Dan Connelly <d_j_c_o_n_n_e_l@i_e_e_e.o_r_g> wrote in message news:<
[email protected]>...
> Steve Juniper wrote:
> > Perhaps some of you aren't familiar with the famous Mark Twain quote: "The coldest I ever
> > was, in my entire life, was one summer in San Francisco."
>
> Neither was Mark Twain, I fear:
http://www.twainquotes.com/SanFrancisco.html
>
> Dan
Dear Dan, Steve, and others,
Below is chapter 56 of "Roughing It," which is where he covered California's climate. The cold-
summer quote still seems to be an amiable but mistaken attribution, but it could still pan out--it
wasn't so long ago that an entire lost novella by Twain ("A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage"--not
worth reading) was discovered.
Carl Fogel
CHAPTER LVI.
We rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the Sierras to the clouds, and looked down upon summer-
clad California. And I will remark here, in passing, that all scenery in California requires
distance to give it its highest charm. The mountains are imposing in their sublimity and their
majesty of form and altitude, from any point of view--but one must have distance to soften their
ruggedness and enrich their tintings; a Californian forest is best at a little distance, for there
is a sad poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous family--redwood,
pine, spruce, fir--and so, at a near view there is a wearisome sameness of attitude in their rigid
arms, stretched down ward and outward in one continued and reiterated appeal to all men to "Sh!--
don't say a word!--you might disturb somebody!" Close at hand, too, there is a reliefless and
relentless smell of pitch and turpentine; there is a ceaseless melancholy in their sighing and
complaining foliage; one walks over a soundless carpet of beaten yellow bark and dead spines of the
foliage till he feels like a wandering spirit bereft of a footfall; he tires of the endless tufts
of needles and yearns for substantial, shapely leaves; he looks for moss and grass to loll upon,
and finds none, for where there is no bark there is naked clay and dirt, enemies to pensive musing
and clean apparel. Often a grassy plain in California, is what it should be, but often, too, it is
best contemplated at a distance, because although its grass blades are tall, they stand up
vindictively straight and self-sufficient, and are unsociably wide apart, with uncomely spots of
barren sand between.
One of the queerest things I know of, is to hear tourists from "the States" go into ecstasies over
the loveliness of "ever-blooming California." And they always do go into that sort of ecstasies. But
perhaps they would modify them if they knew how old Californians, with the memory full upon them of
the dust-covered and questionable summer greens of Californian "verdure," stand astonished, and
filled with worshipping admiration, in the presence of the lavish richness, the brilliant green, the
infinite freshness, the spend-thrift variety of form and species and foliage that make an Eastern
landscape a vision of Paradise itself. The idea of a man falling into raptures over grave and sombre
California, when that man has seen New England's meadow-expanses and her maples, oaks and cathedral-
windowed elms decked in summer attire, or the opaline splendors of autumn descending upon her
forests, comes very near being funny--would be, in fact, but that it is so pathetic. No land with an
unvarying climate can be very beautiful. The tropics are not, for all the sentiment that is wasted
on them. They seem beautiful at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by. Change is the
handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. The land that has four well-defined seasons,
cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony. Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in
the watching of its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious development, its culminating graces--and just
as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new
glories in its train. And I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn,
seems the loveliest.
San Francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately and handsome at a fair distance, but
close at hand one notes that the architecture is mostly old-fashioned, many streets are made up of
decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses, and the barren sand-hills toward the outskirts obtrude
themselves too prominently. Even the kindly climate is sometimes pleasanter when read about than
personally experienced, for a lovely, cloudless sky wears out its welcome by and by, and then when
the longed for rain does come it stays. Even the playful earthquake is better contemplated at a dis--
However there are varying opinions about that.
The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The thermometer stands at about seventy
degrees the year round. It hardly changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets Summer
and Winter, and never use a mosquito bar. Nobody ever wears Summer clothing. You wear black broadcloth--
if you have it--in August and January, just the same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one
month than the other. You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans. It is as pleasant a climate
as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless the most unvarying in the whole
world. The wind blows there a good deal in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland,
if you choose--three or four miles away--it does not blow there. It has only snowed twice in San
Francisco in nineteen years, and then it only remained on the ground long enough to astonish the
children, and set them to wondering what the feathery stuff was.
During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are bright and cloudless, and never a
drop of rain falls. But when the other four months come along, you will need to go and steal an
umbrella. Because you will require it. Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days in hardly
varying succession. When you want to go visiting, or attend church, or the theatre, you never look
up at the clouds to see whether it is likely to rain or not--you look at the almanac. If it is
Winter, it will rain--and if it is Summer, it won't rain, and you cannot help it. You never need a
lightning-rod, because it never thunders and it never lightens. And after you have listened for six
or eight weeks, every night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish in your
heart the thunder would leap and crash and roar along those drowsy skies once, and make everything
alive--you will wish the prisoned lightnings would cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it
with a blinding glare for one little instant. You would give anything to hear the old familiar
thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody. And along in the Summer, when you have suffered
about four months of lustrous, pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and plead
for rain--hail--snow--thunder and lightning--anything to break the monotony-- you will take an
earthquake, if you cannot do any better. And the chances are that you'll get it, too.
San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills. They yield a generous
vegetation. All the rare flowers which people in "the States" rear with such patient care in parlor
flower-pots and green- houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year round. Calla
lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss roses--I do not know the names of a tenth part
of them. I only know that while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow, Californians
are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only keep their hands off and let them grow.
And I have heard that they have also that rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful
Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards call it--or flower of the Holy Spirit--though I thought it grew
only in Central America--down on the Isthmus. In its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a
dove, as pure as snow. The Spaniards have a superstitious reverence for it. The blossom has been
conveyed to the States, submerged in ether; and the bulb has been taken thither also, but every
attempt to make it bloom after it arrived, has failed.
I have elsewhere spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California, and but this moment of the
eternal Spring of San Francisco. Now if we travel a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the
eternal Summer of Sacramento. One never sees Summer-clothing or mosquitoes in San Francisco--but
they can be found in Sacramento. Not always and unvaryingly, but about one hundred and forty-three
months out of twelve years, perhaps. Flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily believe--
people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and night, and wear out their stanchest energies
fanning themselves. It gets hot there, but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it hotter. Fort
Yuma is probably the hottest place on earth. The thermometer stays at one hundred and twenty in the
shade there all the time--except when it varies and goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its
occupants get so used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it. There is a tradition
(attributed to John Phenix [It has been purloined by fifty different scribblers who were too poor to
invent a fancy but not ashamed to steal one.--M. T.]) that a very, very wicked soldier died there,
once, and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition,-- and the next day he
telegraphed back for his blankets. There is no doubt about the truth of this statement--there can be
no doubt about it. I have seen the place where that soldier used to board. In Sacramento it is fiery
Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries and ice-cream, and wear white linen
clothes, and pant and perspire, at eight or nine o'clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and
at noon put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner Lake, seven thousand
feet above the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks
that lift their frosty crags ten thousand feet above the level of the sea.
There is a transition for you! Where will you find another like it in the Western hemisphere? And
some of us have swept around snow-walled curves of the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, six
thousand feet above the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the deathless Summer of the
Sacramento Valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage, its silver streams, all
slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and
spiritualized by distance--a dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the more charming and
striking that it was caught through a forbidden gateway of ice and snow, and savage crags and
precipices.
***
