This is the view as you crest the mountain over the valley containing Lake Tahoe, if you are unlucky. While the ride up is relatively benign and even pleasant, tall trees, bubbling creeks, a winding road, the descent is hell. This could be the last view you ever see as you careen through a guardrail and plunge to your death, an insufficient barrier and a few feet of dirt all that lay between you and an eternal vacation. My wife's mother drove the way down to Lake Tahoe, being from Tennessee and driving in hills she was the natural choice, that and she had the best relationship with God. One can only imagine what this ride is like in winter with snow all over the roads. If you stood on the edge and looked down, undoubtedly the valley floor would be littered with vehicles still sporting ski racks on the roofs and moldered bones in parkas within the crushed interiors.

This is a cabin. In the same sense that the facade of a Gothic Cathedral, though beautiful in its own right, seldom reflects the interior structure, this is not a cabin. It is a nice home that implies the idea of a rustic cabin, even though it is situated on a suburban street, or so I thought. Inside the cabin were two bedrooms, a very large living area/dining area (complete with TV, Cable, DVD Player), and a nice kitchen, while in the backyard there was a hot tub. It was very comfortable and familiar to anyone living in the First World, which is why the bear scared the hell out of me. I had gotten up early one morning to head down to the lake before the screaming hordes got there, first taking the dogs out onto the front lawn of the cabin. In the street, about where this picture was taken from, was a brown bear, actually kind of burnt orange and brown--but fucking HUGE!. In retrospect, I do not know why I did not yell, "go get'em doggies!" I could have freed myself of the tiny balls and chains around my ankles in two quick swings of a paw. Instead, I ran out on the lawn and grabbed the dogs, fleeing for the safety located on the other side of that very strong glass door. Only then did I look to see the brown bear running down the street towards the forest, and I mean running like an Olympic sprinter. I had no idea bears could run so fast. Of course, I immediately ran after it, but after about a hundred feet I realized what I was doing and went back to the cabin in the woods, which is now a cabin in every rustic sense of the word.

If you have never been to Lake Tahoe, you might think it's about a lake, but it's really a basin, a giant basin used to pan for gold. Lake Tahoe has been addicted to money for a 150 years, ever since the California Gold Rush when hordes of dirty, stinking, filthy, miners descended upon the area like locusts. Where those hordes passed, the trees, the wildlife, the unlucky Washoe Indians, were decimated. A century and a half later we call this tourism. In the same way one might swirl the waters of a creek bed in a basin to separate out the gold, Lake Tahoe is designed to separate tourists from their money. See above. Here we have the focus-group tested design of the outdoor mall fountain, the shops mixed in with hotels, and there is the ski lift to haul credit cards to the top of a mountain. About a block away is Nevada and half a dozen casinos. It took about an hour after our arrival before my wife hit her jackpot.

Not slots, but credit card scanners, these are the machines of choice for my wife. Here is her favorite purchase from Lake Tahoe, a Gibeonite watch (not to be confused with the Gibeonites who were enslaved by ancient Israel). This Gibeonite is a fragment of a billions year-old meteorite that smacked into what is now Nambia thousands of years ago. The pattern on the face of the watch is a result of the iron-nickel alloy crystalizing from passage through the atmosphere, or maybe from some planet exploding, one that contained an advanced civilization that shipped off baby Superman. I, personally, was hoping that the meteor fragment would be like the meteor fragments in Smallville, and that the metal would grant superpowers, or at least transform my wife into a scantily clad, anorexic teenager like the stars of Smallville. Instead, it just cost $100, and the battery died after two days of use.

