Irvin S. Cobb

“ Almost immediately the road quits the rocky, bare parapet of the gorge and winds off through the noble, big forest that is a part of the Government reserve. Jays that are twice as large and three times as vocal as the Eastern variety weave blue threads in the green background of the pines; and if there is snow upon the ground its billowy white surface is crossed and criss-crossed with the dainty tracks of coyotes, and sometimes with the broad, furry marks of the wildcat's pads. The air is a blessing and the sunshine is a benediction. ”

“ Over the ridge and down the steep declivity beyond goes your mule, slipping a little. He is reared back until his rump almost brushes the trail; he grunts mild protests at every lurching step and grips his shoecalks into the half-frozen path. You reflect that thousands of persons have already done this thing; that thousands of others—men, women and children—are going to do it, and that no serious accident has yet occurred—which is some comfort, but not much. ”

“ Soon you begin to skitter past the suburban villas of rich men, set back in ornamental landscape effects of green lawns and among tropical verdure. You emerge from this into a gently rolling plateau, upon which flower gardens of incomparable richness are interspersed with the homely structures that inevitably mark the proximity of any great city. There, rising ahead of you, are the foothills that protect, upon its landward side, San Francisco, the city that has produced more artists, more poets, more writers, more actors, more pugilists, more sudden millionaires—cries of Question! ”

“ If your mule were not under you pensively craning his head rearward in an effort to bite your leg off, you would almost be ready to swear the whole thing was an optical illusion, a wondrous dream. Under these circumstances it is not so strange that some travelers who have been game enough until now suddenly weaken. Their nerves capsize and the grit runs out of them like sand out of an overturned pail. ”

“ So, when I was repeatedly assured that the old-time romance had vanished from San Francisco, and with it the atmosphere that bred Bohemianism and developed literature and art, and kept alive the spirit of the Forty-niner times, and all that, I made my own allowances. Those who mourned for the fire-blasted past may have been right, in a measure. Certainly the old-time Chinatown isn't there any more—or, at any rate, isn't there in its physical aspects. The rebuilt Chinatown of San Francisco, though infinitely larger, isn't so picturesque really or so Chinesey looking as New York's Chinatown. ”

“ All day you may ride and never once will your eye rest upon a picture that is commonplace or trumpery.
Going either North or South, your road lies between mountains. To the eastward, shutting out the deserts from this domain of everlasting summer, are the Sierras—great saw-edged old he-mountains, masculine as bulls or bucks, all rugged and wrinkled, bearded with firs and pines upon their jowls, but bald-headed and hoar with age atop like the Prophets of old. But the mountains of the Coast Range, to the westward, are full-bosomed and maternal, mothering the valleys up to them ”

“ If I were in charge of the publicity work of the San Francisco Fair I should advertise two attractions that would surely appeal to all the women in this country, and to most of the men. In my press work I would dwell at length upon the fact that in this part of California a woman may wear any weight and any style of clothes—spring clothes, summer clothes, fall clothes or winter clothes—and not only be perfectly comfortable while so doing, but be in the fashion besides; and to be in the fashion is a thing calculated to make a woman comfortable whether she otherwise is or not. ”

“ New York has a wonderful harbor entrance; Nature did some of it and man did the rest. San Francisco has an even more wonderful one, and the hand of man did not need to touch it. When Nature got through with it, it was a complete and satisfactory job.
The first convincing impression the newcomer gets of San Francisco is that here is a permanent city—a city that has found itself, has achieved its own personality, and is satisfied with it. Perhaps, because they are growing so fast, certain of the other Coast cities strike the casual observer as having just been put up. ”

“ He belongs—or did belong—to the vast vanishing race of oldtime gold prospectors. Halfway down the trail he does light housekeeping under an accommodating [Pg 63] flat ledge that pouts out over the pathway like a snuffdipper's under lip. He has a hole in the rock for his chimney, a breadth of weathered gray canvas for his door and an eighty-mile stretch of the most marvelous panorama on earth for his front yard. He minds the trail and watches out for the big boulders that sometimes fall in the night; and, except in the tourist season, he leads a reasonably quiet existence. ”

“ The woman nearest the walls has on her furs—it is always cool in the shade; the one next to her is wearing the very latest wrinkles in spring garniture; the third one, let us say, is dressed in the especially becoming frock she bought last October; and the one on the outside, where the sun shines the brightest, is as summery in her white ducks and her white slippers as though she had just stepped off the cover of the August number of a magazine. There is something, too, about the salt-laden breezes of San Francisco that gives women wonderful complexions ”

“ To adorn a skunk with any extra qualifications seems as great a waste of the raw material as painting the lily or gilding refined gold. He is already amply equipped for outdoor pursuits. Nobody intentionally shoves him [Pg 56] round; everybody gives him as much room as he seems to need. He commands respect—nay, more than that, respect and veneration—wherever he goes. Joy-riders never run him down and foot passengers avoid crowding him into a corner. You would think Nature had done amply well by the skunk; but no—the Hydrophobic Skunk comes along and upsets all these calculations. ”

“ The birds in California do not build nests. They build ranches.
Most of the way along the Santa Clara Valley our tires glided upon an arrow-straight, unbelievably smooth stretch of magnificent automobile road, which—when it is completed—will extend without a break from the Oregon line to the Mexican line, and will be the finest, costliest, best thoroughfare to be found within the boundaries of any state of the Union, that being the scale upon which they work out their public-utility plans in the West. ”

