We rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the
Sierras to the clouds, and looked down upon summer-clad
California. And I will remark here, in passing,
that all scenery in California requires distance to
give it its highest charm. The mountains are
imposing in their sublimity and their majesty of form
and altitude, from any point of view—but
one must have distance to soften their ruggedness
and enrich their tintings; a Californian forest is
best at a little distance, for there is a sad poverty
of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one
monotonous family—redwood, pine, spruce,
fir—and so, at a near view there is a wearisome
sameness of attitude in their rigid arms, stretched
down ward and outward in one continued and reiterated
appeal to all men to “Sh! —don’t
say a word!—you might disturb somebody!”
Close at hand, too, there is a reliefless and relentless
smell of pitch and turpentine; there is a ceaseless
melancholy in their sighing and complaining foliage;
one walks over a soundless carpet of beaten yellow
bark and dead spines of the foliage till he feels
like a wandering spirit bereft of a footfall; he tires
of the endless tufts of needles and yearns for substantial,
shapely leaves; he looks for moss and grass to loll
upon, and finds none, for where there is no bark there
is naked clay and dirt, enemies to pensive musing
and clean apparel. Often a grassy plain in California,
is what it should be, but often, too, it is best contemplated
at a distance, because although its grass blades are
tall, they stand up vindictively straight and self-sufficient,
and are unsociably wide apart, with uncomely spots
of barren sand between.
One of the queerest things I know of, is to hear tourists
from “the States” go into ecstasies over
the loveliness of “ever-blooming California.”
And they always do go into that sort of ecstasies.
But perhaps they would modify them if they knew how
old Californians, with the memory full upon them of
the dust-covered and questionable summer greens of
Californian “verdure,” stand astonished,
and filled with worshipping admiration, in the presence
of the lavish richness, the brilliant green, the infinite
freshness, the spend-thrift variety of form and species
and foliage that make an Eastern landscape a vision
of Paradise itself. The idea of a man falling
into raptures over grave and sombre California, when
that man has seen New England’s meadow-expanses
and her maples, oaks and cathedral-windowed elms decked
in summer attire, or the opaline splendors of autumn
descending upon her forests, comes very near being
funny—would be, in fact, but that it is
so pathetic. No land with an unvarying climate
can be very beautiful. The tropics are not,
for all the sentiment that is wasted on them.
They seem beautiful at first, but sameness impairs
the charm by and by. Change is the handmaiden
Nature requires to do her miracles with. The
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Roughing It from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
