ould go
to sleep presently and when he woke up, the great journey would have
been accomplished. His words fulfilled themselves. Soon the Native Son
fell into a coma. When he opened his eyes he was in Paradise. He raised
himself up, gave one look about and exclaimed, "What a boob that doctor
was! Whad'da he mean--Paradise! Here I am still in California."

Man has of course, here as elsewhere, chained nature; set her to toil
for him. She is a willing worker everywhere, but in California she puts
no stay nor stint on her productive efforts. California produces--Now up
to this moment I have held myself in. Looking back on my copy I see
only such meager words as "beauty", "glory", "splendor", such pale,
inadequate phrases as "super-mundane fertility" and "super-solar
fecundity". What use are words and phrases when one speaks of
California. It is time for us to abandon them both and resort to some
bright, snappy sparkling statistics.

Reader, I had to soft-pedal here. If I gave you the correct statistics,
You wouldn't believe me.

So here goes!

California produces forty per cent of the gold, fifty per cent of the
wheat, sixty per cent of the oranges, seventy per cent of the prunes,
eighty per cent of the asparagus and (including the Native Daughters)
ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths per cent of the peaches of
the world. I pause to say here that none of these figures is true. They
are all made up for the occasion. But don't despair! I am sure that they
don't do California justice by half. Any other Californiac--with the
mathematical memory which I unfortunately lack--will provide the correct
data. Somebody told me once, I seem to recall, that the Santa Clara
valley produces sixty per cent of the worlds prunes. But I may be
mistaken. What I prefer to remember is one day's trip in that springtide
of prune bloom. For hours and hours of motor speed, we glided through a
snowy world that showed no speck of black bark or fleck of green leaf;
a world in which the sole relief from a silent white blizzard of blossom
was the blue of the sky arch, the purple of distant lupines alternating
with the gold of blood-centered poppies, pouring like avalanches down
hills of emerald green.

Getting out of the scenery zone only to fall into the climate zone.
Reader, it's just the same with the climate as the scenery. It's got to
be done some time, so why not now?

That's what California produces in the way of scenery and fodder. S