“ Half a mile under you, straight as a man can spit, are gardens of willows and grasses and flowers, looking like tiny green patches, and the tents of a camp looking like scattered playing cards; and there is a plateau down there that appears to be as flat as your hand and is seemingly no larger, but actually is of a size sufficient for the evolutions of a brigade of cavalry. ”

“ The unearthly beauty of the whole thing overpowers you. The poet that lives in nearly every human soul rouses within you and you feel like withdrawing to yon dense grove or yon peaked promontory to commune with Nature. ”

“ Only your mule never slips off! It is contrary to a mule's religion and politics, and all his traditions and precedents, to slip off. He may slide a little and stumble once in a while, and he may, with malice aforethought, try to scrape you off against the outjutting shoulders of the trail; but he positively will not slip off. It is not because he is interested in you. A tourist on the cañon's rim a simple tourist is to him and nothing more ”

“ How easy it is for civilized man to become primitive and comfortable in his way of eating, especially if he has just ridden ten miles on a buckboard and nine more on a mule and is away down at the bottom of the Grand Cañon—and there is nobody to look on disapprovingly when he takes a bite that would be a credit to a steam shovel! ”

“ And all of us—Northerners, Southerners, Easterners alike—were actuated by a common purpose—we were going West to see the country and rough it—rough it on overland trains better equipped and more luxurious than any to be found in the East; rough it at ten-dollar-a-day hotels; rough it by touring car over the most magnificent automobile roads to be found on this continent. ”

“ I know that, when I was there, the view from the first rise back of the grounds, looking down upon that long flat where men by thousands were toiling, and building after building was rising, made a picture sufficiently inspiring to warm the enthusiasm and brisken the imagination of any man, be he alien or native.
There isn't any doubt, though, that the people of San Francisco are going to have their hands full when the exposition visitors begin to pile in. ”

“ A native will willingly concede that there was a fire, which burned its memories deep into the consciousness of the city that recovered from it with such splendid courage and such inconceivable rapidity ”

“ Once you get away from the larger hotels, which are accurate copies of the metropolitan article of the East, even to the afternoon tea-fighting mêlées of the women, you find yourself in a city that is absolutely individual and distinctive. ”

“ The thought comes to you that, after all, it is a very bright and beautiful world you are leaving behind. You turn your head to give it a long, lingering farewell, and you try to put your mind on something cheerful—such as your life insurance. ”

“ There is not much to be seen—a depot, a 'dobe cabin or so, a few frame shacks, a few natives, a few Indians and a few incurably languid Mexicans—and that is positively all there is except that, right out there in the middle of nowhere, stands a hotel big enough and handsome enough for Chicago or New York, built in the Spanish style, with wide patios and pergolas—where a hundred persons might perg at one time—and gay-striped awnings. ”

“ The Hydrophobic Skunk resides at the extreme bottom of the Grand Cañon and, next to a Southern Republican who never asked for a Federal office, is the rarest of living creatures. He is so rare that nobody ever saw him—that is, nobody except a native. I met plenty of tourists who had seen people who had seen him, but never a tourist who had seen him with his own eyes. In addition to being rare, he is highly gifted.
I think almost anybody will agree with me that the common, ordinary skunk has been most richly dowered by Nature. ”

“ He certainly ought to be rounded up and put on exhibition at the Fair to show those puny and feeble Eastern fish-liars what the incomparable Western climate can produce.
I almost forgot to mention San Francisco's chief product—Native Sons. A Native Son is one who has acquired special merit by being born in the state. You would think credit would be given to the subject's parents, where it belongs; but, no—that is not the California way. It's a great thing out there to be a Native Son. It counts in politics, and in society, and at the clubs. ”

“ Romance is a commodity that was extremely plentiful last week or last year or last century, but for the moment they are entirely out of it, and can't say with any degree of certainty when a fresh stock will be coming in. This is largely true of all the formerly romantic cities I know anything about, and it appears to be especially true of San Francisco. Romance invariably acquires added value after it has vanished ”

“ You go inside to a big, spotlessly bright dining room and get as good a meal as you can get anywhere on earth—and served in as good style, too. To the man fresh from the East, such an establishment reminds him vividly of the hurry-up railroad lunch places to which he has been accustomed back home—places where the doughnuts are dornicks and the pickles are fossils, and the hard-boiled egg got up out of a sick bed to be there, and on the pallid yellow surface of the official pie a couple of hundred flies are enacting Custard's Last Stand. ”

“ A real-estate agent told me so, and I do [Pg 139] not think a Southern California real-estate agent would deceive anybody—more particularly a stranger from the East. So it must be true. And Los Angeles' main business district is like a transverse slice chopped out of the middle of Manhattan Island. It isn't Western. It is typically New Yorky—as alive as New York and as handsomely done. You can almost imagine you are at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street.
San Francisco, it seems to me, isn't like any city on earth except San Francisco. ”

“ The unconquerable determination of the Eastern tourist to have Southern California conform to his back-home standards is responsible for the fact that many of the tourist hotels out there are not so typical of the West as they might be—and as in my humble judgment they should be—but are as Eastern as it is possible to make them—Eastern in cuisine, in charges and in their operating schedules. ”