We woke up in Temescal, packed our things into the Malibu, and hit the road.
It felt weird to be in the Bay Area and drive away without spending any real time there. Just passing through.
Our route to Tahoe would take us through many towns I’d spent formative years in. And the route itself was a place I’d spent countless hours.
In 1977, my mom began working as an airport shuttle bus driver in Tahoe. The airport wasn’t just for private jets back then, it was serviced by Pan Am, an airline known for having a smiley face on the front of its planes—the nose of the jet was the nose of the face and the windows were the eyes.
As you might expect, Pan Am failed because Americans prefer utterly humorless airlines.
As a child at the airpot, I would ride on the luggage carousel as if I were a suitcase. Then I’d ride in the luggage rack on Mom’s shuttle bus, concealing myself behind a bag so I could surprise a traveler.
When people screamed then burst out laughing, what a fantastic feeling that was—to see someone’s fear turn to joy when I revealed myself to simply be me.
Posing as luggage was also a great way to break the ice. I’d talk to passengers coming and going from places near and far, imagining what those places were like. From the sounds of it, there was a pretty cool world out there.
I even got to hang out in the air traffic control tower. Between taking drags from their cigarettes, the air traffic controllers, pilots, and other grownups at the airport seemed to sense that these might be formative experiences for me.
But as adventurous and joyful as our move to the mountains had been, it was also traumatic because, in moving to Tahoe, my mom had left my dad for the last time.
Within months, Dad moved to Tahoe to be closer to us. But three years later, Mom moved us back to the Bay. Dad would stay in Tahoe for the rest of his life. Thus the countless times I was driven to and from The Lake.
Tahoe was where I went to Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd Grade. Since Dad remained in Tahoe, I also returned there every summer, even as I moved from town to town in the Bay with my mom. Tahoe was the throughline. My on-and-off-again home.
In the immediate aftermath of the divorce, Dad briefly lived in the campground near Camp Richardson, and I spent that summer living in the campground with him. Then he got a cheap apartment near Ski Run. Then a standalone cabin. Eventually, he moved in with a girlfriend who had a pretty nice house that she’d gotten in a divorce.
Visiting my dad every summer and living with him in this wide variety of contexts, I got to experience the broad spectrum of life for a local. Although Tahoe had (and still has) its share of drug and gambling addicts and destitute resort workers, there was always an ever-present, high-altitude call to a greater awareness and reconnection with oneself and with others. Any interaction you might have with someone in Tahoe could have a sacred quality to it. I guess you could say it was like growing up in Tibet, but with more waterskis, hot tubs, blackjack, and yacht rock.
On the way to Tahoe, Highway 50 was the space where I began to feel the Short Now of city life dissolve into the Long Now of the Sierras. It was the entrance to the temple, which you travelled through by car, often stopping at some point to get out and take in the wonder of nature.
I guess you could say Highway 50 was like the Bifröst rainbow bridge between Midgard and Asgard.
When I was five, I remember asking my dad to get my attention before we reached “The Most Beautiful Turn in the Whole World!” I wanted to be fully present for it.
It was just past the summit, where the road turned to reveal the entirety of the lake in all its glittering blue glory. In an instant, your perspective went from a few hundred yards of trees in front of you to as far as the eye could see. The vastness of the lake was awesome to behold. You had entered the temple.
This would be our first time driving this route since the Caldor Fire burned the mountains along Highway 50. I had yet to see the damage with my own eyes.
As we climbed in altitude past Placerville and Pollack Pines, we began to see the first signs of the fire. To my surprise, a lot of the forest remained unscathed. By the time we reached the town of Strawberry, I said, “Maybe the fire didn’t do as much damage as I thought.”
I pulled the car over and we parked near the American River.
After many years of being away, the familiar sound brought me back to a clarity of mind and spirit that I hadn’t felt in a long time.
We got back in the car and drove on.
Minutes later, we entered a forest that was entirely burned. Every tree. Every mountainside. Turn after turn. Mile after mile.
A few cabins had survived. Many were burned to the ground.
I gripped the steering wheel and tried to breathe enough to keep my chest from caving in.
The scale of the devastation was overwhelming. A landscape billions of years in the making. Would it ever be close to the same again? Not in a thousand years.
We reached a ski resort that used to be called Sierra Ski Ranch. The entire mountain was torched.
And at last, we reached the summit.
I gulped as we approached The Most Beautiful Turn in the Whole World.
As we made the turn, it revealed an entire mountainside burned—the fire had leapt over Christmas Valley below and kept burning.
I heard my son say, “Whoa.”
The lake was still visible, of course, but the entrance to the temple had been irrevocably damaged.
It was no longer a space where you shed your petty concerns and surrendered to the timelessness of the High Sierra. It was a space of concern, devastation, and tragedy.
In Norse mythology, the destruction of the Bifröst bridge between Midgard and Asgard signals the beginning of Ragnarok, the End Time.
When I was 15, I left my dad’s house in Tahoe with a duffle bag full of things I owned that I thought might be of some value at the local pawn shop. An Atari console. A pair of roller-skates. Since I was leaving home for good, I could use a bit of spare cash.
Before hitting the pawn shop, however, I stopped by the video store where my friend Alex was working. I told him I was looking for a place to live.
As it turned out, one of his video store colleagues was looking for a roommate. Not a roommate in the traditional sense of having a room, but one who would live in a small corner of the living room in his apartment.
I was in. For the next month, I lived in said corner of said living room. Stringing up a hammock from the ceiling, I doubled my total square footage.
Another gentleman living in the apartment brought home a whole grocery bag full of free food he’d gotten from a local food bank. He pulled out a giant cinnamon roll, large as a plate. We could hardly believe our fortune. How could such a treat be free!?
