(PDF Download) Young Children's Behaviour Guidance Approaches For Early Childhood Educators Fulll Chapter
(PDF Download) Young Children's Behaviour Guidance Approaches For Early Childhood Educators Fulll Chapter
(PDF Download) Young Children's Behaviour Guidance Approaches For Early Childhood Educators Fulll Chapter
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That afternoon’s drive was the hottest I hope ever to have to live
through. To put your hand on unshaded metal was to burn it, as
though on a hot flat-iron. The main road, El Camino Real, was good
all the way to Salinas, but the branch road from there to Monterey
was bumpy and bad until within a mile or so of our destination.
Of Monterey and its peerlessly beautiful seventeen-mile ocean and
cedar drive, there is no need to write. Like Niagara and the Grand
Canyon, it has been written about and photographed in every
newspaper and periodical in the world. Also, as was the case further
south, hot as it might be inland, the coast was deliciously cool. The
weather changed fortunately by the time we again drove inland and
up the perfect boulevard to San Francisco. They tell me, however,
that so far as the neighborhood of San Francisco is concerned no
one need ever dread heat, a scorching temperature being unknown.
Wind you may have, and sometimes fog, but extremes of either heat
or cold, never! Besides other blessings in this particular spot of this
wonderful land you can also choose your own temperature. If you
like warm weather, walk in the sun. If you like cold weather, walk in
the shade. On the former side of the street, you will find a muslin
dress just right; on the latter you will be comfortable in a sealskin
coat. This is not a joke, as I had always thought it to be, but quite
true.
CHAPTER XXVIII
SAN FRANCISCO
Another New York girl, Pauline M., who certainly was as spoiled as
pampering could make her, went once long ago to a Maine hotel and
never stopped talking about how awful the rooms were and how
starved she was because of the horrible food. Twenty years ago she
married a Californian and her house in San Francisco is as luxurious
as a house can well be, but when we arrived she had gone into the
mountains to camp, and telegraphed us to join her. We did not do
that, but we motored out to lunch. Having always associated her
with Callot dresses and marble balustrades, I expected the make-
believe “roughing it” of the big camps in the Adirondacks. As we
arrived at a small collection of portable houses dumped in a clearing
we saw our fastidious friend in heavy solid boots, a drill skirt, flannel
shirt, kneeling beside a campfire cooking flapjacks. She used to be
beautiful but rather anemic; her sauntering, languid walk seemed
always to be dragging a five-yard train, and her face was set with a
bored expression. The metamorphosis was startling. She looked
younger than she had at twenty and she put more life and energy in
her waving of her frying-pan in greeting than she would have put in
a whole New York season of how-do-you-do’s.
Even the Orientals seem affected by the spirit of this land’s
gladness. The Chinaman of San Francisco is a big, smiling and
apparently gay-hearted individual—none the less complex and
mysterious for all that.
Frankly, the people out here who fascinate me most of all are the
Chinese. From the two or three that we have seen in friends’ houses,
a Chinese servant must be about as easy to manage as the wind of
heaven; you might as well try to dig a hole in the surface of the sea
as to make any impression on him. He is going to do exactly what he
pleases and in the way he pleases. Of course, his way may be your
way, in which case you are lucky. Also it must not be forgotten that
his faithfulness and devotion, when he is devoted, is quite as
unalterable as his way. Of the two or three individual ones that we
have seen in friends’ houses, one at least will never be forgotten by
any of us. His serene round face was the personification of docility,
and he moved about in his costume of dull green brocade like some
lovely animate figure of purely decorative value. Why have we
nothing in our houses that are such a delight to the eye?
I have forgotten what we had for luncheon—caviare canapé, I
think, and with it finger bowls.
“No, Chang, not finger bowls yet,” I heard Mr. K. say. So Chang
removed them, only to bring them back again with the next course.
“There is no use,” laughed Mr. K. to me, “he will keep bringing
them back no matter how often I tell him to take them away. He
always does, and we just have to have them from the beginning
through.”
Mr. K. carved on the table—Chang probably insisted on that too—
and asking me whether I preferred dark or white, put the breast of a
broiled chicken on a plate. The Celestial one in green brocade
instead of passing it to me, deftly picked up a fork, placed the
chicken breast back on the platter, took a second joint instead, and
saying severely:
“Him likee leg pliece!” carried the plate to Mr. K.’s mother.