Here is an actual casino, in which you are not allowed to take pictures because people don't like to be photographed throwing their money away. Luckily, this casino was too cheap to have air-conditioning or four walls, so it opened onto the main street. It's also where I kind of got into a fight, but not really. I had gotten up early and gone into town for a little slots action, and there were four underage drunks walking down the street and being loud. One of them had a Pina Colada in hand, which is a perfectly terrible drink made with pineapple and coconut, a good enough reason for a beating by itself. As he passed me, talking about how drunk he was, he suddenly screamed in my ear just because he could. That hurt. It hurt a lot, as in an hour later my ear still hurt. I reacted by turning, grabbing him, and throwing him face first into the wall of the building. His Pina Colada splattered all over his blue Polo shirt upon impact, and then he rebounded and fell on his ass. He looked at me for about a second--then he started crying! His friends just stood there staring at me. What has the country come to when its young men drink Pina Coladas and cry like girl children? As for slots, I like the Wheel of Fortune--though Blackjack is my game. In addition to the normal slots play, if "Spin the Wheel" comes up a speaker blares "Wheel of Fortune" and you get to "spin" the wheel above by pressing a button. You win from 25 to 1000 times whatever the cost of a single play is, in this case 25 cents, so up to $250. I lost a quick $20, probably bad karma blowback, but it was karma well spent.

This is what happens when you split Jacks at Blackjack according to conventional wisdom. Splitting Jacks, or any other cards creates two hands, each with the same card, which you then play separately after paying for the second hand. You aren't supposed to split cards with a value of ten because combined they equal twenty, a very good hand in Blackjack. I managed to survive such crazy play, tripling my investment and pissing off some old guy who had elbowed his way onto the table I was playing. Sadly, this guy may not have been as lucky at the tables. What I don't get is how the hell you can be homeless at Lake Tahoe. The winters are cold and snow is everywhere. That's what happened to the Donner Party not far from Lake Tahoe, no place to go in ten feet of snow and nothing to eat but each other. At least this guy has his larder on the leash for winter.

I turned 40 during this vacation, and it shows you how old I am that I wanted to go to Denny's for my free birthday meal. They haven't been giving out free birthday meals at Denny's for, like, five years, longer if you are black. I did not know this, so I acted like an idiot, getting out my driver license and showing it repeatedly to our waitress. Our waitress was a totally hot young girl from some Scandinavian country, which demonstrates the quality of life situation at Lake Tahoe. People will do anything to live and work there. Our waitress got me a free dessert, seen here, for my birthday. Of course, it's some kind of nasty apple crumbly shit thing with ice cream, and she didn't include a lap dance with it, but still.

If you are going to Lake Tahoe for the first time, you will probably want to get out on the lake, and if you have any desire for peace and beauty, not too mention consideration for others, think sail boat. Unlike a jet-ski, which is noisy and smells, a sail boat is quiet and clean and does not disturb the spirits of the long dead Washoe Indians, who rest at the bottom of the lake. However, if you are a typical American just get a jet-ski and pilot it drunk. Maybe the spirits of the long dead Washoe Indians will be disturbed and drag you down into the cold watery depths to feed upon your noisy, polluted soul, or maybe you'll just fall off the damn thing and drown. Either way, it's a win-win. Since we didn't know how to sail a boat (my wife wants to learn), and we don't like noise and smells and having our souls devoured, we opted for a tour on the Windsor, a catamaran sail boat (my wife also took out a kayak). Although the Windsor powers up to get out on the lake, once it does so the young and shapely first mate will unfurl her sails and serve you drinks, though not necessarily in that order.

If I had been feeling nostalgic for the population density of San Francisco that is not unlike a study on cramming rats in a cage until they start eating each other, I need only turn my gaze towards traffic for boats. Lake Tahoe is pretty big, a surface area of nearly 200 square miles, so you can get away from people, but you have to break through the naval blockade first. There are about. . .one million boats clustered around the tourist saturated shore of South Lake Tahoe. It made me wish I had my own boat, but not a boat like those. My boat would be out of some apocalyptic future, a boat that was painted with a shark motif, that had lots of superfluous sharp edges and many scantily clad women in leather bikinis. My boat would ride high in the water and could run over smaller boats, a kind of Monster Truck of boats--and with missiles too! Lake Tahoe is 1500 feet deep, but I would make it 1400 feet with a hundred feet of yacht wreckage and white bones, all thanks to the. . .Sharkinator.

 

It really is like this, like a photochop by God that combines the elements of two or three separate locales into one perfect landscape. That's snow in July on the mountains, pine trees covering the earth like ivy, and the lake is a liquid blue diamond. Bad prose can't begin to describe it. It was nice.

