Several hives worth of buzzing words follow me around every day, but they are unruly little things, and refuse to fly out my fingertips when I ask them to. Instead, a few of them had taken to buzzing around inside my eyeballs, making my computer screen seem underwater. The cure? Trees. Mountain. Air. Cold water. Friends. Absence of screens.
I threw those keywords into a bowl, added two spoonfuls of serendipity and a quarter cup of flexible schedule, baked it with a few days' notice and when the timer dinged I stepped out of a rented hybrid in Tahoe. Magic.
We spent two days up by the lake that I will always think of as the liquid heart of the Sierra Nevada. It was three parts eating, two parts walking, and one part Romancing the Stone on a TV that was perfectly tiny, just the way I wanted.
Danny DeVito, man. Nice.
East Coasters sometimes hold seasonal leaf variation as a talking point against the West Coast, but wouldya look at that, yellow. Lots and lots of yellow, looking to the eyes the way the daytime sunlight felt to the skin.
The nights were chilly enough to make me grin with gritted teeth as the celestial gods of Tahoe reminded me of just how many stars there really are. Wow.
And just in case I hadn't realized this was perfect timing, how about a shooting star to say hello? Why yes, yes I will. Graag.
Fierce winds the first night put military formations of white caps storming the beach, and the next morning showed a corpse-ridden battlefield, though the crawdads never had a chance.
Jump in the frigid lake, because that's what you do, and stop off on the way out at Emerald Bay, where kids cuted, water lapped, and languages varied; Russian, German, Mandarin, and lots of French. Luckily there was some American in there too, or I would have grown depressed at our national ingratitude.
Tahoe is an easy place to spend a couple days, grow some friendships, and never consider checking off the To-Visit List. There's always more.
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