by the high walls of the skyscrapers they have themselves erected in the name of progress. ”

“ He is always laughing, always shoving his shoulders through the atmosphere; inquisitive as Ricki-ticki and quite as full of life and vim; he seems ready to seize every opportunity of hazard or engagement that the moment offers. He plays all games recklessly; the more dangerous as to stakes or excitement, the better. He drives a powerful motor-car and he is flirting outrageously with one of the prettiest women imaginable, whose invalid husband seems to care very little how much attention she accepts from her frivolous though ardent admirer. ”

“ What if your engine is barely capable of forty miles an hour, that miraculously fast stretch magically carries you at the easiest fifty. If you have a big powerful engine, you forget that ordinarily you dislike whizzing across the surface of the earth, and for just this once—even though you think of it more in terror than in joy—you are approaching the raceway of America, and you, too, are going to race!
“We must be sure that everything is in perfect running order,” you exclaim excitedly as you picture your car leaping out of Omaha and shooting to Denver while scarcely turning over its engine. ”

“ Having ourselves withstood the mud of Iowa without injury and survived the perils of the Platte River Valley without meeting any, we find ourselves as commonplace as anyone who had crossed Long Island would be to New Yorkers. These people out here talk about being hauled through quicksand streams, or of clinging along shelf roads at the edge of a thousand-foot drop as though it were pleasant afternoon driving. ”

“ Beginning with New York, as that is the point we started from, New York was built, is building, will ever be building in huge blocks of steel and stone, and the ambitious of every city and country in the world will keep pouring into it and crowding its floor space and shoving it up higher and higher into towering cubes. New York dominates the whole of the Western Hemisphere and weights securely the Eastern coast of the map, and because of all this weight and importance, New Yorkers fancy they are the Americans of America, but New York is not half as typically American as Chicago ”

“ To compare Chicago with Boston is much like comparing a dynamo with a marble monument, yet paradoxically there is a strong similarity between the two. There is no public place where people congregate. Both are cities of homes, and hotel life has little part in the society of either. Boston society is possibly the most distinguished in America—and Boston front doors will never open to you unless you have cultivation and birth to the extent of proving satisfactorily who your grandparents were. ”

“ Imagine people living all their lives in Cairo never having seen the Pyramids. Imagine anyone living in Italy never having been to Pompeii. Yet we, ourselves, to whom the antiquities and wonders of far countries are perfectly familiar, did not even know that the wonders of our Southwest existed! We thought that Pueblo had a nice Indian sound, that Santa Fé must be an important railroad terminal. ”

“ Beyond Gallup you run into the Navajo Indian Reservation, your road having ascended rather steeply through parklike woods of cedars, and the altitude again affects both lungs and carburetor, but even if it makes you gasp a little it is an essence of deliciousness as reviving as an elixir of life. You go past the road that leads to the wonderful Canyon de Chelly, but it is impossible for a motor—any kind of a motor, even the littlest and lightest one—to go over it in the early spring, so you continue on until at last, coming out upon a mesa, you see spread below you the Painted Desert! ”

“ The cerise and cream-colored dining-room, in which for afternoon tea they take up the center carpet and remove some tables, leaving a hollow square of gray marble tiling to dance on, is the most beautiful room that I have ever seen anywhere, not excepting Paris. The white marble simplicity of the second dining-room also appealed to me, and the upstairs halls are like those in a great private country house.
The restaurant we find for its standard of high prices not very good. The food at the Statler in Cleveland was the best we have had anywhere, and the prices were half. ”

“ Cocoa we bought at the hotels, but our favorite place to buy ice cream was at a soda-water fountain.
The tins in our bread box we hoarded as a miser hoards gold—as a surplus that we might need to keep us alive; and, as is the common end of most misers, when we got to San Francisco and our journey was over, the greater part was still left—to give away. ”

“ How the lobby in itself is supposed to so much contribute to your happiness and comfort, you have no idea. But each and every advertisement either begins or ends with a description and a full-page picture of this imposing hallway. To test the peerless perfection of this Blackstone rival is naturally irresistible and into its overwhelming gorgeousness you go! The gorgeousness is there quite as in the pictures, also it is in every way a perfectly up-to-date and luxurious hotel. You wonder, though, is the cost of food inordinately high? Are wages prohibitive? ”

“ As we come into the outskirts of the city where we are to spend the night, I take off, in the car, my goggles and the swathing of veils that I wear touring, and put on the lace one. The transformation from blown-about hair and dusty face to a tidy disguise of all blemishes is quite miraculous. Dusters are ugly things, but as every woman who motors knows, there is nothing so practical. I don’t think personally that silk ones can be compared for sense and comfort with those of dust-colored linen or cotton. Silk sheds the dust perhaps a little better, but wrinkles more. ”

“ The steel-walled Pullman carefully preserves for you the attitude you started with. Plunging into an uninhabited land is not unlike plunging into the surf. A first shock! To which you quickly become accustomed, and find invigoratingly delicious. Why difficulties seem to disappear; and why that magic land leaves you afterwards with a persistent longing to go back, I can’t explain; I only know that it is true.
The taste we had of the desert has something so appealing in the reminiscence of its harsh immensity by day, its velvet mystery at night—if only we might have gone further into it! ”

“ The disappointing and unsatisfactory thing about a motor trip is that unless you have unlimited time, which few people ever seem to have, you stop too short a while in each place to know anything at all about it. You arrive at night and leave early in the morning and all you see is one street driving in, and another going out, and the lobby, dining-room and a bedroom or two at the hotel. ”

