RON HENGGELER

September 6, 2007
Earthquake weather

SAN FRANCISCO, AUGUST 31, 1866.
Looking over the latest copy of the Republican received by mail, I began to recognize a certain fitness in your having a representative from this coast among your correspondents. I can at least offer a relief to the monotony of their meteorological observations. While they, along the Atlantic seaboard, sing an unvarying “song of heat,” and bear equal testimony to scorching skies, shades that are grateful, and brooks whose murmur the sultry atmosphere makes delicious, perhaps it is well that you have on this Pacific slope an exception to that isothermal crew---one truthful and sadly sincere man, who can, out of his own experience, paint the opposite of that equally charming picture; who could if he liked literally throw a wet blanket over their bucolic efforts. . . . Where else can one so perfectly fulfill the real conditions of existence---eating, drinking, sleeping and working---as here?
Ought I not to be thankful that I can sleep under blankets instead of being driven to the necessity of celestial contemplation from an open window, through the extreme heat of a summer’s night? Should I not be satisfied that I can work the summer through without needing vacation, instead of idling away a month or two in dreaming by babbling brooks or under whispering trees? Or, food being the question, I am pointed to the market, where Pomona has, in the reckless fashion in which everything is done here, poured out her stores in golden and purple grapes, nectarines, apricots and peaches, pears and quinces, which heap the stalls in this damp, grey, autumnal weather. And here are watermelons! Watermelons, and the fog enveloping you like a wet sheet. Watermelons on your table, and a fire in your dining room. Nature revolts and blood curdles at the thought.
Let me be generous. We have had two days of clear weather, and the winds comparatively unobjectionable. But let me also be just. An old resident answered my congratulations with a dubious shake of the head, “Earthquake weather!” Nothing I can say here can equal this unconscious satire on the San Francisco climate. To be forced to look upon a fine day as abnormal and ominous, and to apprehend compensation in a general convulsion of the earth’s surface, revels a condition of things that even in my bitterest moments I have never yet ventured to express.
Bret Hart from LETTER FROM SAN FRANCISCO 1866

 

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