Coast to Coast (23 page)

But it was all done, and almost all of it within the Academy buildings. Only the big castings and the main base of the instrument were made outside (by a shipbuilding company). After four years of work the planetarium was complete, and it was in many ways superior to the Zeiss model. The San Francisco instrument, for example, can work itself entirely automatically if the need arises. A tape recording will give the accompanying lecture; an electric device will dim the house lights, turn on the stars, move the planets and usher in the dawn; and finally the tape recorder will say politely to its audience: “Thanks, come again.” The Germans used copper foil in which to punch the holes that
represented stars, but the San Franciscans thought of a better substance; they coated glass with a very thin layer of aluminium, and managed to make the stars look much more realistic. The German moon was simply a white disk; the San Franciscans project an actual photograph of the moon on to the dome. Thus by a combination of inspired makeshift and liberal knowledge they achieved their object, and a marvellous instrument it is.

There is a flavour to this cultivated avidity that Englishmen sometimes find jarring, especially if they like their learning to be easy going and their culture inclining slightly to the dilettantish. San Franciscans’ libraries are apt to be very perfect in their condition and composition, very conscious of distinction and completeness, and the thought of educated San Franciscans strikes some visitors as a little intolerant of stray ends and loose components, inconsistencies and improbabilities. But San Francisco is scarcely a century old. Its culture is young, and its bland sophistication only a recent acquisition. Another half-century, and if it is still there it will be the queenliest of cities, as wise as any Athens, as beautiful as any Paris, as instinct with unconcious assurance as St. James’s Street on a summer morning, with the sentries moving grandly outside the Palace, and the calm men in bowler hats strolling down to a long lunch.

T
he geographical position of the city is delectable. On one side is the Pacific, with a gentle range of hills running along its shore; on the other a lush and friendly plain leads away to the Sierra Nevada, one of the noblest mountain ranges in the world. The Sierra is a playground for San Francisco, for it is not far away by car, and it contains a multitude of wonderful things. There is Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the United States, a stately mountain always flecked with snow, overlooking the dusty expanses of eastern California and Nevada: from its summit, 14,495 feet high, you can all but see Death Valley, 280 feet below sea level, the lowest and hottest place on the American continent. There are splendid forests in the Sierra, some of them given added magnificence by the presence of the Giant Sequoia, greatest of trees. There are innumerable limpid lakes, high among the mountains, and many savage and inaccessible canyons.

The spirit in which this marvellous country is approached is as characteristic of cultivated San Francisco as the story of the planetraium.
Conscious that it could all too easily be spoilt, San Franciscans defend its scenery and its flavour with academic resolution, easily rationalizing their motives in well-written treatises, setting up efficient and prosperous organizations to resist change, just as in other matters they will accept innovations with eager but tabulated appetite.

My wife and I spent some days with a San Francisco family on the shore of Echo Lake, one of the smaller but easily accessible lakes of the Sierra. They had a chalet there, and we lived a delightful open-air existence, spilling out of the house into tents erected on the bare rock around it, lounging on the balcony in the sunshine, walking in the wilderness country that encloses the lake, or scrambling up the high crags that overlook it. A number of San Franciscan families have such small houses on the lake, and they have taken great pains to preserve its sense of remoteness and isolation. There is, for example, no road around the lake; to reach the houses at its upper end you must either walk through the pine trees along its banks, or take a motor-boat. There are no telephones, either, and messages must be left for collection at the landing-stage. At the southern extremity of the lake there is a pleasant clutter of buildings and outhouses: a grocery store, a post office, boat repairers and handymen’s huts; and beside them, especially on a Friday evening, there is much cheerful bustle when the husbands come out from the city to join their families; big cars disgorge their comfortable drivers, in sports shirts and holiday hats, and there is a whirring and a screaming of motor-boat engines, and a plethora of welcoming daughters, and a splashing of spray and hoisting of suit-cases. Elsewhere around the lake all is sylvan calm; and at night, when there is only silence and the twinkling of a few scattered lights, you might well be a hundred miles from a road, and a thousand from the Golden Gate.

Many San Francisco businessmen send their families to some such place as this for the whole of the summer, driving out themselves for week-ends. Our hosts were fairly characteristic, in this respect, of well-to-do San Franciscans. The family ran three cars: one for the husband, one for the wife, and one (a battered old shooting-brake) for general family purposes. This made visits to Echo Lake very simple. Mother and daughter Sue (a glamorous and nylonned fourteen) could set up home there for the entire summer holiday; the elder son, reaching that age of Americanism when social activity assumes an excruciating importance, could use one car to make his frequent journeys between the lake and the city; father could use the other to escape, each Friday, from the compulsions of accountancy. No wonder this handsome family, even in the autumn, looked bronzed and healthily windswept.

The oldest and most distinguished of the societies devoted to the preservation of the High Sierra is the Sierra Club of San Francisco. It was founded in 1892 under the inspiration of John Muir, the naturalist. Muir was introduced to the Sierra Nevada by his trade: he was then working as a sheep-herder, and he took his flocks to graze in the indescribably beautiful Tuolumne Meadows, near the Yosemite Valley. He was seized with a desire to protect this high-seclusion—as he put it, “to do something for wildness”; and so the club was formed. It has been immensely influential. It was largely because of the efforts of the Sierra Club that the Yosemite Valley, the most spectacular of the Sierra Canyons, was preserved as a national park. Many mountain trails were established, and many mountain huts built, opening the Sierra to an altogether new class of wanderer. The club has helped to preserve forests, and to restock fishless waters. It has contributed to all kinds of exploration and scientific study in the Sierra. Many of the most forbidding peaks on the continent have been climbed by its members, and many of the lesser-known high regions have been mapped by its cartographers. During the war Sierra Club mountaineers played a crucial part in the designing of American mountain equipment and the training of mountain divisions. (The names of these mountaineers are instructive; they were Raffi Bedayn, Dave Brower, Chester Errett, Charles Hanks, Milton Hildebrand, Solon Lindsey, Richard Leonard, Phil von Lubken, Einar Nilsson, Rolf Pundt, Jack Riegelhuth and Bestor Robinson.)