Company or no company, Chang served her always first.
Also the K.’s told me that Mrs. K., senior, was the only member of
the family whose personal wishes he invariably respected. He is also
the slave of the K. baby, but to the rest of the family he behaves
exactly as a chow, or a Persian cat, or any other purely decorative
independent household belonging.
China is the place for old women to live in! They receive all the
attention and consideration that is shown in our own country only to
the most young and beautiful.
Mrs. S., whose husband was for many years chargé d’affaires in
the American legation in Pekin, is the most enthusiastic champion of
everything Chinese. “If a Chinaman is staying under your roof, you
need have no uneasiness on the subject of his good intentions,” she
said this morning. “No Chinaman will stay in your employ if he does
not like you.” As an example, she told us that while she was in Pekin
the head boy of another legation was taken to task about something
in front of some of the under servants—a situation of great indignity.
The occurrence happened in the midst of the serving of a meal. The
Chinaman quietly laid down the dish he was holding and left the
room and the house. In less than ten minutes he presented himself
before Mrs. S. and announced that he had come to live with them.
For nothing would he go back to the other legation, and having
elected Mrs. S. as his tai tai (lady) in her particular service he
stayed. One New Year’s he presented her with a miniature pig,
stunted in the way that the Japanese stunt trees or else just a little
freak. It was only a foot long, but full grown, and as black as though
it had been dipped in shoe polish.
One day in San Francisco, I went out shopping in the Chinese
quarter with Mrs. S. The sensation may be imagined of an American
lady suddenly speaking perfectly fluent Manchu Chinese. Such a
grinning and gesticulating and smiling as went on! And the whole
neighborhood gathered suddenly into the discourse.
Understanding not a single syllable, I could only watch the others,
but even more than ever, they fascinated me.
In San Francisco we rushed early each morning to the Exposition
and spent no time anywhere else. Every now and then someone said
to Pauline, with whom we were stopping, the mysterious sentence:
“Have you taken them to Gump’s?” And her answer: “Why no, I
haven’t!” was always uttered in that abashed apologetic tone that
acknowledges a culpable forgetfulness. Finally one day instead of
driving out towards the Exposition grounds we turned towards the
heart of the city.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To Gump’s!” triumphantly.
“To Gump’s? Of all the queer sounding things, what is to Gump’s?”
“Our most celebrated shop. You really must not leave San
Francisco without seeing their Japanese and Chinese things.”
Shades of dullness, thought I, as if there were not shops enough
in New York! As for Oriental treasures, I was sure there were more
on Fifth Avenue at home than there are left in Asia. But Pauline
being determined, there was nothing for us to do but, as E.M. said,
“to Gump it!”
Feeling very much bored at being kept away from the Exposition, I
entered a store reminiscent of a dozen in New York, walked down an
aisle lined on either side with commonplace chinaware. My first
sensation of boredom was changing to irritability. Then we entered
an elevator and in the next instant I took back everything I had
been thinking. It was as though we had been transported, not only
across the Pacific, but across centuries of time. Through the
apartments of an ancient Chinese palace, we walked into a Japanese
temple, and again into a room in a modern Japanese house. You do
not need more than a first glance to appreciate why they lead
visitors to a shop with the unpromising name of Gump. I am not
sure that the name does not heighten the effect. If it were called the
Chinese Palace, or the Temple of Japan, or something like that, it
would be like telling the answer before asking the conundrum. As in
calling at a palace, too, strangers, distinguished ones only, are asked
to write their names in the visitor’s book.
In this museum-shop each room has been assembled as a setting
for the things that are shown in it. Old Chinese porcelains, blue and
white, sang de bœuf, white, apple-green, cucumber-green and
peacock-blue, are shown in a room of the Ming Period in ebony and
gold lacquer.
The windows of all the rooms, whether in the walls or ceiling, are
of translucent porcelain in the Chinese, or paper in the Japanese;
which produces an indescribable illusion of having left the streets of
San Francisco thousands of miles, instead of merely a few feet,
behind you.