He began to cut the first slice. It was as hard as stone. The knife literally did nothing. Was this thing indestructible?
We began playing frisbee with it, laughing like little kids who had discovered some new game. If we couldn’t enjoy the pleasures of eating it, we’d get the pleasures of tossing it around in a way The Baker never intended for its creation. One of us missed the catch, and the cinnamon roll hit the wall, denting the sheetrock. I laughed until my stomach hurt.
The gentleman who had brought home the indestructible cinnamon roll had a briefcase, which he carried with him whenever he left the apartment.
After a few days, I asked why he always carried a briefcase, and he said “So people know I mean business.”
I asked what was inside the briefcase. He popped the locks.
Inside was a cassette tape of Tesla’s Mechanical Resonance. I’d never heard of Tesla, so I read the text on the cassette. Apparently, they were the greatest band ever assembled. Who knew?
As it so happened, I needed people to know I meant business, too. Specifically, I needed a job that would pay me enough to afford my section of the living room.
Although it was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, and I was free to work any schedule, the ideal job would have evening shifts that I could continue working when school started up again.
Yes, part-time, evening work that paid well—what kind of job was that?
I scoured the classifieds in the Tahoe Daily Tribune. With a pen, I circled a sales job at a Beach Club. The hours were 4 PM to 9 PM, Sunday through Thursday.
Soon, I was working as a Beach Club telemarketer in a windowless room, telling everyone about the sunny paradise that awaited them. There were about a dozen of us working the touch-tone phones, each with our own small cubicle. I was the youngest employee by a very wide margin.
Making a sale meant someone was coming to Tahoe to spend a weekend at the Beach Club. I was a good salesman, which meant I typically got two to four sales a night. Between those sales, I was rejected and hung up on and verbally abused dozens of times each evening.
For the next three years, this was the primary way I made a living.
This was not my first job. From age 13 to 15, I had worked summers and occasional weekends at construction sites, installing glass atriums on houses. I had also worked as a busboy at Carlos Murphy’s and as a dishwasher at Happy Steak and as a clothes folder at Miller’s Outpost. So to my mind, a desk job was pretty sweet.
Even though I was clearly renting the best corner of the living room, I didn’t think my accommodations were entirely conducive to finishing high school, what with the raucous indoor frisbee games and blaring Tesla music and frequent living room smoke-outs.
Alex said his dad had rented rooms to people in the past. Perhaps he would consider renting a room to me.
I waited eagerly for the news. If it didn’t work out, I wasn’t sure what I would do.
When Alex said his dad approved of the idea, I was beyond thrilled. I went over to meet with him. I learned that the rent would be 300 dollars a month, which was a lot, but I would get an entire private bedroom for that, with a door and everything.
With my base salary plus commission, I earned between 7 to 10 dollars an hour, 20 hours a week. And 7 times 20 was 140, which meant I could pay my rent within 2 weeks of work with enough money left for food and a gym membership.
Perhaps best of all, Alex and I would be living under the same roof, more like brothers than friends. And since all of my siblings were about a decade or more older than me, having a same-age brother was a dream.
As I drove our rented Malibu through Meyers in South Lake Tahoe, it was a relief to see that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
We passed the A-frame alpaca rug store.
“My friend Gary used to work there!”
As we continued driving down Pioneer Trail, I told my son about Gary.
He was a forty-something dude who never stopped partying, and that made him a hero to a 15-year-old who grew up watching Animal House and was just starting to party.
Gary was also a black belt in karate. When no one was in the alpaca rug store, he would train on the heavy bag near the back. But the moment some attractive woman entered the store, it was time to stop punching the bag and start extolling the virtues of alpaca fur.
Gary would pet the fur and say, “It’s hypoallergenic—so you can lay yourself down in your bare skin—that’s the alpaca advantage!”
You could say Gary was our local Mr. Miyagi, if the Karate Kid had been a sexual comedy.
Part of me wanted to be like Gary when I grew up. To never stop partying. To possess and radiate indefatigable energy. To have a black belt in everything.
But I failed to keep partying, being almost entirely sober since the day I left Tahoe. I do possess indefatigable energy, but I don’t necessarily radiate it to others the way I once did. And although I may have a black belt in a few things, I probably have a brown belt in too many things.
At last, we arrived at the cabin. On the outside, it looked almost unchanged since I left over 30 years ago.
That my son was about the same age I was when I left here added to the overwhelming time-warp feeling.
Inside the cabin, it took me some time to adjust to all the cosmetic changes. Beloved surfaces replaced or updated. Color schemes altered.
In the living room, there was now a stuffed leopard on the wall, which was problematic for several reasons. Unlike alpaca, leopard fur is not hypoallergenic. Alpaca fur can be sheared the same way wool is sheared from a sheep, without having to decapitate the animal and affix its face in a permanent snarling grimace, which is an implausible expression for an alpaca anyway. None of your friends would believe you had to shoot the alpaca in self-defense before it murdered you.
Gary and I could have easily explained all this if we had been consulted. Our Alpaca Advantage interior design consultancy is one of many thriving businesses that we own jointly in the parallel universe where I never left Tahoe. We also have a silk kimono store and a parachute pants store in adjoining spaces so you can easily buy a complete outfit.
In any event, we would have to live with the dead cat mounted on the wall and the other aesthetic upgrades.
From the chairs on the cabin’s back deck, the spectacular view of the meadow and Freel Peak and Heavenly looked almost exactly the same as they had decades earlier when I first beheld them with much younger eyes.
My 19-year-old sat next to his father’s inner 19-year-old, and together they looked out at the meadow, mountain, sky, and sun.
Soon it would be time to unpack our bags and make a grocery run, but for now we could just sit and relax, knowing we had three whole weeks to enjoy yacht rock in Lake Tahoe before we’d have to board yet another airplane without a smiley face.
