University of Virginia Library

MORE CLIMATE

There are other kinds of climate in California — several kinds — and some of them very agreeable. 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've got it — in August and January, just the same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the other. You don't use overcoats and you don't use fans. It is just as pleasant a climate as could be contrived, and is 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 want to — three or four miles away — it don't 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, the most righteous thing you can do will be to go and steal an umbrella. Because you'll need it. Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days in unvarying 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 — there is little use in bothering about that — and if it is summer, it won't rain, and you can not help it. You never see 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 these 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 the red splendors of hell for one little instant. You would give any thing 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 beg for rain — hail — snow — thunder and lightning — anything to break the monotony — you'll take an earthquake, if you can't do any better. And the chances are that you'll get it, too.