The room devoted to jades and primitives has night-blue walls
overlaid with gold lacquer lattices and brass carvings and in it the
most wonderful treasures of all. They are kept hidden away in silk-
lined boxes, and are brought out and shown to you, Chinese fashion,
one at a time, so that none shall detract from the other. We wanted
to steal a small white marble statuette of a boy on a horse. A thing
of beauty and spirit very Greek, yet pure Chinese that dated back to
the oldest Tang Dynasty! There was also a silver, that was originally
green, luster bronze of the Ham Period, two thousand years old, and
a sacrificial bronze pot belonging to the Chow Dynasty, B.C. 1125.
The patina, or green rust of age, on these two pieces was especially
beautiful. I also much admired a carved rhinoceros horn, but found
it was merely Chien Lung, one hundred and fifty years old, which in
that room was much too modern to be important.
In one of the Japanese rooms there were decorated paper walls
held up by light bamboo frames, amber paper shoji instead of
windows, and the floors covered with tatami, the Japanese floor
mats, two inches thick. You sit on the floor as in Japan and drink
tea, while silks of every variety are brought to you.
We saw three rugs of the Ming Dynasty that are probably the
oldest rugs extant. The most lovely one was of yellow ground, with
Ho birds in blue. And there was an ice-cooler of cloisonné, Ming
Period. They brought the ice from the mountains and cooled the
imperial palace—years ago. Yet to hear Europeans talk, you’d almost
be led to believe that ice is an American invention.
We were shown old Chinese velvet wedding-skirts and a tapestry
of blues, with silver storks and clouds of an embroidery so fine that
its stitches could be seen only through a magnifying glass, and
poison plates belonging to the Emperor Ming that were supposed to
change color if any food injurious to His Majesty were served on
them.
One of the most beautiful things was a Caramandel screen of the
Kang Hai Period, in a corridor that it shared only with an enormous
lacquer image of the Buddha.
We were told that a rather famous collector went out to see the
Fair. On his first day in San Francisco—he was stopping at the St.
Francis Hotel which is only a stone’s throw across the square—he
went idly into this most alluring of shops and became so interested
he stayed all day. The next day he did the same, and the third
morning found him there again. Finally he said with a sigh: “Having
come to see the Exposition, I must go out there this afternoon and
look at it, as I have to go back to New York tomorrow.”
I don’t know that this is an average point of view, but it is a fact
that was vouched for, and also that his check to the detaining shop
ran into very high figures.
Of the suburbs of San Francisco, Burlingame, I suppose, compares
most nearly to Newport, of our Eastern coast, Sewickley of
Pittsburgh or Broadmoore of Colorado Springs. It is a community of
big handsome places occupied by the rich and fashionable. It strikes
you, though, how much simpler people are in habits, in taste, in
attitude, than in the East. Suggest anything on a house-party in
Burlingame or San Mateo, or Ross, and instead of being answered:
“What for?” or “Oh, not just now!” the response is a prompt and
enthusiastic, “Fine! Come on!”
Young women and men in San Francisco, though many have more
money to spend than they know what to do with, demand less in the
way of provided entertainment than New York children in their
earliest teens. A dozen of San Francisco’s most gilded youths stood
around a piano and sang nearly all one evening. After a while
someone played, and the rest danced. At Newport they would have
danced, more likely than anything else, but the music, even if
thought of at the last moment, would probably have been by an
orchestra. One afternoon they pulled candy, and every day they
swim in someone’s pool. Today at the J.’s, tomorrow at the H.’s. The
girls play polo as well as the men and all of them, of course, drive
their own cars.
In the J.’s garden, they have ladders against the cherry trees, and
everyone wanders out there and eats and eats cherries—and such
cherries! In the first place we haven’t any such cherries, and in the
second, can you imagine a group of Newport women climbing up
ladders and clinging to branches rather than let the gardeners
gather them?
But it isn’t the standing on cherry-tree ladders, or the doing of any
actual thing, that makes the essential difference between the people
of the Atlantic and the Pacific Coast. It is the land itself, perhaps—
the sunshine, the climate, that pours a rejuvenating radiance upon
the spirit of resident and visitor alike.
