Our Italy

Charles Dudley Warner

Our Italy

CHAPTER I

HOW OUR ITALY IS MADE

The traveller who descends into Italy by an Alpine pass never forgets the surprise and delight of the transition. In an hour he is whirled down the slopes from the region of eternal snow to the verdure of spring or the ripeness of summer. Suddenly—it may be at a turn in the road—winter is left behind; the plains of Lombardy are in view; the Lake of Como or Maggiore gleams below; there is a tree; there is an orchard; there is a garden; there is a villa overrun with vines; the singing of birds is heard; the air is gracious; the slopes are terraced, and covered with vineyards; great sheets of silver sheen in the landscape mark the growth of the olive; the dark green orchards of oranges and lemons are starred with gold; the lusty fig, always a temptation as of old, leans invitingly over the stone wall; everywhere are bloom and color under the blue sky; there are shrines by the way-side, chapels on the hill; one hears the melodious bells, the call of the vine-dressers, the laughter of girls.

The contrast is as great from the Indians of the Mojave Desert, two types of which are here given, to the vine-dressers of the Santa Ana Valley.

Italy is the land of the imagination, but the sensation on first beholding it from the northern heights, aside from its associations of romance and poetry, can be repeated in our own land by whoever will cross the burning desert of Colorado, or the savage wastes of the Mojave wilderness of stone and sage-brush, and come suddenly, as he must come by train, into the bloom of Southern California. Let us study a little the physical conditions.

The bay of San Diego is about three hundred miles east of San Francisco. The coast line runs south-east, but at Point Conception it turns sharply east, and then curves south-easterly about two hundred and fifty miles to the Mexican coast boundary, the extreme south-west limits of the United States, a few miles below San Diego. This coast, defined by these two limits, has a southern exposure on the sunniest of oceans. Off this coast, south of Point Conception, lies a chain of islands, curving in position in conformity with the shore, at a distance of twenty to seventy miles from the main-land. These islands are San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, Anacapa, Santa Barbara, San Nicolas, Santa Catalina, San Clemente, and Los Coronados, which lie in Mexican waters. Between this chain of islands and the main-land is Santa Barbara Channel, flowing northward. The great ocean current from the north flows past Point Conception like a mill-race, and makes a suction, or a sort of eddy. It approaches nearer the coast in Lower California, where the return current, which is much warmer, flows northward and westward along the curving shore. The Santa Barbara Channel, which may be called an arm of the Pacific, flows by many a bold point and lovely bay, like those of San Pedro, Redondo, and Santa Monica; but it has no secure harbor, except the magnificent and unique bay of San Diego.

The southern and western boundary of Southern California is this mild Pacific sea, studded with rocky and picturesque islands. The northern boundary of this region is ranges of lofty mountains, from five thousand to eleven thousand feet in height, some of them always snow-clad, which run eastward from Point Conception nearly to the Colorado Desert. They are parts of the Sierra Nevada range, but they take various names, Santa Ynes, San Gabriel, San Bernardino, and they are spoken of all together as the Sierra Madre. In the San Gabriel group, "Old Baldy" lifts its snow-peak over nine thousand feet, while the San Bernardino "Grayback" rises over eleven thousand feet above the sea. Southward of this, running down into San Diego County, is the San Jacinto range, also snow-clad; and eastward the land falls rapidly away into the Salt Desert of the Colorado, in which is a depression about three hundred feet below the Pacific.

The Point Arguilles, which is above Point Conception, by the aid of the outlying islands, deflects the cold current from the north off the coast of Southern California, and the mountain ranges from Point Conception east divide the State of California into two climatic regions, the southern having more warmth, less rain and fog, milder winds, and less variation of daily temperature than the climate of Central California to the north.1 Other striking climatic conditions are produced by the daily interaction of the Pacific Ocean and the Colorado Desert, infinitely diversified in minor particulars by the exceedingly broken character of the region—a jumble of bare mountains, fruitful foot-hills, and rich valleys. It would be only from a balloon that one could get an adequate idea of this strange land.

