It was on the third day’s march, I think, from Los Angeles that I found myself nearing San Buenaventura. It was late in the afternoon, and the road ahead was an easy upward slope for several miles. Just at sunset I reached the summit. The town of San Buenaventura lay below me, with its long main street curving through rows of houses of widely various kind, and the Mission church standing on an elevation to the left, with its stucco walls bathed in sunset light, making a strange contrast with the modern town. And beyond, with the sun’s red disc a half circle on the horizon line, lay the peaceful sea, with a tongue of living flame across it turning to black coals the islands in its wake. In a moment the sun was gone, the shadow of the evening was upon the ocean, and over the town had fallen the transfiguration light which rests after sunset in spring-time upon Naples.
Three thousand miles away, and a year and a half in point of time for me, was Long Island Sound. I recalled the last glimpse of it as I looked back from Greenfield Hill in the early morning of my start, and saw it radiant in the sunshine of a midsummer day. And here again, after many months and many leagues of land journey, was the sea. Θἁλαττα! Θἁλαττα! I called aloud, for there was no one near enough to hear.
It was a rare moment, worth living for, that first unexpected glimpse of the Pacific. But strangely enough the feeling which it bred was no harbinger of an eager willingness to end my long experiment. Many a time when work was hard, and far more ardently when there was no work and the physical conditions of life seemed well-nigh unendurable, had I looked with longing to a return to normal living. And yet, as I neared my journey’s end I found possessing me a strange indifference to the idea of return. I do not attempt to analyze the feeling, I simply note it as a fact; but in some degree I recognize in it a vague unwillingness to have done with a phase of experience which for me has opened avenues of useful knowledge. Among them all there rises clearest at this moment the way of added knowledge of my country. I may have travelled it to little purpose, but I am conscious at least of a new-born sense of things which comes of actual contact with the soil and with the primal struggle for existence among men. One stands awestruck before the vastness of our great domain and its quick redemption from the wilderness. But most of all it is contact with the people which breeds in one the strongest patriotic feeling. Local conditions and the presence of large numbers of yet unassimilated foreign elements and rapid changes in economic relations and native weaknesses and vagaries are responsible for awful sores upon the body politic, while the power of aggregated wealth grows apace, and fierce antagonisms and sectional differences arise. Yet beneath the troubled surface of events one comes to know of the great body of a nation whose unity has been purchased and made sure by such a cost of blood and treasure as was never poured out upon the altar of a nation’s life before, and one sees a people intelligent, resourceful, and hugely vital, having much to learn and surely learning much, assimilating foreign elements with miraculous swiftness and growing stronger thereby, living laborious days wherein the rewards are to thrift and energy and enterprising skill, knowing no defeat and unacquainted with the sense of fear, and awakening year by year to a fuller consciousness of national life and of the glorious mission of high destiny. And with increasing knowledge the love of country grows until all thought of worth in her is merged and lost in reverence, and love of her becomes a summons to live worthy of the name and calling of an American.