Lake Tahoe is as much a symbol as a place; it both lives up to its Hollywood image and it doesn’t. I remember cringing at that scene in City of Angels when Nicholas Cage decides to follow Meg Ryan to Tahoe by hitching a ride with a trucker outside that old strip club near LAX, and after a moment of agonizing dialogue: “Tahoe,” “Reno,” “Tahoe,” “Reno,” ”Tahoe,” they pop up to the lake—what would actually be about a 10 hour journey—and I remember the feeling of relief when Meg Ryan gets run over and killed by that log truck on the highway, ending my own agony with that dreadful movie. It’s actually the small idyllic Fallen Leaf Lake that the awkward movie couple wakes up on after their one night of fallen-angel sex. Even old Perry Mason episodes have those distance defying lines like “Paul can you drive up to Tahoe?” …so LA. Of course we San Franciscans claim Tahoe as ours. Yet I did know of at least one family in LA who had a house at Tahoe, in fact it was on Fallen Leaf Lake, with their romantic stories of snowmobiling in to the cabin with holiday dinners and guests in tow. I had hoped to one day receive an invite to one of these true Hollywood-style romantic Tahoe holidays, but in a very real tragedy the family matriarch (my friend) died suddenly in her hotel room in San Francisco one night in 2004 after meeting with me and an environmental artist about a project—a project that is ironically located at the foot of the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, also a prominent locale in City of Angels. She was a truly brilliant and elegant woman and I felt robbed for having known her only a very short time. Yet hers was the kind of family I’ve been drawn to and fantasized about since childhood—families with stories. Her memorial service was held in the courtyard at Los Angeles Union Station, well attended by the LA arts community who also loved her.  Her daughter, who was with her that night in San Francisco, is a unique character in her own right and I was lucky enough to get to know her a bit more after her mother passed—but that’s for another chapter, which will not be called City of Angels.

We drove into Fallen Leaf Lake (actually named for an Indian guide though surrounded by lovely Aspen Trees) on our October 2014 weekend escape to Tahoe. The leaves had mostly already fallen, the tourists mostly gone until snowfall, and the houses on Fallen Leaf Lake mostly shuttered for the season. Not being a skier, summer is my favorite time at Tahoe—the lake is surprisingly swimmable—but the in-between seasons when campgrounds are closed and you can walk on deserted beaches is magical, and the beaches are bigger than normal thanks to the draught. Water has been released at the dam to do its work below, a dam originally built to store water as needed by raising the lake above its original level, which would otherwise remain relatively constant. The dog-friendly beach at Taylor Creek was wonderfully deserted, and its golden sand was as clean as the marsh behind it was muddy—dog heaven—though somebody had to brave the lake water to wash her off. In recent years the issue of dog-friendly accommodations has become paramount for us, and for that Tahoe scores pretty low. It makes sense that a winter sport destination isn’t going to offer much for the family pooch, and dogs always sacrifice first when ecosystem sensitivity comes into play. There are dog-friendly hotels of course, which has become a commonplace marketing ploy. The proliferation of websites for pet-friendly travel is as astounding as it is astoundingly inaccurate.  Food however, is another matter and as good as the weather was on this trip, eating outside at night at 6200 feet in October is not an option. But, we had the free use of a timeshare so there was no “looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth.” (Trivia: that’s a phrase I actually know the origin of, being “horsey” myself. The reason for not looking into a horse’s mouth that has just been given to you, at least not in front of the giver, is because of what you can tell quite easily by doing so—its age.) This time-share wasn’t pet-friendly, so we had to flash Ripley’s “service dog” credentials—always handy though it sometimes creates friction with other dog owners. I had stayed at this same hulk of a hotel at the foot of Ski Run Blvd several times before while working on a project in South Lake Tahoe before it went “time-share,” a concept that completely escapes logic in my view.

