CHAPTER XXX
“UNENDING SAMENESS” WAS WHAT THEY SAID
Of course you can’t see the Fair in a day, or two days, or three. 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. The San Franciscans, too, are building in the valley towering office buildings in which they work as earnestly for their living as any others elsewhere, but in spirit they are still hill-people, and their horizon is rimmed not by acquisitive ambition, but by sea and sky.
When we started, I had an idea that, keen though we were to undertake the journey, we would find it probably difficult, possibly tiring, and surely monotonous—to travel on and on and on over the same American road, through towns that must be more or less replicas, and hearing always the same language and seeing the same types of people doing much the same things. Everyone who had never taken the trip assured us that our impression in the end would be of an unending sameness. Sameness! Was there ever such variety?
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; and that is where you come to your first real contrast.
Omnipotent New York, in contrast to ambitious Chicago. Chicago is American to her backbone—active, alive and inordinately desiring, ceaselessly aspiring. Between New York and Chicago is strung a chain of cities that have many qualities, like mixed samples of these two terminal points. But beyond Chicago, no trace of New York remains. Every city is spunky and busy, ambitious and sometimes a little self-laudatory. (New York is not self-laudatory; she is too supremely self-satisfied to think any remarks on the subject necessary.) Leaving the country of fields and woods and streams, you traverse that great prairie land of vast spaces, and finally ascend the heights of the mighty Rocky Mountains.
The next contrast is in Colorado Springs, which is as unlike the rest of America as though St. Moritz itself had been grafted in the midst of our continent. All through New Mexico and Arizona you are in a strange land, far more like Asia than anything in the United States or Europe. A baked land of blazing sun, dynamic geological miracles, a land of terrible beauty and awful desolation, and then the sudden sharp ascent to the height of steep snow and conifer-covered mountains, looking even higher than the Rockies because of their abrupt needle-pointed heights. And finally, the greatest contrast climax of all, the sudden dropping down into the tropically blooming seacoast gardens of the California shore.
It goes without saying that only those who love motoring should ever undertake such a journey, nor is the crossing of our continent as smoothly easy as crossing Europe. But given good weather, and the right kind of a machine, there are no difficulties, in any sense, anywhere.
There couldn’t be a worse tenderfoot than I am, there really couldn’t. I’m very dependent upon comfort, have little strength, less endurance, and hate “roughing it” in every sense of the word. Yet not for a moment was I exhausted or in any way distressed, except about the unfitness of our car and its consequent injuries, a situation which others, differently equipped, would not experience.
I suppose the metamorphosis has come little by little all across our wide spirit-awakening country, but I feel as though I had acquired from the great open West a more direct outlook, a simpler, less encumbered view of life. You can’t come in contact with people anywhere, without unconsciously absorbing a few of their habits, a tinge of their point of view, and in even a short while you find you have sloughed off the skin of Eastern hidebound dependence upon ease and luxury, and that hitherto indispensable details dwindle—at least temporarily—to unimportance.