The United States has here, then, a unique corner of the earth, without its like in its own vast territory, and unparalleled, so far as I know, in the world. Shut off from sympathy with external conditions by the giant mountain ranges and the desert wastes, it has its own climate unaffected by cosmic changes. Except a tidal wave from Japan, nothing would seem to be able to affect or disturb it. The whole of Italy feels more or less the climatic variations of the rest of Europe. All our Atlantic coast, all our interior basin from Texas to Manitoba, is in climatic sympathy. Here is a region larger than New England which manufactures its own weather and refuses to import any other.

With considerable varieties of temperature according to elevation or protection from the ocean breeze, its climate is nearly, on the whole, as agreeable as that of the Hawaiian Islands, though pitched in a lower key, and with greater variations between day and night. The key to its peculiarity, aside from its southern exposure, is the Colorado Desert. That desert, waterless and treeless, is cool at night and intolerably hot in the daytime, sending up a vast column of hot air, which cannot escape eastward, for Arizona manufactures a like column. It flows high above the mountains westward till it strikes the Pacific and parts with its heat, creating an immense vacuum which is filled by the air from the coast flowing up the slope and over the range, and plunging down 6000 feet into the desert. "It is easy to understand," says Mr. Van Dyke, making his observations from the summit of the Cuyamaca, in San Diego County, 6500 feet above the sea-level, "how land thus rising a mile or more in fifty or sixty miles, rising away from the coast, and falling off abruptly a mile deep into the driest and hottest of American deserts, could have a great variety of climates.... Only ten miles away on the east the summers are the hottest, and only sixty miles on the west the coolest known in the United States (except on this coast), and between them is every combination that mountains and valleys can produce. And it is easy to see whence comes the sea-breeze, the glory of the California summer. It is passing us here, a gentle breeze of six or eight miles an hour. It is flowing over this great ridge directly into the basin of the Colorado Desert, 6000 feet deep, where the temperature is probably 120°, and perhaps higher. For many leagues each side of us this current is thus flowing at the same speed, and is probably half a mile or more in depth. About sundown, when the air on the desert cools and descends, the current will change and come the other way, and flood these western slopes with an air as pure as that of the Sahara and nearly as dry.

"The air, heated on the western slopes by the sea, would by rising produce considerable suction, which could be filled only from the sea, but that alone would not make the sea-breeze as dry as it is. The principal suction is caused by the rising of heated air from the great desert.... On the top of old Grayback (in San Bernardino) one can feel it [this breeze] setting westward, while in the cañons, 6000 feet below, it is blowing eastward.... All over Southern California the conditions of this breeze are about the same, the great Mojave Desert and the valley of the San Joaquin above operating in the same way, assisted by interior plains and slopes. Hence these deserts, that at first seem to be a disadvantage to the land, are the great conditions of its climate, and are of far more value than if they were like the prairies of Illinois. Fortunately they will remain deserts forever. Some parts will in time be reclaimed by the waters of the Colorado River, but wet spots of a few hundred thousand acres would be too trifling to affect general results, for millions of acres of burning desert would forever defy all attempts at irrigation or settlement."

This desert-born breeze explains a seeming anomaly in regard to the humidity of this coast. I have noticed on the sea-shore that salt does not become damp on the table, that the Portuguese fishermen on Point Loma are drying their fish on the shore, and that while the hydrometer gives a humidity as high as seventy-four, and higher at times, and fog may prevail for three or four days continuously, the fog is rather "dry," and the general impression is that of a dry instead of the damp and chilling atmosphere such as exists in foggy times on the Atlantic coast.

"From the study of the origin of this breeze we see," says Mr. Van Dyke, "why it is that a wind coming from the broad Pacific should be drier than the dry land-breezes of the Atlantic States, causing no damp walls, swelling doors, or rusting guns, and even on the coast drying up, without salt or soda, meat cut in strips an inch thick and fish much thicker."