Back to the lake: “nature hates lakes” is a proclamation that I have never forgotten. It was made by a field geology professor at the University of Oregon. On many a road trip I’ve seen evidence of its truth all over the west, pointing out every meadow along the road that is obviously a former lake. I like observing simple things that make sense and pointing them out to others, and yes I know my constant trivia-sharing can be annoying to my passengers (Rikk). It may be these simple observations and understanding about any number of small things and phenomena that from an early age kept me from feeling any kind of urge to believe in a god. The world actually does make sense if you just bother to observe it. “Nature hates lakes” is a simple rule, water, once fallen on or bubbled up from the land, “wants” to find its way to the sea and generally does just that. If you think hard about all the lakes you know and ask yourself how many of them are natural (i.e. no dam) you’ll soon realize that they are in fact quite rare. Any lake with an outlet is the process of becoming not a lake but a valley. One place where this has been observed in my lifetime is Mirror Lake, tucked beneath Half Dome just beyond the Ahwahnee Hotel, which is being allowed to dry up as a demonstration of what happened to all of Yosemite Valley over the eons. Some lakes have been frozen in time, however briefly, by human intervention; Tahoe is one of these. There is a river flowing into it and the same river flows out—and yes there is a dam. In less time than Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions” of years it will become a meadow. Humans can either speed up the process by creating more erosion and silt (skiing comes to mind) or slow it down with all sorts of “Keep Tahoe Blue” measures, but it can’t be stopped. Doubtful though that our species will witness the transformation. For now there’s no denying that the lake is indeed incredibly blue. I have a friend who swam the length of it in an end-to-end relay who says that what he saw out there in the middle, where the water is 1600 feet deep (only Crater Lake is deeper) defies description.  Except as he said, that you can see “just everything,” and when a swimmer dives in it sets off an effect “like a blue laser light show.”

It seems the lake itself though exists as much in people’s minds–at least mine–as it does as a real experience. Perhaps because it is and has always been a rather exclusive place with limited access. Most of us know its beauty in brief glimpses at 50 mph thanks to the highway that rings it. As for those who call Tahoe home, the most plebian neighborhoods are in South Tahoe (it’s flat and prone to flooding—who could have predicted it’s where the poor folk would end up). Ironically the South Lake was also home to the earliest summer places of the San Francisco super wealthy at the turn of the 20^th century. They would have ferried across the lake on yachts from the North Shore where a spur connected to the new Transcontinental Railroad at Truckee. One of those families, the Baldwins were in the business. You needed a lot of money to Summer there in the early 20^th century as it would have been no easy feat to get there. There was of course no road around the lake. These estates have for the most part been preserved in all their rustic glory for the public and they now offer the largest expanses of public access to the lake. A friend and I had the opportunity to party once in one of these grand balconied log halls called Valhalla. It was late Fall and snowing and the place was decorated for the holidays, a nearly perfect scene save that it was a work event. The entire shoreline is dotted with these mansions, some famous like the one in Godfather II, or the lonely isolated Vikingsholm with its spooky island stone tea house in Emerald Bay and its green roofs a full century before they became the fad of the day. Then there’s Incline Village in the northeast corner (Nevada) where the words “tear-down” can be heard at Starbucks and new money builds ever-bigger scale-less mega-mansions. The result is that the vast majority of shoreline is private or nearly inaccessible. Layer onto this the extreme environmentalist agenda of public agencies (they’re actually all rolled up into one mega-agency, the Tahoe Regional Planning Authority) and what you get is a place that can feel at least a little unfriendly. Don’t get me wrong I share the fervor for protecting the Lake as an ecosystem, but there’s a vast distance between a “Keep Tahoe Blue” bumper sticker on the back of an Escalade and actually keeping the lake accessible to the public or anything like wild.

“Nuke Tahoe Keys” was actually the bumper sticker that appealed more to my radical sensibilities. Though it is a much less common sticker it shares the iconic color and shape as the keep it blue one. The Keys is a suburban residential marina development on the South Lake right at the mouth of the Upper Truckee River as it enters the lake. This watery suburb is where the Bradys would have lived if The Brady Bunch  had been set in Tahoe and it is offensive to every sense—starting with taste if that kind of taste were a sense—and I’m told is an environmental disaster as well. My client at the TRPA had such a sticker on the back of his truck. I know he did work in that area that required attendance at all sorts of public events and always wondered how that bumper sticker played in the parking lot after some public meeting.

