In one day's
travel--or, at most, two--you can get a taste of all the things that
make this farthermost corner of the United States at once so diversified
and so individual--sky-piercing mountain and mirage-painted desert;
seashore and upland; ranch lands, farm lands and fruit lands; city and
town; traces of our oldest civilization and stretches of our newest;
wilderness and jungle and landscape garden; the pines of the snows, the
familiar growths of the temperate zone, the palms of the tropics; and
finally--which is California's own--the Big Trees. All day you may ride
and never once will your eye rest upon a picture that is commonplace or
trumpery.

Going either North or South, your road lies between mountains. To the
eastward, shutting out the deserts from this domain of everlasting
summer, are the Sierras--great saw-edged old he-mountains, masculine as
bulls or bucks, all rugged and wrinkled, bearded with firs and pines
upon their jowls, but bald-headed and hoar with age atop like the
Prophets of old. But the mountains of the Coast Range, to the westward,
are full-bosomed and maternal, mothering the valleys up to them; and
their round-uddered, fecund slopes are covered with softest green. Only
when you come closer to them you see that the garments on their breasts
are not silky-smooth as they looked at a distance, but shirred and
gored, gathered and smocked. I suppose even a lady mountain never gets
too old to follow the fashions!

Now you pass an orchard big enough to make a hundred of your average
Eastern orchards; and if it be of apples or plums or cherries, and the
time be springtime, it is all one vast white bridal bouquet; but if it
be of almonds or peaches the whole land, maybe for miles on end, blazes
with a pink flame that is the pinkest pink in the world--pinker than the
heart of a ripe watermelon; pinker than the inside of a blond cow.

Here is a meadowland of purest, deepest green; and flung across it, like
a streak of sunshine playing hooky from Heaven, is a slash of wild
yellow poppies. There, upon a hillside, stands a clump of gnarly,
dwarfed olives, making you think of Bible times and the Old Testament.
Or else it is a great range, where cattle by thousands feed upon the
slopes. Or a crested ridge, upon which the gum trees stand up in long
aisles, sorrowful and majestic as the funereal groves of the ancient
Greeks--that is, provided it was the ancient Greeks who had the funereal
groves.

Or, bes