The Californiacs | Page 9

I repeat that California throws her first tentacle into your
heart as you stand there wondering whether you'll go to your hotel or,
plunging headforemost into the crowds, swim with the current.
Imagine a city built not on seven but a hundred hills. I am sure there are
no less than a hundred and probably there are more. Certainly I climbed
a hundred. On three sides the sea laps the very hem of this city and on
one side the forest reaches down to its very toes. That is, when all is
said, the most marvelous thing about San Francisco - that the sea and
forest come straight to its borders. And as, because of its peninsula
situation they form the only roads out, sea and forest are integral parts
of the city life. It accounts for the fact that you see no city pallor in the
faces on the streets and perhaps for the fact that you see so little
unhappiness on them. On Sundays and holidays, crowds pour across
the bay all day long and then, loaded with flowers and greens, pour
back all the evening long. As for flowers and greens, the hotels, shops,

cafes, the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants are full of them. They are so
cheap on the streets that everybody wears them. Everybody seems to
play as much as possible out of doors. Everybody seems to sleep out of
doors. Everybody has just come from a hike or is just going off on one.
Imagine a climate rainless three-quarters of the year, which permits the
workingman to tramp all through his vacation with the impedimenta
only of a blanket, moneyless if he will, but with the certainty always
that the orchards and gardens will provide-him with food.
Through the city runs one central hill-spine. From this crest, by day,
you look on one side across the bay with its three beautiful islands, bare
Yerba Buena, jeweled Alcatraz and softly-fluted Angel Island, all
seemingly adrift in the blue waters, to Marin county. The waters of the
bay are as smooth as satin, as blue as the sky, and they are slashed in
every direction with the silver wakes left by numberless ferryboats.
Those ferryboats, by the way, are extremely graceful; they look like
white peacocks dragging enormous white-feather tails. By night the bay
view from the central hill-spine shows the cities of Berkeley and
Oakland like enormous planes of crystal tilted against the distance, the
ferryboats illuminated but still peacock-shaped, floating on the black
waters like monster toys of Venetian glass. In the background, rising
from low hills, peaks the blue triangle of Mt. Diablo. In the foreground
reposes Tamalpais - a mountain shaped in the figure of a woman-lying
prone. The wooded slopes of Tamalpais form the nearest big
playground for San Franciscans - and Tamalpais is to the San
Franciscan what Fujiyama is to the Japanese. Would that I had space to
tell here of the time when their mountain caught fire and thousands -
men, women and children - turned out to save it! Everybody helped
who could. Even the bakers of San Francisco worked all night and
without pay to make bread for the fire-fighters.
By day, on the city side of the crest, you catch glimpses of other hills,
covered for the most part with buildings, like lustrous pearl cubes; for
San Francisco is a pearl-gray city. At night you can look straight down
the side streets to Market street on a series of illuminated restaurant
signs which project over the sidewalk at right angles to the buildings. It
is as though a colossal golden stairway tempted your foot.
Perhaps after all the most breath taking quality about San Francisco is
these unexpected glimpses that you are always getting of beautiful

hill-heights and beautiful valley-depths. Sunset skies like aerial banners
flare gold and crimson on the tops of those hills. City lights, like nests
of diamonds, glitter and glisten in the depths of those valleys. Then the
fogs! I have stood at my window at night and watched the ragged
armies of the air drift in from the bay and take possession of the whole
city. Such fogs. Not distilled from pea soup like the London fogs; moist
air-gauzes rather, pearl-touched and glimmering; so thick sometimes
that it is as though the world had veiled herself in mourning, so thin
often that the stars shine through with a delicate muffled lustre. By day,
even in the full golden sunshine of California, the view from the hills
shows a scene touched here and there with fog.
As for the hills themselves, steep as they are, street cars go up and
down them. What is more extraordinary, so do automobiles. The hill
streets are cobbled commonly; but often, for the better convenience of
vehicles, there