All this is done with a fine professional efficiency; but there still hangs about some of the club’s activities a gentle fragrance of the 1900’s, just as, on the murals that decorate San Francisco’s celebrated Bohemian Club, members are depicted in plus fours and cloth caps. Since 1901 the Sierra Club has organized Annual Outings into the mountains. A member wrote of the first outing: “The trip was made interesting by the obstacles to be surmounted, and it was a sight to see dignified college professors, wily limbs of the law, deft doctors, and reverend clergymen join gleefully in rolling rocks, lifting logs, and shovelling snow to make way for the commissary.” Nowadays the obstacles to be surmounted are carefully graded. You may choose, for example, if you are young and indigent, to go on a Knapsack Trip, carrying your own food on your back, walking, and pitching camp yourself. Or you may prefer a Burro Trip; donkeys will then carry your goods for you, and as a result your wanderings are more closely confined to trails. Those who are both well-heeled and energetic can do a High Trip, lavishly attended by people to do the chores, but moving camp from time to
time during a four-week trip; or a Saddle Trip, in which horses carry both you and your possessions, and minions do all the cooking and packing (the minions are sometimes the sons of members, earning their way; my host’s son had spent the previous summer acting as boatman on the swift currents of the Colorado River). Finally, if you are a
very
dignified professor, or an
excessively
reverend clergyman, you can stay at Base Camp, living at a central headquarters staffed with cooks and “activity leaders”, and thence going mildly out, day by day, into the wilderness.

There is an ominous sound to one phrase in the regulations for the Saddle Trips. Each member is allowed 50 pounds of dunnage; but, say the regulations, “riders able to play musical instruments may have them transported in addition”. What desperate prospects are opened up by this phrase! with the elderly attorney strumming at his guitar and clearing his wizened throat, before embarking upon some out-door epic or comic novelty; with the rest of the party preparing their smiles, or clapping their thighs; and no one more enthusiastic than the young lawyer from the same office, and no one more impatient than some other anxious performer, already taking advantage of the shadow of the trees to tighten the strings of his ukelele. It is all part of the flavour of the Sierra Club, and of San Francisco itself; and when encountered, it is found to be blessed with a pleasant simplicity. All the same, it is at once amusing and alarming to think of those eminent divines tramping the Sierra and singing, in a cracked but determined unison:

Here, I think, the Sierra Club parts company with those scholarly and respectable English societies graced by the bearded membership of my grandfather: for it is difficult to imagine the vicar of Nether Broughton or old Dr. Crithersby contributing to such a sing-song as they stooped to examine the flora of the Shropshire hills, or progressed towards some little-known Saxon lintel.

But there is among most Americans a predilection for the communal, a survival, no doubt, from emigrant and pioneer days; and the
Sierra Club is no exception. Somewhere among the remarkable technical achievements‚ the lavish publications, the distinguished membership, there is a faint but persistent hint of the Youth Hostel. As long ago as 1903 Mount Whitney was climbed by a Sierra Club party numbering 103, a circumstance which would seem to detract from the mystic satisfaction of reaching the summit; and two years later sixty-one people stood on the top of Mount Rainier—“the largest recorded party,” says the club convincingly, “to make the climb in any one day.” The Sierra Club has an eminent mountaineering record, and one of its early supporters was Edward Whymper of the Matterhorn; now something called the Hundred Peaks Award is awarded by the Southern California Chapter’s Desert Peaks Section to members who climb 100 peaks between Tehachapi Pass and the Mexican border. The compelling drive and thirst for success of most Americans does not often march easily with the serenity of the mountains.

Indeed, there can be few places of comparable grandeur so ghastly to visit as the Yosemite Valley on a holiday. From the east a narrow tortuous road leads over the mountains from Leevining, beside the delicious blue expanse of Mono Lake; and along this highway the cars move almost bumper to bumper, with a constant whining of engines, and incessant stopping and goings, so tiring for the nerves that if you so much as slow down to look at a deer in the woods there is a blaring of horns behind you, passed on like some hideous talisman from car to car through the mountains, until far in the distance behind you may be heard a last faint echo of exasperation.

The valley itself is one of the most magnificent places in America: a canyon dominated by rock slabs of enormous size, with waterfalls gushing from the edges of precipices and falling hundreds of feet in slivers and plumes of white. But on a holiday the magic of the scene is totally destroyed. Cars in their hundreds are lined in awesome array in the car parks. Policemen control the traffic, for all the world as if it were the intersection of Park Avenue and 52nd Street. Milling crowds in open shirts and floral frocks buy their picture postcards and send letters home (if you are too lazy to write, you can probably buy one already written for you, full of such phrases as: “Yosemite is one of the major scenic wonders of the nation, and we certainly are glad we motored here through the incredible beauties of the Sierra with the trees looking beautiful in their summer foliage”). The congestion is terrible, the constant unrelenting movement of the tourists wearisome in the extreme, and the predominant atmosphere sticky, jaded, but determined.

This is a characteristic paradox of the west coast: for within sight of these multitudes there are crags and mountain meadows almost unvisited from one decade to the next; and the tasteless crowds of Yosemite often drive on to visit San Francisco, most radiant and sublime of American cities, where the Sierra Club continues its efforts to “do something for wildness”.