Keep Tahoe Green
posted by
Scott Herring
@
12:51 AM
If I am very lucky and behave myself, I may get to do a writing project on Lake Tahoe. More details later (I hope--again, if I am lucky and good). If this project were to come through, I would be writing at length about the whole Tahoe basin. I know the Sierra well--I've lived next to it for a decade now--but have always avoided urban Tahoe. To help organize my thoughts, we made a trip there earlier this summer, and should be headed back sometime in the next few weeks. I expect a disorienting experience; it is what I've come to regard as normal for Tahoe, or at least the Tahoe I've come to know.
We made that first trip in late June, just after classes finished at UC Davis, but not before I had recovered from an epic three-week cold, the work of another of the exotic viruses our toddler brings home regularly. We stayed at a famous resort on the south shore of the lake, one that I think I will leave nameless, for now, anyway. Purely because of its age (it dates from the 1920s), I imagined this place would be classy, snooty, full of itself and its elegant history. We decided to stay in two separate rooms, so I could cough by myself. The room Jen and the kids stayed in had a broken TV, and was right next to the bar. Mine had no telephone, no nothing, really. The water tap barely worked, and the water looked just like salmon milt. I had to let it settle before I could venture to drink any. I was on the ground floor, but there was no curtain over the bathroom window, nothing to block the view in but an immature cedar. I realized that the management was relying on the window to steam over when the shower was running, which did mostly work.
When I couldn't find an electrical plug in the bathroom, they almost lost me (it finally turned up behind the towels). I did at least like the design of the plates over the plugs and switches: they featured paintings of a winsome bear talking to the moon. That would be the famous legend told by the Washoe tribe, the one they call "The Night Brother Bear Lost His Mind."
Having settled in, sort of, we walked down to the beach, where the lake, quite full after a winter of heavy snow, lapped at the edge of the forest, and of the bar and grill. The beach was a noisy place, with maybe two hundred people milling about, and many, many children. Steller's jays swooped everywhere in quantity, the kind of jay with bright blue plumage and prominent black crest on their heads. Jen spilled a can of mixed nuts on the ground, and the Steller's jays went on the alert. They first had to get Lewis, our toddler, out of the way. They accomplished this with what I swear looked like a variant on the broken-wing con job: two of them landed in front of him, and, when he chased them, they were able to lure him away from the nuts. They had a ball, swallowing entire almonds and pecans whole. How they can digest them--well, one wonders, and feels a little dyspeptic doing so.
Lots of robins swooped through the trees, too, and we were soon also confronted by a herd of about twenty beggar geese, Canada geese that were exceptionally fearless even by their standards. They spent the day and night on the beach; I found them there again long after sundown, clustered in the water in front of the bar, muttering to themselves.
Trying to get a feel for the place, the whole place, I walked out onto the long pier belonging to the company that owns this joint. The water is about eighteen feet deep at the end, and you can see the bottom--if barely. No beer cans on the bottom. The resort rents various kinds of watercraft, and had a gas pump on the pier that dispensed unleaded for $4.88 a gallon. I studied the heavy boat traffic, examining a huge and elegant catamaran, then watching a three-story cabin cruiser park. When I reached the end of the pier, I looked toward the big gray boxes that mark the Nevada state line--the casinos, that is.
And I was visited, then, by a heretical thought that kept coming to me all day. I thought of the bumper stickers that have long been a common sight in California: "Keep Tahoe Blue," they say, next to a map of the lake done in dark blue. But what does it matter, I now thought, if Tahoe is blue? What would you think of a bumper sticker that demands we "Keep Vegas Organic," or "Keep Atlantic City Wholesome"? The Tahoe basin, I decided, is about as wild and pure as Disney World.
But we stayed for a couple of days, and the place, the whole place, began to grow on me as it never had before. I even enjoyed the town, South Lake Tahoe; in the past, I had hustled through quickly, appalled. (Why, though? Was I afraid all this was going to start multiplying and spill over the passes and destroy the rest of the Sierra? I think that's just what I was afraid of). I had never spent so much time on the lakeshore, and found that I was enjoying the human company.
It is important, a part of the place, that it is surrounded by high mountains and something like wilderness; it is not Las Vegas. The whole place, in fact, has a Montana/Wyoming vibe. The standard vehicle for young guys is an old full-size Ford or Chevy pickup with rust damage, or something similar: an old Wrangler, an old Ram, that sort of thing. I suppose that can't be the only dominant style; doubtless, at the local high school, a permanent death-struggle of which we will never hear anything goes on between the Hipp Hopp Boyz, the Goths, the jocks, and then the cowboys. Probably there are other new groups by now: the Nippie-Pinchers, let's say, who express their loathing for bourgeois conformity by pinching their own nipples as hard as they can stand.
Nevertheless, we saw plenty of cowboys, although these were cowboys who spent a lot of time with cell phones jammed in their ears. We heard country and western playing overhead in the pizza place. We saw lots of normal-looking people. Everyone was friendly. Everyone. The guy at the hamburger place where we stopped on arriving in town offered me a cup of water when he thought I looked like I needed it. I in fact needed it desperately. The very high school kids who ran the pizza joint where we ate dinner were nice. A young guy sitting at the next table made faces at Lewis, to Lewis' utter delight.
It wasn't anything like California (by which I mean, of course, the urban coast). For a while, I thought it was Nevada mixing in and diluting the nastiness, but then remembered that the Sierra is mostly like this; I had never much noticed it because I spend most of my Sierra time off in the backcountry somewhere. What was most remarkable was that I felt my normal urban stand-offishness, my willingness to believe the worst of people, fading before even a single day was over. The social situation was odd, though: I never knew if I was supposed to say hello to strangers, as in the country, or ignore them, as in the city. In practice, I uncomfortably did both.