Even at the end of a little while you find yourself beginning to
understand something of the oppressive grayness that settles upon
the spirit of every Californian when away from home. Which reminds
me of a young Italian girl whom I found one day crying her heart
out on a bench in the Public Gardens in Boston. To me Beacon
Street is one of the most beautiful streets I have ever seen,
especially where the old and most lovely houses face the green of
the Public Gardens, and the figure of this sobbing girl was doubly
woeful. To every question I could think of she shook her head and
sobbed, “No.” She had not lost anyone, no one had deserted her,
and she was not hungry, or cold, or houseless, or penniless. “But,
my dear, what is the matter?” I implored. Finally, almost strangling
with tears, she stammered: “B-boston is so u-ugly!”
Mrs. M., a Californian married to a New Yorker, had seemed to us
rather negative, a listless silent figure who trailed through New York
drawing-rooms more like a wraith than a live woman. We happened
to be at her mother’s when this pale, frail, young person returned
home for a visit and came very much to life! She hung cherries on
her ears, covered her hat, and filled her belt with poppies, and came
running up the terraces of their very wonderful gardens, her arms
outstretched and shouting at the top of her voice:
“California, my California! I’m home, home, home!”
The Portico of a California House
Does anyone ever feel like that about New York? I wonder! Does
anyone really love its millionaires’ palaces, its flashing Broadway, its
canyon streets, its teeming thoroughfares, its subway holes-in-the-
ground into which men dive like moles, emerging at the other end in
an office burrow—sometimes without coming up into the outdoors at
all? Or are the sentiments composed more truly of pride that has
much egotism in the consciousness of more square feet of masonry
crowded into fewer square feet of ground; more well-dressed
women, more automobiles; bigger crowds—sprucer-looking crowds;
more electric signs; more things going on; more business; more
amusements; more making and spending; more losing and breaking,
than, one might almost say, all the other cities of the world
together?
All of which makes typical New Yorkers contemptuous of and
dissatisfied with every other city. But as to whether they love it, as
the people of Chicago or San Francisco do—do they? Do we?
For anyone to look out upon New York’s immensity and spread out
his arms and say: “My city! My home!” would be almost like looking
overhead and saying, “My sky, my stars!” Almost, wouldn’t it?
I wanted to lead up to the story of a California bride’s impression
of New York. Instead of which I seem to have arrived in New York,
but left the bride at home!
The story was told me by Mr. B., himself a New Yorker, but whose
wife and stepson were Californians. Last winter the stepson brought
his wife to New York on their wedding-trip. This is what Mr. B. told
me:
“She had everything we could give her, but spent the afternoon at
matinées and galleries and shopping; her evenings at the play or the
opera and a cabaret afterward, and her mornings in bed. Finally I
said: ‘Why don’t you want us to have some dinners for you, so that
you can meet some people? You can’t know much about a city if you
meet no one.’
“‘Oh,’ she said,’the people look so queer.’
“‘How, queer?’
“‘Why, so—so well-dressed and so horrid—their faces aren’t kind,
and they don’t seem to smile at all.’
“But I insisted on taking her up Fifth Avenue to see the fine
houses. No enthusiasm. Finally I said:
“‘But surely, the V. house is wonderful!’
“‘I suppose so,’ she said,’but like all the rest, it is just stone and
mortar stuck up in a crowded, noisy street, and the newspapers
blow up around the door.’
“Then she stopped, and seeing how disappointed I was, patted
me on the arm: ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I was born and grew up in an
orange grove, and you people stifle me. I want to go home.’”
CHAPTER XXIX
THE FAIR
The Fair will be over when this account is published, but it was so
dominant a part of San Francisco at the time we—and all the
thousands of others—were there I haven’t the heart to cut the pages
out.
With merely a phrase, you can make a picture of the little fair at
San Diego; cloister-like gray buildings with clumps of dense green,
and a vivid stroke of blue and orange. But to visualize the Pan-
American Exposition in a few sentences is impossible. You could
begin its description from a hundred different points and miss the
best one, you can say one thing about it and the next moment find
you were quite wrong. In the shade or fog, it was a city of baked
earth color, oxydized with any quantity of terra cotta; in the sun it
was deep cream glowing with light. If you thought of half the domes
as brown, and others as faded green, you found, the next time you
saw them, that they looked like a bit of the sky itself, and the brown
ones glimmered a dull, yet living, rose.
