IN THE HAUNT OF THENATIVE SON
In the Haunt of the Native Son
There are various ways of entering San Francisco, and the traveling general passenger agent of any one of half a dozen trunklines stands ready to prove to you—absolutely beyond the peradventure of a doubt—that his particular way is incomparably the best one; but to my mind a very satisfactory way is to go overland from Monterey.
The route we followed led us lengthwise through the wonderful Santa Clara country, straight up a wide box plait of valley tucked in between an ornamental double ruffle of mountains. I suppose if we passed one ranch we passed a thousand—cattle ranches, fruit ranches, hen ranches, chicken ranches, bee ranches—all the known varieties and subvarieties.
In California you mighty soon get out of the habit of speaking of farms; for there are no farms—only ranches. The particular ranch to which you have reference may be a ten-thousand-acre ranch, where they raise enough beef critters to feed a standing army, or it may be a half-acre ranch, where somebody is trying to make things home-like and happy for eight hens and a rooster; but a ranch it always is, and usually it is a model of its kind, too. 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.
Eventually the road changes into a paved and curbed avenue, lined with seemingly unending aisles of the tall gum trees. 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! Question! from the Pittsburgh delegation—more good fiction and more Native Sons than any community in the Western Hemisphere.