I will have to come back to Tahoe in future blogs. It is a big place. It can be a delightful place. It is also home to some of the worst tourist traps I have ever encountered. As I said, Tahoe is disorienting. This makes for comedy, even if it does regularly give me a headache.
South Lake Tahoe map - Tagzania
We made that first trip in late June, just after classes finished at UC Davis, but not before I had recovered from an epic three-week cold, the work of another of the exotic viruses our toddler brings home regularly. We stayed at a famous resort on the south shore of the lake, one that I think I will leave nameless, for now, anyway. Purely because of its age (it dates from the 1920s), I imagined this place would be classy, snooty, full of itself and its elegant history. We decided to stay in two separate rooms, so I could cough by myself. The room Jen and the kids stayed in had a broken TV, and was right next to the bar. Mine had no telephone, no nothing, really. The water tap barely worked, and the water looked just like salmon milt. I had to let it settle before I could venture to drink any. I was on the ground floor, but there was no curtain over the bathroom window, nothing to block the view in but an immature cedar. I realized that the management was relying on the window to steam over when the shower was running, which did mostly work.
When I couldn't find an electrical plug in the bathroom, they almost lost me (it finally turned up behind the towels). I did at least like the design of the plates over the plugs and switches: they featured paintings of a winsome bear talking to the moon. That would be the famous legend told by the Washoe tribe, the one they call "The Night Brother Bear Lost His Mind."
Having settled in, sort of, we walked down to the beach, where the lake, quite full after a winter of heavy snow, lapped at the edge of the forest, and of the bar and grill. The beach was a noisy place, with maybe two hundred people milling about, and many, many children. Steller's jays swooped everywhere in quantity, the kind of jay with bright blue plumage and prominent black crest on their heads. Jen spilled a can of mixed nuts on the ground, and the Steller's jays went on the alert. They first had to get Lewis, our toddler, out of the way. They accomplished this with what I swear looked like a variant on the broken-wing con job: two of them landed in front of him, and, when he chased them, they were able to lure him away from the nuts. They had a ball, swallowing entire almonds and pecans whole. How they can digest them--well, one wonders, and feels a little dyspeptic doing so.
Lots of robins swooped through the trees, too, and we were soon also confronted by a herd of about twenty beggar geese, Canada geese that were exceptionally fearless even by their standards. They spent the day and night on the beach; I found them there again long after sundown, clustered in the water in front of the bar, muttering to themselves.
Trying to get a feel for the place, the whole place, I walked out onto the long pier belonging to the company that owns this joint. The water is about eighteen feet deep at the end, and you can see the bottom--if barely. No beer cans on the bottom. The resort rents various kinds of watercraft, and had a gas pump on the pier that dispensed unleaded for $4.88 a gallon. I studied the heavy boat traffic, examining a huge and elegant catamaran, then watching a three-story cabin cruiser park. When I reached the end of the pier, I looked toward the big gray boxes that mark the Nevada state line--the casinos, that is.
And I was visited, then, by a heretical thought that kept coming to me all day. I thought of the bumper stickers that have long been a common sight in California: "Keep Tahoe Blue," they say, next to a map of the lake done in dark blue. But what does it matter, I now thought, if Tahoe is blue? What would you think of a bumper sticker that demands we "Keep Vegas Organic," or "Keep Atlantic City Wholesome"? The Tahoe basin, I decided, is about as wild and pure as Disney World.
But we stayed for a couple of days, and the place, the whole place, began to grow on me as it never had before. I even enjoyed the town, South Lake Tahoe; in the past, I had hustled through quickly, appalled. (Why, though? Was I afraid all this was going to start multiplying and spill over the passes and destroy the rest of the Sierra? I think that's just what I was afraid of). I had never spent so much time on the lakeshore, and found that I was enjoying the human company.
It is important, a part of the place, that it is surrounded by high mountains and something like wilderness; it is not Las Vegas. The whole place, in fact, has a Montana/Wyoming vibe. The standard vehicle for young guys is an old full-size Ford or Chevy pickup with rust damage, or something similar: an old Wrangler, an old Ram, that sort of thing. I suppose that can't be the only dominant style; doubtless, at the local high school, a permanent death-struggle of which we will never hear anything goes on between the Hipp Hopp Boyz, the Goths, the jocks, and then the cowboys. Probably there are other new groups by now: the Nippie-Pinchers, let's say, who express their loathing for bourgeois conformity by pinching their own nipples as hard as they can stand.
Nevertheless, we saw plenty of cowboys, although these were cowboys who spent a lot of time with cell phones jammed in their ears. We heard country and western playing overhead in the pizza place. We saw lots of normal-looking people. Everyone was friendly. Everyone. The guy at the hamburger place where we stopped on arriving in town offered me a cup of water when he thought I looked like I needed it. I in fact needed it desperately. The very high school kids who ran the pizza joint where we ate dinner were nice. A young guy sitting at the next table made faces at Lewis, to Lewis' utter delight.
It wasn't anything like California (by which I mean, of course, the urban coast). For a while, I thought it was Nevada mixing in and diluting the nastiness, but then remembered that the Sierra is mostly like this; I had never much noticed it because I spend most of my Sierra time off in the backcountry somewhere. What was most remarkable was that I felt my normal urban stand-offishness, my willingness to believe the worst of people, fading before even a single day was over. The social situation was odd, though: I never knew if I was supposed to say hello to strangers, as in the country, or ignore them, as in the city. In practice, I uncomfortably did both.
I will have to come back to Tahoe in future blogs. It is a big place. It can be a delightful place. It is also home to some of the worst tourist traps I have ever encountered. As I said, Tahoe is disorienting. This makes for comedy, even if it does regularly give me a headache.
South Lake Tahoe map - Tagzania
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