Tahoe, Blue

Gayle Brandeis

          TAHOE, BLUE

Mark Twain called Lake Tahoe—the largest alpine lake in North America, straddling the state line between California and Nevada 6,225 feet high in the Sierra Nevada mountains—“the fairest picture the whole earth affords”, although he was less taken with the name of this “noble sheet of blue water,” deeming Tahoe “repulsive to the ear.”

◊

Every time I hear about Donald Drumpf’s 2006 trip to Lake Tahoe—the trip where he met Stormy Daniels—I cringe, and not just for obvious reasons. I cringe because Lake Tahoe has become my home, and the thought of Drumpf chasing someone around in his tighty-whities anywhere near my home makes me want to crawl out of my own skin. While his encounter with Daniels was consensual (if grudgingly so on Daniels’ part), Drumpf is also alleged to have grabbed and kissed three other women without their permission during that Tahoe trip, including Jessica Drake, the 14th woman to publicly accuse Drumpf of sexual harassment during his 2016 presidential campaign. This would be deeply troubling anywhere, but for it to have happened in a place that brings me so much peace adds an extra layer of squick, an oily sediment clouding my beloved lake.

◊

Everywhere you find yourself in Lake Tahoe, you’ll see “Keep Tahoe Blue” stickers on the backs of cars or in coffee houses and boutiques where you can purchase them for a small donation. Blue here, of course, refers to the stunning color of the lake—the blue that changes depending on the weather, on the time of day, moving from turquoise in places to deep, navy velvet in others, the blue that desperately needs our protection. The water clarity hit its lowest recorded level ever in 2017 after 12,000 tons of sediment poured into the lake—a result of drought followed by heavy precipitation. That year, you could only see 59.7 feet down into the 1,644 foot deep lake, 9.5 feet less than 2016. Scientists hope to bring the clarity back to 100 feet, but it will take a lot of work to save our famous blue.

◊

Beyond Tahoe, “blue” of course means many things. The term “blue comedy”, for instance, refers to comedy that bends toward the risqué, the ribald, full of profanity and sex. Bill Cosby’s 1969 album “It’s True! It’s True!” contained a “blue” bit called “Spanish Fly”, with lines that blare like sirens now, things like “Oh yeah, that’s really groovy man, Spanish fly is groovy, yeah. From then on, any time you see a girl: ‘Wish I had some Spanish fly.’ Go to a party see five girls standing alone: ‘Boy if I had a whole jug of Spanish fly, I’d light that corner up over there.’”

◊

During Bill Cosby’s trial on April 12, 2018, Janice Dickinson testified that “America’s Dad” raped her in Lake Tahoe in 1982, after he flew her here to “discuss her career.” When she complained of menstrual cramps during dinner with Cosby and his musical director, Cosby gave her a blue pill he said would help, one that made her feel “dizzy and woozy”; he invited her up to his room shortly thereafter.

“I was feeling really lightheaded and it didn’t sound like my words were coming out,” she said on the stand. “I couldn’t get the words out I wanted to say. After I took pictures, he got on top of me as I was seated on edge of bed. I remembered his smell of cigars, espresso, body odor…I couldn’t move, I was motionless…wondering what the heck is he doing…I was in shock; I didn’t consent to this; I hadn’t said yes. I didn’t fly to Tahoe to have sex with Mr. Cosby.”

◊

People say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but what happens in Tahoe, in the depths of it, truly does stay. The water is so cold, it is said to preserve bodies (and.in fact, the wet suit-clad body of a diver was retrieved from the lake 17 years after his death; a representative from the El Dorado Sheriff’s Office said “He looked 90 percent like a person, the physical form was there, he was very present.”)  In an apocryphal story, Jacque Cousteau emerged shaken from a Tahoe dive, saying “The world is not ready for what I have seen.” People have speculated he saw mob victims with cement shoes, or maybe the bodies of Chinese railroad workers killed by bosses who didn’t want to pay, or perhaps corpses still in Victorian garb who had died when their pleasure cruise sank. It appears Cousteau never actually visited Tahoe, but the stories remain, and the possibility that bodies fill the lake still remains, as well—bodies suspended in all that blue the way trauma remains in the body, suspended inside our cells.

◊

When we moved to Tahoe, I prayed it would be a trauma free, scandal free, zone; it was the place where my husband and I had come for a fresh start after a six month separation. We had just started to reconcile when I received an invitation to teach at Sierra Nevada College on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe for a year, and this felt like the perfect chance for a new beginning, a place where we could rebuild without being confronted by painful memories everywhere we turned. And it has been that place for us, a place where we fell in love with the beauty around us as we fell all the more deeply back in love with one another. About halfway through that one year visiting writer gig, we decided we didn’t want to leave, and have been here four years now. We renewed our vows on the shore of the lake—I wore a blue dress; our new wedding bands hold a strip of blue stone.

◊

Horrific behavior by a president-to-be or a Jell-o shilling comic shouldn’t sully my personal connection with this place—and it won’t, not in any lasting way—but hearing such stories set here does give me chills, maybe because they remind me bad things happen everywhere, even in a place so full of beauty, a place that represents a move away from pain. But of course pain has long been built into this land—the people indigenous to this region, the Washoe, whose name literally means “people from here”, were driven off this land by settlers and mining companies who cut down all the piñon trees in the basin, trees the Washoe relied upon for food, and sent the lumber down the mountain to build the mining town of Virginia City. The gorgeous trees that tower around us now are fairly new, planted after the land was stripped in the name of silver. And personal pain lives here for us now, too—my dad died two years after he moved to the region with us, so we regularly cross paths with sites of sadness, although the area is thankfully full of sweet memories of him, too; each time I drive past a particular stretch of the east shore of the lake, I remember my dad saying the view made him feel like his mind was giving birth.

◊

Further expounding upon his hatred for the name Tahoe, Mark Twain wrote “They say it means ‘Fallen Leaf’” (he was incorrect about this—Tahoe actually derives from the Washoe, “dá’aw,” meaning “The Lake”) “—well, suppose it meant fallen devil or fallen angel, would that render its hideous, discordant syllables more endurable? Not if I know myself.”

If I know myself, those syllables soothe me, whisper yes, whisper blue, whisper home.

◊

When I gaze out at the lake now, it often feels like a mirror—when I am feeling calm, the water is calm; when I am feeling choppy inside, little waves churn the surface—but I know there is no direct correlation, know how insignificant I am on the scale of this body of water, and I like that, like how much bigger it is than me and my naive wishes for a pain-free life. Whether I like it or not, the lake reflects all of us—Twain’s fallen angels and fallen devils alike; the lake has room for all of us in her deepest cold blue heart.

◊