Roughing it De Luxe

by Irvin S. Cobb

"You're right there, mister," broke in the button-nosed man, snapping him up instantly. "The air is tolerable clear here today; but you oughter to see the air up in the mountains! Why, it's so clear up there it would make this here hill-country air look like a fog. I remember oncet I was browsing along a cliff up in that country, toting my fishpole, and I happened to look over the bluff—just so—and down below I saw a hole in the creek that was just crawling with them big trouts—steel-head trouts and rainbow trouts. I could see the spots on their sides and their fins waving, and their gills working up and down.

"I figured out that it was fully a hundred feet down to the water and the water would natchelly be tolerable deep; so I let all my line run off the reel, a hundred and sixty feet of it; and I fished and fished and fished—and didn't get a strike, let alone a nibble. Yet I could look over and see all these hungry trouts down below looking up with expectant looks in their eyes—I could see their eyes—and jumping round regardless; and yet not a bite! So I changed bait—changed from live bait to dead bait, and back again to live—and still there wasn't nothing doing. So I says to myself: 'Something's wrong, sure! This thing'll stand looking into.'

IT'S A GREAT THING OUT THERE TO BE A NATIVE SON

"So I snoops round and finds a place where there's a sort of a sloping place in the bluff; and I braces my pole in a rock and leaves it there; and I climbs down—and then I sees what's the matter. It was that there clear air that had fooled me! It was three hundred feet if it was an inch down from the top of that there bluff to the creek, and the hole was fully a hundred feet deep—maybe more; and away down at the plumb bottom all them trouts was congregated in a circlelike, looking up mighty greedy and longing at my bait, which was a live frog, dangling two hundred and forty-odd feet up in the air. But, speaking of clear air, that wasn't nothing at all compared to some other things I could tell you about. Another time——"

At this point I rose and escaped to the diner. When I got back at the end of an hour the other survivors told me that, up to the time he got off at Sacramento, the button-nosed man had been getting better and better all the time. He certainly ought to be rounded up and put on exhibition at the Fair to show those puny and feeble Eastern fish-liars what the incomparable Western climate can produce.

I almost forgot to mention San Francisco's chief product—Native Sons. A Native Son is one who has acquired special merit by being born in the state. You would think credit would be given to the subject's parents, where it belongs; but, no—that is not the California way. It's a great thing out there to be a Native Son. It counts in politics, and in society, and at the clubs.

And, after that, the next best thing is to be a Southerner, either by birth or descent. People who have Southern blood in their veins are very proud of it and can join a club on the strength of it; and some of them do a lot of talking about it. The definition is rather elastic—anybody whose ancestors worked on the Southern Pacific is eligible, I think.

Of course, there are a lot of real Southerners; but there are a whole lot more who—so it seemed to me—are giving remarkably realistic imitations of the type known in New York as the Professional Southerner. San Francisco excels in Southerners—the regular kind and the self-made kind both.