“ The spirit of going through with what you undertake and not being stopped by a little mud that we first met with in Rochelle is here much intensified. In Illinois they prided themselves on surmounting obstacles; out here they are so imbued with the attitude of the men who live out on the plains and through the mountains—the pioneers whose adventures the most frivolous social leader knows by heart—that they don’t even recognize an obstacle when they see it. ”

“ In fact, after years of touring, I have in a vague, ragged sort of way tried to hold to what might be called a motor philosophy. Anyway, I have found it a splendid idea when things go very uncomfortably to remember—if I can—what a very charming diplomat, who was also a great traveler, once told me: that in motoring, as in life, since trouble gives character, obstacles and misadventures are really necessary to give the trip character! ”

“ Except while still in the Reservation where we passed occasional Navajos we saw no living person or thing the rest of the day. Sometimes we went over rolling, stubbled prairie, fringed again with cedars and pines; next through a veritable desert of desolation with nothing but rocks and sand. Sometimes the road wound tranquilly through timbered glades; again came a straight, monotonous stretch of sandy trail. ”

“ Smith’s baby is the loveliest and cleverest prodigy you have ever seen, and her feelings will be those exactly of Chicagoans if you tell them anything that could be construed into an unfavorable comparison. They can’t bear New York any more than the mother can bear Mrs. Smith’s baby. At the very sight of a New Yorker they nettle and their minds flurry around and gather up quickly every point of possible advantage to their own beloved Chicago. ”

“ La Caravana!” crowding into the Plaza to receive them, if the streets of Santa Fé no longer riot in tumult and bloodshed, they at least still riot in color and picturesqueness, kaleidoscopic enough to vie with anything in Constantinople or Cairo. You might think yourself in the Orient or in a city of old Spain transported upon a magic carpet, but nothing less like the United States can be imagined. Along the narrow crooked streets, dwellings hundreds of years old stand shoulder to shoulder with modern houses that have wedged themselves between. ”

“ Hotels, however, are very lenient in the matter of the appearance of guests, because of all the begrimed-looking tramps, our “chauffeur” after driving ten hours or so in the sifting dust is the grimiest. The only reason why he is not taken for a professional driver is because no one would hire anyone so disreputable-looking.
In one hotel, though, a grimy working mechanic having gone up in the elevator and a strange, perfectly well turned out person having come down, the confused clerk asked where the chauffeur went and did the new gentleman want a room? ”

“ You perceived that the buildings of the separate States and foreign nations trailed off like a suburb at one end, and that the Zone was a straight street also by itself. Among the thousands of embellishments, you noticed perhaps the lovely statues of Borglum’s “Pioneer,” Fraser’s “End of the Trail,” Daniel Chester French’s “Genius of Creation,” the adventurous bowman on the top of the Column of Progress, nor could you miss the nations of the West and East, and the figures of the rising and the setting sun. ”

“ But it isn’t the standing on cherry-tree ladders, or the doing of any actual thing, that makes the essential difference between the people of the Atlantic and the Pacific Coast. It is the land itself, perhaps—the sunshine, the climate, that pours a rejuvenating radiance upon the spirit of resident and visitor alike. ”

“ The engine is to him what Chicago is to the Chicagoans, the very child of his heart; its every little piece of steel or aluminum as personally precious to him as a baby’s tooth or curl is to its doting parent. We can all be tired and hungry, wet or cold, or broiling and thirsty, it means nothing to him so long as that engine is comfortably purring under its bonnet. ”

“ All of the mountain roads of Colorado are splendidly built—even though some of their railless edges are terrifying to anyone light of head, and by no means to be recommended to an inexpert driver. One famously beautiful drive has a turntable built at an otherwise impossibly sharp bend.
After Pueblo—which by the way is not in the least quaint or Indian as its name promised, but a smoky and smeltering industrious little Pittsburgh—you [136] come out upon the plains, plains that look as you imagined them, on which cattle and cowboys ranged and prairie schooners came slowly over the horizon. ”

“ It seems rather funny that we, who nearly failed to stay intact over the well-worn Santa Fé trail, are branching into the unbeaten byway of the desert! We have taken our battered exhaust pipe off, and shipped it to Los Angeles, and our sensation without it is one of such freedom that we feel we can surmount all obstacles. ”

“ And afterwards, when you have actually climbed to their knees or shoulders, and look back upon the endless plains, you forget the wearying journey and feel keenly the beauty of their very endlessness. The ever-changing effect of light and shadow over that boundless expanse weaves an enchanted spell upon your imagination that you can never quite recover from. Sometimes the prairies are a great sea of mist; sometimes they are a parched desert ”

“ For miles and miles after leaving Isleta, a quite large settlement where there are many Indians and also many tourists, you go on and on and on over an easy gradually ascending road not unlike the long Platte Valley drive, but much more uninhabited. The once dangerous fording of the Puerco River is no longer a barrier to motorists, as there is a splendid new bridge that takes you smoothly over. From time to time you come to a few adobe huts or a lonely little packing-box railroad station, but your road stretches uneventfully on, until Laguna. ”

“ The making of a great city depends less on the men who are in office than on those who have no office, and who want none. It is the spirit of the people that makes a city go forward or leaves it standing still. The spirit that is essential to progress, [106] in Omaha as everywhere, is one of unity, harmony and good will. ”