Craving Travel, Recalling Summers at Lake Tahoe
Lake Tahoe was the home of my heart, and my childhood wonderland. There I became an amateur naturalist and an avid rambler. I lived at Lake Tahoe every summer of my youth, 17 precious years, and I learned to love the earth deeply.
It’s probably how I became such a nomad, too. My Dad was a teacher, and got a summer job with the Nevada Division of Forestry, so every summer on Memorial Day weekend, he and Mom would pack up the Chevy and drive to Lake Tahoe to spend three months in the trees while Dad worked as a forest-fire fighter. Before I was born, and for the first couple summers of my life, Mom and Dad worked on the Zephyr Cove lighthouse, watching for smoke from forest fires all around the lake. When I was born, they hauled my baby self along, but after my Mom had another baby in two years, they got transferred to a cabin in Glenbrook, on the east side of the lake.
It was a fantastic, Huckleberry Finn lifestyle for us kids. My folks had decided never to bring a television set with them (except once for the moon landing), so we made our own entertainment. We’d start the day with birdwatching at breakfast. Dad hung seed feeders in the trees outside the windows, and there was a bird book on the windowsill (flickers, chickadees, sapsuckers, tanagers, and the always noisy Stellar jays). Also, Mom put a salt lick out there, so often deer came by, too.
After breakfast, we had free rein to play in the forest all morning, the only rule being we had to stay within shouting distance of the cabin. A sagging boat house became a pirate’s hide-away and big rocks became castles. Of course, there were trees to climb, and we’d come back covered in sticky pine pitch. We turned one willow into a general store while we were playing at being covered-wagon settlers, and one time, when we were way up in it, a deer came along and nibbled branches just below us, not bothered a bit by our excited whispering.
We collected rocks and flowers and miniature mountain alder cones. We’d search for Ponderosa pine trees, with bark that smells like vanilla. There were also pinyon pines and we hunted avidly for their cones: too young, they’d be hard and wouldn’t open; too old, and the squirrels would have eaten all the pine nuts (but sometimes they left one or two behind). We learned to find wild onions, with the delicate purple flowers.
Mom and Dad were conservationists long before ecology was popular, and they taught us to respect and identify animals, plants and bugs. They had no fear of bees, and taught us the bees were just minding their own business and we shouldn’t hurt them just because we were afraid. If a bee landed on Mom, she would either shake her arm softly to dislodge it or push it gently off with a slow finger. One time when we were driving up to Lake Tahoe, a bee got in the car and flew down Dad’s shirt. He calmly leaned away from the seat, signaled the car was stopping, pulled over, got out of the car, took off his shirt and flapped it so the bee flew away, then put his shirt back on, got back in the car and kept driving.
Sometimes, Dad would drive us in his firefighter truck up to the dump to see bears, and occasionally Mom would take us on side hikes up Coolie Canyon during the day while Dad was patrolling. One year, giant puffballs grew in a clearing on the side of the path. Mom said some people considered them as tasty as steak, but she would never eat wild mushrooms. Besides, these were not young and tender, but dry and near their end. She told us to kick them like soccer balls (which they resembled), so we ran at them and kicked hard at their fleshy white roundness, which exploded into a mist of brown spores. We kicked them all to bits, laughing and laughing.
Once a month, we hiked up Shakespeare Peak. It was a longish hike, a couple of hours, so we’d pack sack lunches and head up the trail. We used to rest at the top of one really steep pitch, and right beside the trail were several craggy trees dead from lightning strikes. Buzzards often sat in those trees, so we’d start looking to see who would be the first to spot a turkey vulture, either sitting or flying. Mom would joke about them following her, as if they were waiting for her to keel over. We all laughed. (Back then, we could never imagine our parents getting old.)
At the top of the mountain, we’d eat our sandwiches and apples and kick our heels while looking out over the whole lake — you could see all of it except one tiny bit of south shore, and you could clearly see the three or four different shades of blue showing depth, from turquoise in the shallows all the way to the deepest indigo in the middle of the lake. Mt. Tallac on the west side would usually have snow on it in the shape of a cross through late July. A couple of times, it even snowed on us in June.
A few times a month there’d be fantastic thunderstorms in the afternoon, great cacophonous masterpieces of thunder and lightning, so much closer and louder than the storms down on the plain. Dad said it was the giants throwing their bowling balls.
Every afternoon it wasn’t raining we’d go swimming. Mom made 3’x3’ rafts for each of us from branches, Styrofoam, and plywood painted sky blue. We’d swim for hours until our lips turned dark blue and then Mom would tell us it was time to go home. Even though we’d be shivering and stuttering with cold, we’d beg to stay just a little longer.
One year, a mink came swimming with us for a couple of days, just playing, without any fear. Another year, there was a ladybug swarm, and we hid underwater as best we could until it flew on by. Lots of other wildlife lived up there, too. Dad said he saw a mountain lion one night when he was out fighting a fire. Now and then we had a slow visitor, an old porcupine with half the quills missing from his tail. He came around for several years, and we left carrots out for him, then one year Dad said he saw him disappearing over the ridge with another porcupine.
Every day, once dinner was done, after we kids had washed and dried the dishes (while singing harmony together), the whole family would walk around the large meadow at dusk and look for deer and watch the evening bats. There was quite a large herd of deer that slept in the meadow, 30 or so. Sometimes in the morning we’d go look for their sleeping nests. We’d lie down in the pressed grass circles and curl up and pretend we were deer, too.
After the meadow walk, we’d play board games and cards and tell lots of jokes trying to make the others forget what they had in their hands. We always laughed so hard.
At night, we slept on the porch, listening to the coyotes singing and watching the bats zoom by in the dusk. As it got darker, every now and then we’d call out: “Look, there’s Dale Evans!” or “There’s Roy Rogers!” because they were shooting stars, too. We’d also watch for Sputnik, or at least that’s what we thought it was, and we didn’t close our eyes until we saw it.
After three months of endless summer days, suddenly Labor Day weekend arrived. Mom and Dad would pack up the car, and then we’d drive down the Sierras back into California, back into clocks and calendars and shoes and lessons and homework. But even though nine months of the year we were the same as every other kid, we always knew Lake Tahoe summers made us the luckiest kids in the world.
