Keep Tahoe Green, Part 2

When last you heard from us, Jen, the kids, and I were bivouacked in a decayed tourist joint on the south shore of Lake Tahoe. This actually happened last summer; it's getting cold up in the Sierra now, and about time for the ski resorts to gear up. I was, and still am, trying to get a handle on the big writing project about the lake that I hope to be undertaking soon. During this trip, I was sick to the point of a kind of light delirium, not entirely unpleasant, although sleep was a sometime thing.

I did enjoy South Lake Tahoe, but a little goes a long way. One day we went horseback riding--or, more precisely, Jen and Dustin went horseback riding, while our toddler Lewis and I waited for them to return. We sat in the car for the hour and a half they were gone, in a dusty lot next to the corral. Lewis slept the whole time; I tried to sleep. When we arrived, a mechanic working on a diesel pickup next to the corral turned on a gasoline-powered generator and kept it going the whole time. Down the hill, a city or county or Forest Service backhoe was burying a sewer line or something equally edifying. The operator somehow contrived to spend the whole time in reverse, or at least the backup alarm suggested that he was. Vehicles kept coming and going, including a whole fleet of diesel trucks. At some point, I remembered a piece of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Lake Tahoe advertising prose that I'd seen in my research: "Come be entranced by its restful air!"

The very moment Jen and Dustin returned, the mechanic switched the generator off--but Lewis, at least, never did wake up.

We then returned to the hovel Jen, Dustin, and Lewis were staying in. We discovered--and I could hardly believe this--seven nails exposed where the living room carpet was torn next to the bathroom door. The nails were pointy-side-up. They were only about a quarter of an inch long (is that an argument in favor of the hotel?). I opened up the phone book on the floor to cover them, and left if lying as if someone had been reading the phone book and laid it face down to save the page. The phone book had to be open or else it would not have covered all the many exposed nails. I decided it would be best for everyone if, when we departed, we just left the nails as they were, without the phone book. My theory was that the next person who stepped on them--or the next, or the next, it couldn't go on forever--would be the one to sue, and then these problems might actually get fixed.

Jen, Dustin, and Lewis prepared for the beach. Jen suggested that I stay in the room and sleep. It sounded great. About ninety seconds before they left, a garage band that had been hired to play in the outdoor bar burst upon the scene. The bar, as I noted in my earlier entry, was right next to Jen's room. It seated about two hundred people. I later found that the band had set up across the walkway from the corner of Jen's hovel. The music was surely audible ten miles out on the lake. It was audible, I am certain, over the noise of boat and jet ski engines. About halfway through the set, the band slammed into a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," and gave the lyrics a local spin: "On we sweep with threshing oar; / Our only goal will be the Tahoe shore!"

I spent all this time standing next to the TV. I couldn't hear it if I sat down.

I at last staggered away, and found Jen and the kids on the beach. The garage band finished its set about a minute after I left. The Canada geese that hang out here were still in the area, walking from group to group, chortling in a Canada-goose way, and gobbling the pretzels and Doritos people occasionally threw them. I was supposed to taking this trip to do research, and since sleep was out of the question, I thought I should get some work done. I blundered down a trail to have a look at old Tahoe.

Conveniently close to the "resort" where we were staying was the Tallac Historic Site. Run by the US Forest Service, the site is a collection of vacation homes built by San Francisco millionaires in the early twentieth century, now publicly owned and run essentially as a big sprawling museum. I walked the full network of paths between the buildings, among trees that are in places bigger than any in the whole Tahoe basin (because it was a resort, this area was not logged). The houses and cottages were all wood and stone, some of them featuring lofty main halls with fireplaces that reached up and up to the remote ceiling.

I walked through the structures that were open, and peeked through the windows of those that were not. They were full of furnishings and odds and ends from a hundred years ago. These places were pre-synthetic, as was everything in them; they dated from an age before plastic, when everyday things were made of bone and stone and wood and the like. It was a heavy era, by which I mean everything weighed a lot. The skis that can still be found in one of the cottages looked more like surfboards to me. What I was seeing, I eventually realized, were artifacts left by people who came here, a hundred years ago, to have fun: tennis courts, fishing tackle, boats. They developed an elaborate powerboat subculture, and every millionaire had a boathouse on the lake. The boats combined elegant wooden hulls with power plants designed for maximum speed and noise and pollution.

Later that day, after I finished with Tallac, I returned to the pier at our resort. I arrived just as the bats were coming out, and walked again to the end. The big gray boxes along the Nevada line--the casinos--were turning bright red. I could smell the pine trees on shore when I was well out to sea. A friendly family greeted me as I walked out. A house full of revelers was open to the night, and I am certain one could hear them in Nevada if all the plentiful engine noise on the lake and the shore were to cease. The swimming dock over by Tallac was lit up at the end like the dock in The Great Gatsby.

Later still, I walked to the shore one last time, at about ten o'clock, and the reality of the lake was disclosed to me. The mountains were mostly dark, but the rim of the lake was lit up all the way around, a wandering oval made of light. In a couple of places--South Lake Tahoe, and the urban strip and casino zone on the northern shore--the band of light bulged upwards, but mostly it was thin, and mostly it was unbroken.

Gravity and necessity made that oval. The lake shore is where everyone wants to be. The lake shore is where the ground is relatively flat, where roads can be built with an ease that is unusual in these ruthless mountains, and structures too. The weather is milder the lower you go. So the mountains above are mostly dark, but the shore--the line beneath which no one can descend--is lit up all the way around.

What we see at Tahoe--the things that people do there, and build there--is nothing new. This place has been a playground for a long time. There is just a whole lot more of it.