At times on the coast the air contains plenty of moisture, but with the rising of this breeze the moisture decreases instead of increases. It should be said also that this constantly returning current of air is always pure, coming in contact nowhere with marshy or malarious influences nor any agency injurious to health. Its character causes the whole coast from Santa Barbara to San Diego to be an agreeable place of residence or resort summer and winter, while its daily inflowing tempers the heat of the far inland valleys to a delightful atmosphere in the shade even in midsummer, while cool nights are everywhere the rule. The greatest surprise of the traveller is that a region which is in perpetual bloom and fruitage, where semi-tropical fruits mature in perfection, and the most delicate flowers dazzle the eye with color the winter through, should have on the whole a low temperature, a climate never enervating, and one requiring a dress of woollen in every month.

CHAPTER II

OUR CLIMATIC AND COMMERCIAL MEDITERRANEAN

Winter as we understand it east of the Rockies does not exist. I scarcely know how to divide the seasons. There are at most but three. Spring may be said to begin with December and end in April; summer, with May (whose days, however, are often cooler than those of January), and end with September; while October and November are a mild autumn, when nature takes a partial rest, and the leaves of the deciduous trees are gone. But how shall we classify a climate in which the strawberry (none yet in my experience equal to the Eastern berry) may be eaten in every month of the year, and ripe figs may be picked from July to March? What shall I say of a frost (an affair of only an hour just before sunrise) which is hardly anywhere severe enough to disturb the delicate heliotrope, and even in the deepest valleys where it may chill the orange, will respect the bloom of that fruit on contiguous ground fifty or a hundred feet higher? We boast about many things in the United States, about our blizzards and our cyclones, our inundations and our areas of low pressure, our hottest and our coldest places in the world, but what can we say for this little corner which is practically frostless, and yet never had a sunstroke, knows nothing of thunder-storms and lightning, never experienced a cyclone, which is so warm that the year round one is tempted to live out-of-doors, and so cold that woollen garments are never uncomfortable? Nature here, in this protected and petted area, has the knack of being genial without being enervating, of being stimulating without "bracing" a person into the tomb. I think it conducive to equanimity of spirit and to longevity to sit in an orange grove and eat the fruit and inhale the fragrance of it while gazing upon a snow-mountain.

This southward-facing portion of California is irrigated by many streams of pure water rapidly falling from the mountains to the sea. The more important are the Santa Clara, the Los Angeles and San Gabriel, the Santa Ana, the Santa Margarita, the San Luis Rey, the San Bernardo, the San Diego, and, on the Mexican border, the Tia Juana. Many of them go dry or flow underground in the summer months (or, as the Californians say, the bed of the river gets on top), but most of them can be used for artificial irrigation. In the lowlands water is sufficiently near the surface to moisten the soil, which is broken and cultivated; in most regions good wells are reached at a small depth, in others artesian-wells spout up abundance of water, and considerable portions of the regions best known for fruit are watered by irrigating ditches and pipes supplied by ample reservoirs in the mountains. From natural rainfall and the sea moisture the mesas and hills, which look arid before ploughing, produce large crops of grain when cultivated after the annual rains, without artificial watering.

Southern California has been slowly understood even by its occupants, who have wearied the world with boasting of its productiveness. Originally it was a vast cattle and sheep ranch. It was supposed that the land was worthless except for grazing. Held in princely ranches of twenty, fifty, one hundred thousand acres, in some cases areas larger than German principalities, tens of thousands of cattle roamed along the watercourses and over the mesas, vast flocks of sheep cropped close the grass and trod the soil into hard-pan. The owners exchanged cattle and sheep for corn, grain, and garden vegetables; they had no faith that they could grow cereals, and it was too much trouble to procure water for a garden or a fruit orchard. It was the firm belief that most of the rolling mesa land was unfit for cultivation, and that neither forest nor fruit trees would grow without irrigation. Between Los Angeles and Redondo Beach is a ranch of 35,000 acres. Seventeen years ago it was owned by a Scotchman, who used the whole of it as a sheep ranch. In selling it to the present owner he warned him not to waste time by attempting to farm it; he himself raised no fruit or vegetables, planted no trees, and bought all his corn, wheat, and barley. The purchaser, however, began to experiment. He planted trees and set out orchards which grew, and in a couple of years he wrote to the former owner that he had 8000 acres in fine wheat. To say it in a word, there is scarcely an acre of the tract which is not highly productive in barley, wheat, corn, potatoes, while considerable parts of it are especially adapted to the English walnut and to the citrus fruits.

