Claremont Inn
Claremont, CaliforniaDear friends,
I am trying to decide whether I can ship my typewriter east by express when my trunk goes or whether I just must keep it with me because it is so convenient to have. There have been many times this year when I have had to write business letters of one sort and another and the typewriter has been a boon. This is the week I pack to start, though not the final departure. I go north to see Carmel and the Yosemite and to call on the San Francisco friends. I shall perhaps manage to see a few sights in S.F. which I did not do before because I did not feel like it. I liked S.F. as much as I have not liked Los Angeles. It is queer how we form impressions of cities with quite insufficient reasons, but they sure are definite feelings to which I at any rate stick very firmly, as for instance my dislike of Chicago, persisting ever since 1900. I've not been there many times, but every time it is the same feeling. And Philadelphia which I knew for the first time at about the same period is just delightful - and they both have rotten politics.
Since I wrote you last the weeks have been relativelt [sic] quiet, but with jaunts out from Claremont to various places in southern California. I told you I think about seeing the Bakersfield flowers and about going into the desert to Palm Springs, etc. and to 29 Palms. Since then there have been various additions to my knowledge and my pleasure.
As far as educational institutions go, it has been amazing how little interest I have felt in these under my nose, and I know why - they are not of a scientific slant though there are some exceptions to this. I have happened to fall in with few of the scientific group, and I have let days pass and done nothing about it. I should like to meet the botany man, for he is rather famous, but he is also busy, and I have not thought I should bother him with questions about my little affairs. I may yet ask him what botany to get for Colorado - I just have to have something. He is the newly chosen college dean of the faculty and one of the professors who are "important". I went to the annual meeting of Phi Beta Kappa recently, for the whole of this region. There I met Professor Hilton, zoology, who took his degree at Cornell sometime along in Miss Morgan's period. He exchanged with Prof. Needham some years ago. The Phi Beta Kappa meeting was interesting, a conventional speech, and after that three essays by undergraduates who have won the $50.00 prizes offered in three groups, Philosophy Psychology and Education (essay was by a junior college girl on the contribution of things and places related to rivers in her education, "Books in the Running Brooks"); History, Political Science, etc. with a history of Coventry dressed up in nice style by another junior college girl; Esthetics, Fine Arts, etc. with a boy speaking with great assurance on the principles of esthetics as of 1941, he from U.S.C. They were of course rather long for reading, but it put the emphasis on the essays. I shall be most interested to know if the regional combination in our part of the world is interesting - this meeting seemed very much alive. It was a luncheon meeting, served in one of the big Pomona dormitories.
One week end I went over to see an alumna, Margaret Sanborn, 14, who lives in Redlands in an 8-acre orange grove. It was most delightful since the trees were in full blossom and so fragrant. She runs a gift shop of superior style as well as taking care of her aged mother. Since then she has taken me out for a day in the desert, and we struck a hot one, 97° in Indio in the shade, and any amount higher out in the sun where we were, but to see the extraordinary flowrs we were after we went up some hundreds of feet and struck a breeze, so we ate very comfortably under a little mesquite tree which cast a pale shade, and the flowers were all around us. It was one of the most flowery desert places I have seen. Each desert place is different, and each has its charm, but I realize that I have seen them all at the rich time of the year, and also in an unsually wet year, so the flowers have been fine and lasted a long time. We went through one stretch where it was particularly arid and ghastly hot, which gave me a glimpse of what they might all be like in a few more weeks, though this place did have very few bushes. The way the bushes are spaced so that they look as if set out at respectful distances in a garden is apparently a common plan - it has been true in all the places I have seen. You can walk anywhere among them and see them easily and to advantage.
Another week I made a trip up to Santa Barbara to see the Botanic Garden there and the town in general, the one I have liked best of all I thik, though I am not sure its morals are good! The Garden was just a joy, the things placed in their natural environments, with a desert section, a meadow, a brook valley, a woodland section, and some specials. The five species of Rhus were all together so they could be compared conveniently, also the many, many species of California Lilac. Incidentally I have seen that genus in full blossom ever since the 1st of February - in various places, different elevations, different species. It is just a beauty, the misty blue, or fairy white clusters of blossoms. Of course it is a state favorite.