Seeing it first from a distance, coming down upon it from the hill
streets of San Francisco, you saw a biscuit-colored city with terra-
cotta roofs, green domes and blue. Beyond it the wide waters of a
glorious bay, rimmed with far gray-green mountains. But you were
luckiest if you saw it first when the sun was painting it for you,
which was invariably unless there was a fog, or perhaps you looked
down upon it at night when the scintillating central point, the Tower
of Jewels, looked like a diamond and turquoise wedding-cake and
behind it an aurora of prismatic-colored search-lights—the most
thrilling illumination possible to imagine.
Or entering one of its many gates you wandered like an ant
through bewildering chaos. Not that it lacked plan; its architectural
balance was one of the most noteworthy things about it. But there
were so many courts, so much detail. Gradually, you noticed that
there were eight great exhibition palaces, and a ninth, the Palace of
the Fine Arts, like a half-circle at the end. You perceived that the
buildings of the separate States and foreign nations trailed off like a
suburb at one end, and that the Zone was a straight street also by
itself. Among the thousands of embellishments, you noticed perhaps
the lovely statues of Borglum’s “Pioneer,” Fraser’s “End of the Trail,”
Daniel Chester French’s “Genius of Creation,” the adventurous
bowman on the top of the Column of Progress, nor could you miss
the nations of the West and East, and the figures of the rising and
the setting sun.
The murals of Brangwyn no chair boy would let you pass. Each
one pushed you in front, and backing off to give you the proper
distance, declared that they cost five thousand dollars “each one.”
We were admiring their vital animation, for they pulsated fairly
with energy and life, as well as color, when suddenly from the
sublime to the ridiculous, E. M. remarked: “That’s curious! The men
have just taken their shirts off.” Then Celia and I wondered too, why
every male figure was brown as a berry as high as a shirt sleeve
would roll up, and white as a person always sheltered from the air
over all the rest of his body?
We also wondered about the four women who clung to the
corners of gigantic boxes on top of the beautiful Fine Arts
colonnade. Each of the boxes suggested the coffin of a very fat
Mormon and his four wives weeping for him. There was something
hidden up there that the clinging women were afraid to take their
gaze away from, but what it was we had no idea. All of which levity
reminds me that in Paris I watched two tourists as they hurried
eagerly down the long gallery toward the Venus de Milo. Arrived at
its base one of them leaned over the guard rail, stared at the
marble, and exclaimed:
“Why, Gussie, she’s all pock-marked!”
My criticism of a work as notable as the Pan-American Exposition
is probably much like the above. Beautiful as much of it is, I wish
they had left a few unfilled niches, a few plain surfaces, but they are
filling them fuller every day. When we first came, the little kneeling
figure on her peninsular front of the Fine Arts Temple and her
reflection in the lagoon gave an impression of a dream. While we
were there, they filled every archway with imposing sculptures until
it looks merely like a museum.
I found myself driving around and mentally taking things away.
The lovely old eucalyptus trees, the only planting that was on the
grounds before the Fair, seemed almost to have heard me, for they
were not to be kept from taking everything off that they could, and
untidily strewing the ground with their discarded clothing.
One thing, however, was hard to understand or forgive; of all the
courts, especially at night, the one which had the most imaginative
appeal, was the Court of Abundance. At the four corners of a square
pool were standards of erect green cobras holding brasiers filled with
leaping flames of tongues of silk blown upward by concealed fans
and red and yellow lights; in the center of the pool was the Fountain
of the Earth, a work of highly imaginative beauty in which, above
four panels of symbolic figures in high relief, the globe of the earth
was set in a rose-colored glow surrounded by a mystic vapor, made
by a gentle escapement of steam, and then at one side they had
planted two huge Maltese cross standards of blatant electric lights!
On the subject of the exhibits, everyone has read about the Ford
cars that are assembled on a conveyor. Beginning at one end as
pieces of metal and running off at the other under their own power.
That was undoubtedly the most interesting exhibit to the public in
general, but to many others the Sperry Flour display was quite as
ingenious and if anything more interesting. They had a whole row of
little booth kitchens to show how all the nations of the world use
flour.
A camper tossed flapjacks over a campfire; a Mexican made
anchillades and tomales; a Swede, a Russian, a Chinaman, a Hindoo
and four or five others made their national wafers and cakes—and
gave samples away! In the center at a bigger oven was baked
home-made American bread and cake and pies, of such
deliciousness that everyone who passed by looked as longingly as
the proverbial ragamuffin in front of a baker’s window.
