Up and down the Coast these tourists traipse for months on end, spending a week here and two weeks there, and doing the same things in the same way at each new stopping place. You meet them, part from them, and meet them again at the next stand, until the monotony of it grows maddening; and always they are intently following the routine you saw them following last week or the week before, or the week before that. They have traveled clear across the continent to practice such diversions as they might have had within two hours' ride of Philadelphia or New York; and they are going to practice them, too, or know the reason why.
Of course they are not all constituted this way; I am speaking now of the impression created in California by tourists in bulk. They decline to do the things for which this country is best adapted; they will not see the things for which it is most famous. Few of them take the roughing trips up into the mountains; fewer still visit the desert country. All about them the tremendous engineering contracts that have made this land a commercial Arabian Nights' Entertainment are being carried out—the mighty reclamation schemes; the irrigation projects; the damming up of cañons and the shoveling away of mountains—but your average group of Eastern tourists pass these by with dull and glazed eyes, their souls being bound up in the desire to reach the next hotel on the route with the least possible waste of time, and take up the routine where it was broken off at the last hotel.
They tennis and they golf, and some go horseback riding and some take drives; and at one or two places there is polo in the season. Likewise, in accordance with the rules laid down by the Palm Beach authorities, the women change clothes as often as possible during the course of the day; and in the evening all hands appear in full dress for dinner, the same being very wearing on men and very pleasing to women—that is, all of them do except a few obstinate persons who defy convention and remain comfortable. After dinner some of the younger people dance and some of the older ones play bridge; but the vast majority sit round—and then sit round some more and wonder whether eleven o'clock will ever come so they can go to bed!
A good many take the wrong kind of clothes out there with them. They have read in the advertisements that Southern California is a land of perpetual balm, where flowers bloom the year round; and they pack their trunks with the lightest and thinnest wearing apparel they own, which is a mistake. The natives know better than that. The all-wool sweater is the national garment of the Western Coast—both sexes and all ages go to it unanimously. Experience proves it the ideal thing to wear; for in Southern California in the winter it is never really hot in the sun and it is often exceedingly cool in the shade. Besides, there is a sea wind that blows pretty regularly and which makes a specialty of working through the crannies in a silk shirt or a lingerie blouse. The chilliest, most pallid-looking things I ever saw in my life were a pair of white linen trousers I found in the top tray of my trunk when I reached the extreme lower end of California. I had to cover them under two blankets and a bedspread that night to keep the poor things from freezing stiff.
The medium-weight garments an Easterner wears between seasons are admirably suited for the West Coast in the winter; but the guileless tenderfoot who is making his first trip to California usually doesn't learn this until it is too late. If he is wise he studies out the situation on his arrival, and thereafter takes his overcoat with him when he goes riding and his sweater when he goes walking; but there are many others who will be summer boys and girls though they perish in the attempt.
At Coronado I witnessed a mighty pitiable sight. It was a cool day, cooler than ordinary even, with a stiff wind blowing skeiny shreds of sea fog in off the gray ocean; and a beating rain was falling at frequent intervals. The veranda was full of Easterners trying to look comfortable in summer clothes and not succeeding, while the road in front was dotted with Westerners, comfortable and cozy in their thick sweaters. There emerged upon the wind-swept porch a youth who would have been a sartorial credit to himself on a Florida beach in February or upon a Jersey board-walk in August; but he did not coincide with the atmospheric scheme of things on a rainy March day down in Southern California.
HE FELT HE WAS PROPERLY DRESSED FOR THE TIME, THE PLACE AND THE OCCASION
To begin with, he was a spindly and fragile person, with a knobby forehead and a fade-away face. Dressed in close-fitting black and turned sidewise, with his profile to you, he would instantly suggest a neatly rolled umbrella with a plain bone handle. But he was not dressed in black; he was dressed in white—all white, like a bride or a bandaged thumb; white silk shirt; white flannel coat, with white pearl buttons spangled freely over it; white trousers; white Panama hat; white socks; white buckskin shoes, with white rubber soles on them. He was, in short, all white except his face, which was a pinched, wan blue, and his nose, which was a suffused and chilly red. If my pencil had had an eraser on it I'm satisfied I could have backed him up against the wall and rubbed him right out; but he bore up splendidly.