On this route to the sea the road is lined with gardens. Nothing could be more unpromising in appearance than this soil before it is ploughed and pulverized by the cultivator. It looks like a barren waste. We passed a tract that was offered three years ago for twelve dollars an acre. Some of it now is rented to Chinamen at thirty dollars an acre; and I saw one field of two acres off which a Chinaman has sold in one season $750 worth of cabbages.

The truth is that almost all the land is wonderfully productive if intelligently handled. The low ground has water so near the surface that the pulverized soil will draw up sufficient moisture for the crops; the mesa, if sown and cultivated after the annual rains, matures grain and corn, and sustains vines and fruit-trees. It is singular that the first settlers should never have discovered this productiveness. When it became apparent—that is, productiveness without artificial watering—there spread abroad a notion that irrigation generally was not needed. We shall have occasion to speak of this more in detail, and I will now only say, on good authority, that while cultivation, not to keep down the weeds only, but to keep the soil stirred and prevent its baking, is the prime necessity for almost all land in Southern California, there are portions where irrigation is always necessary, and there is no spot where the yield of fruit or grain will not be quadrupled by judicious irrigation. There are places where irrigation is excessive and harmful both to the quality and quantity of oranges and grapes.

The history of the extension of cultivation in the last twenty and especially in the past ten years from the foot-hills of the Sierra Madre in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties southward to San Diego is very curious. Experiments were timidly tried. Every acre of sand and sage-bush reclaimed southward was supposed to be the last capable of profitable farming or fruit-growing. It is unsafe now to say of any land that has not been tried that it is not good. In every valley and on every hill-side, on the mesas and in the sunny nooks in the mountains, nearly anything will grow, and the application of water produces marvellous results. From San Bernardino and Redlands, Riverside, Pomona, Ontario, Santa Anita, San Gabriel, Pasadena, all the way to Los Angeles, is almost a continuous fruit garden, the green areas only emphasized by wastes yet unreclaimed; a land of charming cottages, thriving towns, hospitable to the fruit of every clime; a land of perpetual sun and ever-flowing breeze, looked down on by purple mountain ranges tipped here and there with enduring snow. And what is in progress here will be seen before long in almost every part of this wonderful land, for conditions of soil and climate are essentially everywhere the same, and capital is finding out how to store in and bring from the fastnesses of the mountains rivers of clear water taken at such elevations that the whole arable surface can be irrigated. The development of the country has only just begun.

If the reader will look upon the map of California he will see that the eight counties that form Southern California—San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Kern, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Orange, and San Diego—appear very mountainous. He will also notice that the eastern slopes of San Bernardino and San Diego are deserts. But this is an immense area. San Diego County alone is as large as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined, and the amount of arable land in the valleys, on the foot-hills, on the rolling mesas, is enormous, and capable of sustaining a dense population, for its fertility and its yield to the acre under cultivation are incomparable. The reader will also notice another thing. With the railroads now built and certain to be built through all this diversified region, round from the Santa Barbara Mountains to the San Bernardino, the San Jacinto, and down to Cuyamaca, a ride of an hour or two hours brings one to some point on the 250 miles of sea-coast—a sea-coast genial, inviting in winter and summer, never harsh, and rarely tempestuous like the Atlantic shore.

Here is our Mediterranean! Here is our Italy! It is a Mediterranean without marshes and without malaria, and it does not at all resemble the Mexican Gulf, which we have sometimes tried to fancy was like the classic sea that laves Africa and Europe. Nor is this region Italian in appearance, though now and then some bay with its purple hills running to the blue sea, its surrounding mesas and cañons blooming in semi-tropical luxuriance, some conjunction of shore and mountain, some golden color, some white light and sharply defined shadows, some refinement of lines, some poetic tints in violet and ashy ranges, some ultramarine in the sea, or delicate blue in the sky, will remind the traveller of more than one place of beauty in Southern Italy and Sicily. It is a Mediterranean with a more equable climate, warmer winters and cooler summers, than the North Mediterranean shore can offer; it is an Italy whose mountains and valleys give almost every variety of elevation and temperature.