The last trip has just finished and was one of the best. We left, my friend Grace Berry and her pal, Dr. Humphries, another easterner and myself, of a Tuesday night and went some 40 miles or so at the edge of the evening, reaching a little town with a fair hotel before real dark. This was on the edge of Lake Elsinore, one of the largest lakes in this region. It is higher than ever this year, trees at its edge all with their feet in the water, etc. Next day we went by all rather quiet roads along the back edge of the coast ranges, through very different botanical settings as the miles passed, and we were out of the car picking things quite as much as in it. We came to another mission, one of those farthest from the shore, and one little restored, used even now by the Indians of the district. It was small and interesting, and I hope my pictures will come out well. Like them all it had some old bells in a nice little tower, this time not connected with the church. I tried an interior of the church but there just was no light there and it will be a miracle if it comes out. After a time we found a little wayside place where they fed us simply and we started on, but got the wrong road so took a few extra miles. We came at late afternoon to a small town, Julian, an old gold mining town, some 4,000 feet up and a nice place. The hotel was 70 years old, and they speak of that as we do of 1680 or so. We had a most excellent dinner, and spent all evening diligently finding out what we had picked. The trees around were the elegent Coulter pines, sturdy and stylish, with the biggest cones ever. We picked one huge cone from a low branch and I shall start it to South Hadley this week if it is permitted to transport it across state borders. It may be ten or twelve inches tall, and 8 - 10 thick, with heavy scales and lots of pitch. It is not now open, but will probably open up to show the seeds before it reaches Alma. Also there will be a small branch to show the heavy long needles, and I hope I can later produce a picture of the whole tree. It is the genus I have been hoping to see all year, ever since I saw the cones used for Xmas decorations at Berkeley. Under the trees were the most exquisite of the mariposa lilies, satin bells, creamy white, and so beautifully formed. There were also three clovers, all new to me - nothing is like anything I ever knew - and a tiny thing in fruit called lace -pod, little circular pods up a slender stalk, with little thin places or holes around each tiny pod. In the same general kind of place next day we found the stunning yellow lupine, as elegant, Charlotte, as the yellow gentians in the Swiss grove. The Women's Club in this town has a flower show each week end in May, and of course we saw that. They utilize the basement of a little town hall, a dark place, with a dirt floor, and many of their things are planted right in the floor. They have electric lights so you can see the stuff. Some of the decorative things like pine branches and cones and so on do not have to be renewed, but on Thursdays the women go out and bring in what they can find, shoals of things, Friday forenoon they put them in order, with tags using common names, and then they stay around over the week end. They hve [sic] a good time, and we surely did. The school children were going in the forenoon we left.
Two nights we stayed at Julian, and between them made a dash down into the Borego Desert, another style of desert. To get there we slid down a canyon road for some eight miles, passing one of the little old gold mines which is still working on the way. It was a handsome valley, lots of mountains folding in, and their slopes now very green. They will be brown soon. We came out into the valley of a little stream and for a width of some fifty yards more or less this was bordered by reeds, rushes, rich grasses and little trees with cattle eating the greenness diligently. Abruptly beyond this swale came the desert, no question about it, rising on the side slopes at varying angles and most picturesque. It was interesting to trace the coming of things into flower as we went further and further down. The most stunning plants were the flaming red ocotillo, tall slender withes tipped with vermilion flames made up of hundreds of small flowers, ranging in height from some 6 to perhaps 18 feet, sometimes 25 or more in a cluster. They are gorgeous, but equal to them were the golden desert agaves, as tall as the others, rising from a smallish century plant thing and with the flower cluster perhaps 4 to 5 feet tall at the top of a sturdy spike. Both things really were magnificent. There were of course many others, some whose beauties we saw only when we looked at them with lenses. We went to the place called Borego P.O. and found that section of the desert already brown and mostly dead, with only a short flowering season this year. The Inn where Grace had had some thought of spending the night was closed until October - it was 98.5° but we found a shade under some tamarisk trees and got a meagre lunch from the little store. There was a breeze and we really did not suffer, though I was glad not to stay longer. We went back up the hill to Julian for that second night of analyzing flowers. The last day we were near the base of Mount Palomar after lunch and went up to the new observatory, where the 200" lens is to be. The road up is perfectly graded and wide, ample for the moving of the lens when it is ready - 9 miles of mountain road. The observatory is wonderful, with a glassed-in visitors' gallery provided with a big chart so you know at least where the elevator is that takes up the observors, and where they get into the basket-like object which holds the observer a long distance above the mirror. The dome of this observatory, also of the two others already in use is silvered and shines brightly for miles in the sun. The whole thing is most wonderful. I hope the lens will get up with no mishap. From about five miles down and across the mountain there is another road 14 miles long, not done as yet but passable, and we came down that way. It is by far the loveliest mountain I have seen out here - it looks more like New England mountains and has forests and flowers and birds in multitudes. We came home across another near-desert stretch and had to stop to clutch more flowers as the sun set. After a nice supper at a place we have been before we came oome in the evening some 50 miles, passing one of the huge camps where the search lights were spoting aeroplanes. It was altogether a grand trip.
During the writing of this I have stopped to go to Oratorio St. Paul, Mendelssohn, which I had never heard. It was quite splendid, Pomona students as soloists and chorus. They have a fine music department. I have heard this year the Messiah, the Seven Last Words, and this, as well as one concert by the Men's Glee Club, this last about half and half serious and sportive. The Women's concert came when I was on one of these trips.
Program from now on. Leave this week, May 23, for Carmel, and hope it will not be foggy all the time but it may be. One day in Palo Alto, a week or so in San Francisco, two days with a family connection north of S.F., leave for the Yosemite June 9, five days there, then back here either directly or indirectly to pick up my things and start east. First stop at Los [sic] Vegas to see Boulder Dam if I do not quail before the heat, then the six day trip at three parks, Zion, Bryce, and the north Rim of the Grand Canyon, Salt Lake City, to Colorado thorugh either the Royal Gorge or Moffatt Tunnel, Colorado Springs, Denver, Estes Park (about a week) and then really east getting to South Hadley along July 16 - 20. I may stop a day in Cleveland. The few days here will go to getting reservations, packing, etc.
Addresses. May 23-30. Holiday House, Carmel-by-the-Sea
June 1-6. Hotel Chancellor, San Francisco.
June 7-18. Claremont, Calif. Gen. Delivery[Unsigned, but written by Abby H. Turner]