Tahoe is a place that is very mixed up in my mind between recreation and work, as perhaps almost an equal number of trips to the lake were for project work vs personal. This may be the only place where this is true, and it creates kind of an uncomfortable memory rift, luckily the two reasons for visiting Tahoe mostly fit neatly into two decades: the 90s for pleasure, the 2000s for work and after 2010 just blurry. I have never defined myself by my job, and generally when I am in a reminiscent state of mind, work memories don’t enter the picture at all. Tahoe is different, maybe as much because I never really connected to it strongly on a personal basis because of its unfriendliness—and because I don’t ski. On a recent trip we stayed on the exact site of a design competition that I won in 2001, but which bears no physical evidence today of any change at all. It is not a place “shaped by me.” Unbuilt projects give me deep feelings of professional impotence.

That design competition was orchestrated by the TRPA. The original event was to be a three day charrette with four firms participating pro-bono. Everybody got free access to various attractions, free lodging for the participants and their guests and a most disgusting dinner aboard the Tahoe Queen (dinner cruise is an oxymoron). It wasn’t a bad deal really, but generally speaking competitions are a way to get free work out of consultants even if the client doesn’t know what they’ll do with it. This was the case here, and 10 years later nothing has been done, though there is quite a nice new park at the south end where Highway 50 makes a sharp bend (“no dogs allowed” though, huh?). The TRPA didn’t even control the land, a tiny sliver where Ski Run Blvd meets the lake with a small ramshackle marina and a pier for the Tahoe Queen Paddle Boat. The intent was that the four teams would work in the same space above the Riva Grill (Riva is a wooden speed boat) sharing ideas, with the promise of a contract for the selected firm. Well consultants don’t share under circumstances like that, and one team started their work by erecting paper walls around their work space. The client in charge of the event was a colorful character—I would say gay but never asked him outright—who had given each of us a nickname based on background research conducted long before the event. He admitted to a few of them after some drinks one night, including my bosses’: “ball buster.”  This proved he had great insight in this regard later after still more drinks at Valhalla I gave him a nickname: “The Puppet Master,” which he didn’t like. He was tall and thin and wore very tight bulge-producing jeans, and had meticulously combed hair, the look you’d expect from a 70s porn director. I did a quick sketch for the project in all of 10 minutes, knowing it would be the scheme we’d present, and it was. We “won” the competition and were in fact awarded a contract to do… well honestly I can’t remember, but it wasn’t much. The Puppet Master later revealed that one of their selection criteria had been to watch how each team behaved during the presentations of the other three in a public forum (poker face!). I remember sitting on my hands through one of them as the presenter completely choked and I choked back laughter. Actually I just think the client had the hots for me. We got invited back for another freebie competition a few years later, which we didn’t win, but I made certain to have more fun that time.

Long before websites existed to find dog-friendly hotels, gay hotels—or anything else for that matter—we used various gay travel books to search out gay-owned B&Bs. Our first trip to Tahoe was probably in 92 just after buying the Trooper. We found a place just over the Nevada border on the North Shore. The place had a frozen-in-time 70s vibe right down to the house plants and indeed the mustachioed owner. It was a big open-beamed three story house entered at the top with bedrooms below and a long set of steps down to the lake. If I didn’t know better I’d say it could have been the house—and the owner—in Falcon Studios’ The Other Side of Aspen, but then there are lots of houses at Tahoe that would fit that bill, maybe it was the grand piano. The proprietor was useful enough, explaining how to find the nude beach for example—which isn’t a beach at all just a lot of very big boulders a few of which are large enough to lay on—and finding it, like so many other such places is mostly about looking for the parked cars along the otherwise featureless road. It’s a very cool place to spend the day though, which may or may not have a name, reached by a long scramble down the mountainside from the highway. In fact it’s the steepest shoreline anywhere on the lake, which is probably why it’s been left undeveloped. These are the kinds of geographies that get “found” and claimed by outliers (hippies, naturists, gays…) and its one of those remarkable places where you run into people you know from other places like it. People who aren’t wearing clothes seem to become friendlier, an almost counterintuitive phenomenon, and it’s not always though sometimes is about sex.  The northeast shore of white boulders and crystal clear water is the most beautiful stretch of Nevada shoreline in spite of being difficult to access—or perhaps because of it.