There was always a crowd, too, watching the manufacture of
white lead paint by the Fuller Company, and going through the
staterooms of a section, full-sized, of an Atlantic steamer. Perhaps
the greatest interest of all was shown in a model United States post-
office, with bridges crossing above, so people could look down and
see all the details of sorting and distributing.
One thing you noticed—nearly all San Franciscans were personally,
or through some members of their family, interested in the Fair.
Everyone gave dinners on the Zone, either on the balcony of the
Chinese restaurant—that had nothing Chinese about it except its
Chinese ornamentation on the front of the building—or at the Old
Faithful Inn of the Yellowstone. The illuminations at night were very
soft and subdued, all the lanterns were turned dark side to the
Concourse and light side to the buildings.
In the Zone there were few new attractions, and fewer worth
seeing. The best were the Panama Canal, the Painted Desert, and
Captain, the mind-reading horse. A woman mind reader, who took
turns with the horse, was equally remarkable.
The queen of the Samoan village, clad literally in a short skirt, a
Gaby Deslys head-dress, a string of beads and a dazzling smile, had
not only great audacity but a fascinating personality that was literally
bubbling over with the old Nick. We were crazy about her, a fact she
saw perfectly well, for in the garden afterward, when she had
discarded her gorgeous head-dress and donned a modest piece of
sash tied around her chest, she came straight to us and shook hands
as a child might, who, amidst a crowd of strangers, had singled out
a friend. That is all there is to tell, as we couldn’t speak Samoan, nor
she English.
A few months ago, in the midst of a daring flight, the wings of the
famous Beachey’s aeroplane crumpled and plunged into the sea. The
aviator was strapped into his machine in such a way that, if he still
lived, he could not free himself.
Le roi est mort! Vive le roi!
And the new king was Art Smith. At eleven o’clock at night, the
siren blew and thousands crowded about the open field to see him
start. Up and up and up he went until, at several hundred feet up, a
torch suddenly burned at the back of the machine which swept the
sky, leaving a trail of fire like a comet’s tail, looped and double
looped and curved and twisted and wrote “ZONE” across the sky.
But really to see the feats of this aeronaut who far exceeded
Beachey’s daring, you had to go to the Aviation Field on a day when
he flew at five. You saw, if you were early enough to stand near the
ropes of the enormous enclosure, a young boy apparently, very
small, but stockily built, walk casually out of the crowd standing back
of the machine, wave good-bye to a young girl, his wife, and get on
a sort of bicycle on the front of his biplane without any apparent
strapping in, except the handle of the steering-wheel that he pulled
close in front of him. Across the wide grass field he gradually arose,
soared higher and higher, until at half a thousand feet or more, he
dipped and swooped, then somersaulted round and round and round
in a whirling ball, then flying upside down, dropped nearly over your
head, then arose again, flying backwards, sideways, fell, arose,
dipped—like a bird gone mad. At last he came swooping down and
alit at the end of the great green field.
Very young and small, Art Smith walked the whole length of the
field between fifty thousand shouting, waving human beings. No
hero of the Roman Stadium, no king coming to his own, has lived a
greater moment than the young birdman lived every day. Boyishly
his mouth broke into a wide smile, he doffed his cap, bowing to the
right and to the left, and the applause followed him in a series of
roars. At the hangar his young wife ran out and kissed him. He had
been spared to her once again.
CHAPTER XXX
“UNENDING SAMENESS” WAS WHAT THEY
SAID
Of course you can’t see the Fair in a day, or two days, or three.
And if you stay long in San Francisco, you won’t want to leave at all.
Up and down and around the hills, you constantly see houses that
you wish you could immediately go and live in. For in what other city
can you sit on a hillside—only millionaires sit on hilltops—with a view
of sea and mountains below and beyond you? Where else, outside of
a Maxfield Parrish picture, is there a city rising gayly on steep sugar-
loaf hills, and filled with people whose attitude of mind exactly
matches their hilltops?