 

For about ten minutes. And then a riverboat shows up--THERE ARE NO RIVERS AT LAKE TAHOE--escorted by a bunch of noisy boats not yet sent to the deep by my Sharkinator. Sure, some of the boats had hotties in bikinis, but half the time there were people like beached whales with legs and arms driving them. In the background is the result of a manmade landslide. It seems that they wanted to make a road back whenever they made roads without filling out environmental impact statements, instead using dynamite and calling them "manmade" because only men got to blow things up. We didn't drive on that road, but it turns out that all the roads get shut down in the winter because of avalanches, which makes you wonder why they just don't dig a tunnel all the way around a lake. I say break out the dynamite.

 

That's an island. It's what happens when God, or Nature, or Whatever, decides to make a landslide without dynamite. That island used to be part of the mountain in the background, which came apart some time in the geologic past. A big chunk of a much bigger mountain fell into the lake, changing the shape of the lake, the tiny bay, and creating that island. The island was cool, but you have to kayak to it, or swim, it's about two hundred feet off shore.

 

At turn of the 20th century, some old woman bought the the bay and island for $250,000. On the shore she built this house, the Vikingsholm, or something, which we did not get to visit, and on the island she built her tea house. I joke you not. Every day some poor bastard servant would row her out to the island from shore, where she would climb some steps cut into the rock up to her little tea house and have Earl Grey, hot. I like tea as much as the next guy, but building a house on the island just for tea? What a waste. She should have built a castle. That way, if the Washoe Indians ever rose from the dead as lake zombies to punish the white devils for developing technology and guns while the Indians sat around enjoying the scenery, then she would have been safe. That she died before the inevitable zombie attack is not relevant. The tea house burnt down a couple of decades ago when kids tried to start a fire in the hearth and the Forest Service decided it was cheaper to "restore" the island than rebuild tea house, again passing up an opportunity for a zombie proof castle. Idiots.

 

Lake Tahoe is crowded on a weekend in summer--don't go. If you do go, you will need to get up at dawn if you want to see things without the distraction of people. I also advise Photoshop. Standing on this long dock, I was struck by how dark the water was before dawn--probably because there was no light. It was a warm dark, like a blanket, and then the sun came up and pushed the covers back.

 

There was a guy with a metal detector in this image, but I brushed him out because metal detectors are fucking stupid. I mean, you go on vacation to Lake Tahoe so you can search for spare change? Just stay home and pull the cushions out of the couch. Sometimes I get the feeling that the things we see in three dimensions just exist in two. That depth is a trick of the light once it has had its coffee in the morning. In the sleepy light the different layers look like patches of cloth, orange, green, brown, and red, sewn on a garment.

 

Is anyone else creeped out by forests? I like trees, but I can't help thinking the forest wants to kill me. Lake Tahoe, the human habitation, is surrounded by forests that go on forever. You can step into that forest and walk for a hundred miles, though you probably won't get more than a hundred feet before tree roots wrap around your ankles and pull you down into the earth. Standing on the edge of that forest, all the shadows and green come together in my mind. There you are looking up at this immense, aged thing, and it is looking down on you, waiting.

 

It's strange to think the Washoe Indians saw pretty much the same meadow covered in dew at dawn, the same mist roll across the valley, the same sun illuminate the trees, just like I saw, except they saw it first. And they were probably close to naked. This picture made me feel sad, but I couldn't figure out why.

 

It wasn't until we left I realized the problem was right in front of me. It was a long line of cars leaving Lake Tahoe. Here we see a common bumper sticker: Keep Tahoe Blue. The clarity of lake has been declining at the rate of a foot per year--down to 75 feet last year--for at least 40 years. The problem is the sticker people driving vehicles, pumping out nitrogen and ozone, leaking MTBE, boating, eating, shitting, turning Tahoe gray. And I was one of them, and all I can say in my defense is that I am not so dumb as to not know it, which isn't much of a defense at all. On the plus side, I am used to living with guilt and we look forward to going back soon.