But it is our commercial Mediterranean. The time is not distant when this corner of the United States will produce in abundance, and year after year without failure, all the fruits and nuts which for a thousand years the civilized world of Europe has looked to the Mediterranean to supply. We shall not need any more to send over the Atlantic for raisins, English walnuts, almonds, figs, olives, prunes, oranges, lemons, limes, and a variety of other things which we know commercially as Mediterranean products. We have all this luxury and wealth at our doors, within our limits. The orange and the lemon we shall still bring from many places; the date and the pineapple and the banana will never grow here except as illustrations of the climate, but it is difficult to name any fruit of the temperate and semi-tropic zones that Southern California cannot be relied on to produce, from the guava to the peach.

It will need further experiment to determine what are the more profitable products of this soil, and it will take longer experience to cultivate them and send them to market in perfection. The pomegranate and the apple thrive side by side, but the apple is not good here unless it is grown at an elevation where frost is certain and occasional snow may be expected. There is no longer any doubt about the peach, the nectarine, the pear, the grape, the orange, the lemon, the apricot, and so on; but I believe that the greatest profit will be in the products that cannot be grown elsewhere in the United States—the products to which we have long given the name of Mediterranean—the olive, the fig, the raisin, the hard and soft shell almond, and the walnut. The orange will of course be a staple, and constantly improve its reputation as better varieties are raised, and the right amount of irrigation to produce the finest and sweetest is ascertained.

It is still a wonder that a land in which there was no indigenous product of value, or to which cultivation could give value, should be so hospitable to every sort of tree, shrub, root, grain, and flower that can be brought here from any zone and temperature, and that many of these foreigners to the soil grow here with a vigor and productiveness surpassing those in their native land. This bewildering adaptability has misled many into unprofitable experiments, and the very rapidity of growth has been a disadvantage. The land has been advertised by its monstrous vegetable productions, which are not fit to eat, and but testify to the fertility of the soil; and the reputation of its fruits, both deciduous and citrus, has suffered by specimens sent to Eastern markets whose sole recommendation was size. Even in the vineyards and orange orchards quality has been sacrificed to quantity. Nature here responds generously to every encouragement, but it cannot be forced without taking its revenge in the return of inferior quality. It is just as true of Southern California as of any other land, that hard work and sagacity and experience are necessary to successful horticulture and agriculture, but it is undeniably true that the same amount of well-directed industry upon a much smaller area of land will produce more return than in almost any other section of the United States. Sensible people do not any longer pay much attention to those tempting little arithmetical sums by which it is demonstrated that paying so much for ten acres of barren land, and so much for planting it with vines or oranges, the income in three years will be a competence to the investor and his family. People do not spend much time now in gaping over abnormal vegetables, or trying to convince themselves that wines of every known variety and flavor can be produced within the limits of one flat and well-watered field. Few now expect to make a fortune by cutting arid land up into twenty-feet lots, but notwithstanding the extravagance of recent speculation, the value of arable land has steadily appreciated, and is not likely to recede, for the return from it, either in fruits, vegetables, or grain, is demonstrated to be beyond the experience of farming elsewhere.

Land cannot be called dear at one hundred or one thousand dollars an acre if the annual return from it is fifty or five hundred dollars. The climate is most agreeable the year through. There are no unpleasant months, and few unpleasant days. The eucalyptus grows so fast that the trimmings from the trees of a small grove or highway avenue will in four or five years furnish a family with its firewood. The strong, fattening alfalfa gives three, four, five, and even six harvests a year. Nature needs little rest, and, with the encouragement of water and fertilizers, apparently none. But all this prodigality and easiness of life detracts a little from ambition. The lesson has been slowly learned, but it is now pretty well conned, that hard work is as necessary here as elsewhere to thrift and independence. The difference between this and many other parts of our land is that nature seems to work with a man, and not against him.