In many other cities people live in long narrow canyons called
streets, under a blanket of soot, signifying industry, and they scurry
around like ants carrying great mental loads, ten times as big as
they are, up steep hills of difficulty, only to tumble down with them
again. The people of countless other cities are valley people, their
perception bounded by the high walls of the skyscrapers they have
themselves erected in the name of progress. The San Franciscans,
too, are building in the valley towering office buildings in which they
work as earnestly for their living as any others elsewhere, but in
spirit they are still hill-people, and their horizon is rimmed not by
acquisitive ambition, but by sea and sky.
When we started, I had an idea that, keen though we were to
undertake the journey, we would find it probably difficult, possibly
tiring, and surely monotonous—to travel on and on and on over the
same American road, through towns that must be more or less
replicas, and hearing always the same language and seeing the
same types of people doing much the same things. Everyone who
had never taken the trip assured us that our impression in the end
would be of an unending sameness. Sameness! Was there ever such
variety?
Beginning with New York, as that is the point we started from,
New York was built, is building, will ever be building in huge blocks
of steel and stone, and the ambitious of every city and country in
the world will keep pouring into it and crowding its floor space and
shoving it up higher and higher into towering cubes. New York
dominates the whole of the Western Hemisphere and weights
securely the Eastern coast of the map, and because of all this weight
and importance, New Yorkers fancy they are the Americans of
America, but New York is not half as typically American as Chicago;
and that is where you come to your first real contrast.
Omnipotent New York, in contrast to ambitious Chicago. Chicago is
American to her backbone—active, alive and inordinately desiring,
ceaselessly aspiring. Between New York and Chicago is strung a
chain of cities that have many qualities, like mixed samples of these
two terminal points. But beyond Chicago, no trace of New York
remains. Every city is spunky and busy, ambitious and sometimes a
little self-laudatory. (New York is not self-laudatory; she is too
supremely self-satisfied to think any remarks on the subject
necessary.) Leaving the country of fields and woods and streams,
you traverse that great prairie land of vast spaces, and finally ascend
the heights of the mighty Rocky Mountains.
The next contrast is in Colorado Springs, which is as unlike the
rest of America as though St. Moritz itself had been grafted in the
midst of our continent. All through New Mexico and Arizona you are
in a strange land, far more like Asia than anything in the United
States or Europe. A baked land of blazing sun, dynamic geological
miracles, a land of terrible beauty and awful desolation, and then the
sudden sharp ascent to the height of steep snow and conifer-
covered mountains, looking even higher than the Rockies because of
their abrupt needle-pointed heights. And finally, the greatest
contrast climax of all, the sudden dropping down into the tropically
blooming seacoast gardens of the California shore.
It goes without saying that only those who love motoring should
ever undertake such a journey, nor is the crossing of our continent
as smoothly easy as crossing Europe. But given good weather, and
the right kind of a machine, there are no difficulties, in any sense,
anywhere.
There couldn’t be a worse tenderfoot than I am, there really
couldn’t. I’m very dependent upon comfort, have little strength, less
endurance, and hate “roughing it” in every sense of the word. Yet
not for a moment was I exhausted or in any way distressed, except
about the unfitness of our car and its consequent injuries, a situation
which others, differently equipped, would not experience.
I suppose the metamorphosis has come little by little all across our
wide spirit-awakening country, but I feel as though I had acquired
from the great open West a more direct outlook, a simpler, less
encumbered view of life. You can’t come in contact with people
anywhere, without unconsciously absorbing a few of their habits, a
tinge of their point of view, and in even a short while you find you
have sloughed off the skin of Eastern hidebound dependence upon
ease and luxury, and that hitherto indispensable details dwindle—at
least temporarily—to unimportance.
CHAPTER XXXI
TO THOSE WHO THINK OF FOLLOWING IN
OUR TIRE TRACKS
For the benefit of those who are planning such a trip and in
answer to the many questions that have been asked us since our
return, we have compiled the following pages:
The subject of car equipment, driving suggestions, garage and
road notes, I have left to E. M., who has written a part of this
chapter.
At the end of the book is a small outline map of the United States
and the route we took marked on it with divisions, each indicating a
day’s run. On separate pages are enlarged, detailed diagrams of
these divisions, drawn to uniform scale, giving general road surfaces,
points of historical or topographical interest along the road, and
thumbnail outlines that suggest the types and relative sizes of the
hotels they represent. Each little symbol means a modernly, even a
luxuriously equipped house; good food, good rooms and private
baths. The mileage between all these best hotels is clearly indicated,
so that a tourist can plan the distance he likes to run at a glance.
