CLIMATE RESUMED
I have spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California, and the eternal Spring of San
Francisco. Now if we travel a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal Summer of
Sacramento. One never sees Summer clothing or mosquitoes in San Francisco — but they can be
found in Sacramento. Not always and unvaryingly, but about 143 months out of twelve years,
perhaps. Flowers bloom there, always, you can easily believe — people suffer and sweat, and
swear, morning, noon and night, and wear out their dearest energies fanning themselves. It gets
pretty hot there, but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it hotter. Fort Yuma is probably
the hottest place on earth. The thermometer stays at 120 in the shade there all the time — except
when it relents and — goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so used to the
terrific heat that they are bound to suffer without it. There is a tradition (attributed to John
Phoenix) that a very, very wicked soldier died there, once, and of course he went straight to the
hottest corner of perdition, —, and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets. There is no
doubt about the truth of this statement — there can be no doubt about it — for I have seen
the place where that soldier used to board. With a French lady by the name of O'Flannigan, and
she lives there yet. Sacramento is fiery Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat
strawberries and ice-cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire at eight or nine
o'clock in the morning, and take the cars, and at noon put on your furs and your skates and go
skimming over frozen Donner Lake, seven thousand feet above the valley, among snow banks
fifteen feet deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty crags ten
thousand feet above the level of the sea. There is a transition for you! Where will you find
another like it in the Western hemisphere? And I have swept around snow-walled curves of the
Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, 6000 feet above the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon
the everlasting summer of the Sacramento Valley, with its green fields, its feathery foliage, its
silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted atmosphere, and all infinitely
softened and spiritualized by distance — a rich, dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairy land, made all
the more charming and striking that it was caught through a forbidding gateway of ice and snow
and savage crags and precipices.
