Charles Warner - Our Italy

One thing may be regarded as settled. Whatever the sensibility or the peculiarity of invalidism, the equable climate is exceedingly favorable to the smooth working of the great organic functions of respiration, digestion, and circulation.

It is a pity to give this chapter a medical tone. One need not be an invalid to come here and appreciate the graciousness of the air; the color of the landscape, which is wanting in our Northern clime; the constant procession of flowers the year through; the purple hills stretching into the sea; the hundreds of hamlets, with picturesque homes overgrown with roses and geranium and heliotrope, in the midst of orange orchards and of palms and magnolias, in sight of the snow-peaks of the giant mountain ranges which shut in this land of marvellous beauty.

California is the land of the Pine and the Palm. The tree of the Sierras, native, vigorous, gigantic, and the tree of the Desert, exotic, supple, poetic, both flourish within the nine degrees of latitude. These two, the widely separated lovers of Heine's song, symbolize the capacities of the State, and although the sugar-pine is indigenous, and the date-palm, which will never be more than an ornament in this hospitable soil, was planted by the Franciscan Fathers, who established a chain of missions from San Diego to Monterey over a century ago, they should both be the distinction of one commonwealth, which, in its seven hundred miles of indented sea-coast, can boast the climates of all countries and the products of all zones.

If this State of mountains and valleys were divided by an east and west line, following the general course of the Sierra Madre range, and cutting off the eight lower counties, I suppose there would be conceit enough in either section to maintain that it only is the Paradise of the earth, but both are necessary to make the unique and contradictory California which fascinates and bewilders the traveller. He is told that the inhabitants of San Francisco go away from the draught of the Golden Gate in the summer to get warm, and yet the earliest luscious cherries and apricots which he finds in the far south market of San Diego come from the Northern Santa Clara Valley. The truth would seem to be that in an hour's ride in any part of the State one can change his climate totally at any time of the year, and this not merely by changing his elevation, but by getting in or out of the range of the sea or the desert currents of air which follow the valleys.

To recommend to any one a winter climate is far from the writer's thought. No two persons agree on what is desirable for a winter residence, and the inclination of the same person varies with his state of health. I can only attempt to give some idea of what is called the winter months in Southern California, to which my observations mainly apply. The individual who comes here under the mistaken notion that climate ever does anything more than give nature a better chance, may speedily or more tardily need the service of an undertaker; and the invalid whose powers are responsive to kindly influences may live so long, being unable to get away, that life will be a burden to him. The person in ordinary health will find very little that is hostile to the orderly organic processes. In order to appreciate the winter climate of Southern California one should stay here the year through, and select the days that suit his idea of winter from any of the months. From the fact that the greatest humidity is in the summer and the least in the winter months, he may wear an overcoat in July in a temperature, according to the thermometer, which in January would render the overcoat unnecessary. It is dampness that causes both cold and heat to be most felt. The lowest temperatures, in Southern California generally, are caused only by the extreme dryness of the air; in the long nights of December and January there is a more rapid and longer continued radiation of heat. It must be a dry and clear night that will send the temperature down to thirty-four degrees. But the effect of the sun upon this air is instantaneous, and the cold morning is followed at once by a warm forenoon; the difference between the average heat of July and the average cold of January, measured by the thermometer, is not great in the valleys, foot-hills, and on the coast. Five points give this result of average for January and July respectively: Santa Barbara, 52°, 66°; San Bernardino, 51°, 70°; Pomona, 52°, 68°; Los Angeles, 52°, 67°; San Diego, 53°, 66°. The day in the winter months is warmer in the interior and the nights are cooler than on the coast, as shown by the following figures for January: 7 a.m., Los Angeles, 46.5°; San Diego, 47.5°; 3 p.m., Los Angeles, 65.2°; San Diego, 60.9°. In the summer the difference is greater. In June I saw the thermometer reach 103° in Los Angeles when it was only 79° in San Diego. But I have seen the weather unendurable in New York with a temperature of 85°, while this dry heat of 103° was not oppressive. The extraordinary equanimity of the coast climate (certainly the driest marine climate in my experience) will be evident from the average mean for each month, from records of sixteen years, ending in 1877, taken at San Diego, giving each month in order, beginning with January: 53.5°, 54.7°, 56.0°, 58.2°, 60.2°, 64.6°, 67.1°, 69.0°, 66.7°, 62.9°, 58.1°, 56.0°. In the year 1877 the mean temperature at 3 p.m. at San Diego was as follows, beginning with January: 60.9°, 57.7°, 62.4°, 63.3°, 66.3°, 68.5°, 69.6°, 69.6°, 69.5°, 69.6°, 64.4°, 60.5°. For the four months of July, August, September, and October there was hardly a shade of difference at 3 p.m. The striking fact in all the records I have seen is that the difference of temperature in the daytime between summer and winter is very small, the great difference being from midnight to just before sunrise, and this latter difference is greater inland than on the coast. There are, of course, frost and ice in the mountains, but the frost that comes occasionally in the low inland valleys is of very brief duration in the morning hour, and rarely continues long enough to have a serious effect upon vegetation.

In considering the matter of temperature, the rule for vegetation and for invalids will not be the same. A spot in which delicate flowers in Southern California bloom the year round may be too cool for many invalids. It must not be forgotten that the general temperature here is lower than that to which most Eastern people are accustomed. They are used to living all winter in overheated houses, and to protracted heated terms rendered worse by humidity in the summer. The dry, low temperature of the California winter, notwithstanding its perpetual sunshine, may seem, therefore, wanting to them in direct warmth. It may take a year or two to acclimate them to this more equable and more refreshing temperature.

Neither on the coast nor in the foot-hills will the invalid find the climate of the Riviera or of Tangier—not the tramontane wind of the former, nor the absolutely genial but somewhat enervating climate of the latter. But it must be borne in mind that in this, our Mediterranean, the seeker for health or pleasure can find almost any climate (except the very cold or the very hot), down to the minutest subdivision. He may try the dry marine climate of the coast, or the temperature of the fruit lands and gardens from San Bernardino to Los Angeles, or he may climb to any altitude that suits him in the Sierra Madre or the San Jacinto ranges. The difference may be all-important to him between a valley and a mesa which is not a hundred feet higher; nay, between a valley and the slope of a foot-hill, with a shifting of not more than fifty feet elevation, the change may be as marked for him as it is for the most sensitive young fruit-tree. It is undeniable, notwithstanding these encouraging "averages," that cold snaps, though rare, do come occasionally, just as in summer there will occur one or two or three continued days of intense heat. And in the summer in some localities—it happened in June, 1890, in the Santiago hills in Orange County—the desert sirocco, blowing over the Colorado furnace, makes life just about unendurable for days at a time. Yet with this dry heat sunstroke is never experienced, and the diseases of the bowels usually accompanying hot weather elsewhere are unknown. The experienced traveller who encounters unpleasant weather, heat that he does not expect, cold that he did not provide for, or dust that deprives him of his last atom of good-humor, and is told that it is "exceptional," knows exactly what that word means. He is familiar with the "exceptional" the world over, and he feels a sort of compassion for the inhabitants who have not yet learned the adage, "Good wine needs no bush." Even those who have bought more land than they can pay for can afford to tell the truth.