When backpacking became our preferred vacation activity throughout the 1990s Tahoe was often a staging point to a hike anywhere in the Sierra or a connecting point to highway 395 (the hot spring belt) and more options for taking off clothes. The first hike was into the Desolation Wilderness, an unfortunate name for such a beautiful stretch of mountain peaks and lakes. This trail-head was at the very touristy Eagle Falls above Emerald Bay. We were not yet seasoned hikers; there was wine leaking out of plastic bottle running down my leg, and we didn’t realize that given the option of another route we should never start a hike with crowds of daily tourists. Later trips would be planned around this specific issue. Some hikes just start where they start and you have to grit your teeth till you’ve passed the “day hiker distance barrier.” We hiked the Kalalau Trail on the Napali Coast once where for the first half mile or so we were being passed by people wearing flip flops and jeweled sandals over the rough lava while we lumbered on in hiking boots and big packs. By then we had done it enough to know that the uncommitted would drop away after just a few miles at most. The Eagle Falls trail is a steep relentless climb, high enough to make breathing tough. Our destination was Dicks Lake (enough said and no there is no apostrophe) but there are many pristine lakes in the area 2000-3000 feet above Tahoe and Rikk developed a lifelong habit of stripping off and testing out each one. To this day any and all bodies of water are an irresistible draw to getting naked. Dicks Lake turned out to be spectacularly situated against a steep semicircular amphitheater of sheer cliffs. We pitched our tent on a flat rock that cantilevered over the water about 10 feet up and doubled as a diving board. The water was brain-freeze cold. Sleeping on rock is a trick though often preferable to the uneven and sloping ground around. We hoisted our food bag into a tree and tried to sleep. I don’t even think we had our fancy mattresses back then so it would have been a sleepless night with or without the bears, and bears there were. This is very beary country as is all of the Sierra and Trinity, and every hike we’ve done here has involved at least sightings. Once in Trinity our campsite was charged in the middle of night, a sound I can’t describe because not every loud noise really does sound like a freight train, though only in Wyoming did we resort to carrying “bear bells” and storing food in bear-proof cans. Somehow Grizzlies are just a thousand times scarier than our sweet California Black Bears.

Fast forward 20 years to this fall where for the first time we watched bears scoop up red migrating salmon in Taylor Creek so dense it looked like a Japanese Koi pond. Alongside 30 or so other onlookers, holding Ripley tightly at my side while she sniffed the air uneasily (eyesight is not her most acute sense) we came staggeringly close to a mother Black Bear and cub. This was my second closest bear encounter. One night while staying in a dreaded Camp Curry tent-cabin in Yosemite I had a terrible case of diarrhea and was getting up and stumbling through the maze-like camp to the restroom every half hour or so.  The other thing that had been going on all night was an occasional loud popping sound from the parking lot some distance off, though at the time I thought I was imagining it. It was on one of those half-awake urgent trips through the dark camp toward the bright light of the open bathroom door that I came face to face with a very large black object just as I turned into the blindingly bright doorway.  No time to think, I froze and the bear casually strolled out of the john brushing my elbow with its bristly fur as it went on its way. My elbow is quite high above the ground—just for reference.  Inside was an empty bag of chips and a huge steaming pile of bear shit. Strangely I was too tired to be scared and went about the business at hand. At day break out in the parking lot we learned what all the popping sounds had been. Dozens of cars had broken windows and door frames and some interiors were completely destroyed. It seemed every car that a bear had gotten inside of was left with a telltale calling card, a big steaming shit. In spite of hygiene, these are smart animals. Some had even learned how jumping on the tops of cars with their massive weight would pop open the doors. Even as I lay sleepless the night before listening to those pops and speculating what they might be, it struck me that not a single car alarm had gone off. It was the 90s, in Northern California, when car alarms were at their peak of annoyingness and almost everyone had one, including us. It was when I saw the big dusty paw print on the passenger side window of our Trooper that I realized it: not only do bears not like car alarms, but they had learned what the little red flashing lights meant. The little red flashing light on the dash of our car can be the only explanation for why that big paw didn’t become a fist (if bears need to make fists to break things). Ironically, Taylor Creek where we just watched that picturesque scene of bears feeding on bright red salmon, above a beaver dam, alongside the idyllic golden beach on Lake Tahoe is just a stone’s throw from the reviled Brady-esque motor boat suburb called Tahoe Keys—nuke it indeed.