East of the Mississippi there are plenty of high-class hotels, and
although fine ones are building in every state of our country, in
many sections of the West those dependent upon luxuries will still
have to go occasionally long distances a day to get them.
From New York to San Francisco, by way of the Rocky Mountains
and Los Angeles, is about 4,250 miles; which divides itself into about
four weeks’ straight running, including the side trips to the Grand
Canyon, to San Diego and Monterey, but not including extra days to
stop over. To make it in less would be pretty strenuous, but perfectly
feasible. Allowing no time out for sightseeing, accidents or weather
delays, we arrived in San Francisco in four weeks’ running time,
including the run to San Diego (two days), but we skipped a stretch
of Arizona and Southeastern California, a distance that would have
taken about three days, which would have made our own entire
distance time twenty-nine days.
Some days we drove thirteen or fourteen hours, others we drove
only three or four. We never ran on schedule, but went on further or
stayed where we were as we happened to feel like it, excepting, of
course, our one breakdown and the two times we were held over by
rain. When roads were good and the country deserted, we went
fast, but the highest the speedometer ever went for any length of
time in the most uninhabited stretches was fifty miles an hour. At
others it fell to six! For long, long distances, on account of the speed
laws or road surfaces, we traveled at eighteen to twenty. Between
thirty-five and forty is the car’s easiest pace where surface and
traffic conditions allow. East of Omaha we were never many hours a
day on the road. Between Omaha and Cheyenne, and again between
Albuquerque and Winslow, finding no stopping places that tempted,
we drove on very long and far.
In the matter of what to carry: New tires, of course. For any but a
very heavy car two spare shoes are plenty. Tubes you can buy
anywhere. I only had five punctures all the way—and no blow-out.
More than two extra shoes would be a hindrance because of their
weight. A small shovel is sometimes convenient but not necessary
east of New Mexico, and with a high car not necessary at all. African
water bags are essential west of Albuquerque, but not before. Fifty
or a hundred feet of thin rope may be very useful if you happen to
strike mud or sand stretches, especially if two cars are making the
trip together. In the way of spare parts, I should suggest a couple of
spark plugs, extra valve and valve spring, fan belt, extra master links
for a chain-drive car. Tire chains with extra heavy cross-pieces for all
wheels are indispensable through the Middle West in case of rain.
And see that the tools that have been “borrowed” from your tool kit
have been replaced. Repairs on the road are aggravating enough,
not to be made more so through lack of tools. Now that people carry
spare rims and almost never seem to put in a new tube and pump it
up on the road, they neglect to carry a pump and a spare tube, but
if you should have three flat tires in one day, you will appreciate a
spare tube and an old-fashioned tire pump that works!
I carried thirty-five gallons of gasoline in my tank, which gave me
a radius of three hundred and fifty miles on a tank full, with which I
was never in any danger of running short. I should say that a two
hundred-mile radius would be plenty, except across the desert. You
can buy it even there, but at about three or four times the regular
rate. You may go many miles before you come to a hotel, but
gasoline you can buy anywhere. Good shock absorbers all around
will probably save you a broken spring or two. It will pay to look
over your springs after each day’s run and if a leaf is broken, have a
new one put in before attempting to go on.
In the Middle West, automobile associations or highway
commissioners do magnificent work. Roads are splendidly sign
posted, and in the dragged roads districts, the rain no sooner stops
than the big four- and six-horse drags are out. Follow a rainstorm in
a few hours, and you will find every road ahead of you as smooth as
a new-swept floor. Hence for the patient motorist, who can spare the
time, there is always an eventual moment when there are good
roads.
A few of the bad roads of the Southwest are so rocky that you
have literally to clamber over them, but about seventy per cent of
the road across New Mexico and Arizona, in which I include the road
across the Mohave Desert that I covered later, is a fair, and
occasionally fast, natural road. The streams are generally easy to get
through, and at those that are sandy or too deep, the automobile
association keeps teams standing on purpose to see you through.
Don’t try to drive from New York to San Francisco on high gear.
You will often have used “first” by the time you strike the Rocky
Mountains. Don’t, then, subject your bearings to an unnecessary
strain by forcing your motor to labor as it must, if too steep a hill is