During the last week of February, just prior to the publication of Inside the Liberal Arts, I found myself literally snowbound in the Sierras, on the California side of Lake Tahoe. Allow me to lapse from abstract to narrative discourse and tell you about that extraordinary week; think of it as a break from all the Deep Thought -- the prize in the Crackerjack box of the Inside the Liberal Arts blog.
Tahoe is a gem of the American West: one of the largest and deepest lakes outside of the Great Lakes and more than a mile high, straddling California and Nevada. I hadn’t seen it since I was fourteen. I got two or three brief glimpses of it through the snowstorm.
To begin at the beginning: I flew from New York to Denver on a Wednesday morning and connected to Reno. A three-hour technical problem delayed the second flight, but I didn’t think there was any hurry. I could use the time to write.
After finally arriving in Reno, I picked up a rental SUV and headed west toward California on I-80. As I climbed into the Sierras, darkness settled and the snow began. Despite having all-wheel drive, it seemed safest to stop overnight in Truckee, CA, about twenty miles short of my destination of Tahoe City, where I was to meet up with my son Jeremy, daughter-in-law Hannah, and my newborn granddaughter Clementine, along with a gaggle of Hannah’s family, the Mitchells. So I stopped in Truckee and got what I was told was the last room in the local Marriott.
Thursday morning the snow hadn’t let up, and I was told I’d need chains to drive legally down to Tahoe City. While clearing snow of the car, I dropped the car keys in the fresh powder. That could have proven interesting – but somehow I found them quickly. I’m not a big fan of snow driving, but I found a local auto parts store that sold me Norwegian “socks” to cover my front tires. These light-weight items looked like fitted bed sheets with netting to cover the tread of the tires. As I was informed, they are the legal equivalent of chains “in fifty states.”
I had to put the socks on the tires myself, which is supposed to take five minutes if you know what you’re doing. And I managed the job after some twenty minutes of backing and advancing the car three or four feet to get the socks to fit snugly on the tires. Then I headed for the cottage I’d reserved at an inn in Tahoe City.
The drive was okay, by which I mean I survived it. The car never slipped, but it was harrowing enough that afterwards, the fingers of my right hand were spasming from gripping the wheel. I settled into the cozy, rustic cabin in the deep snow, then drove back a mile or two to a roadhouse where I joined Jeremy, Hannah, and the Mitchells for lunch – and also met my new granddaughter for the first time in her father’s rented SUV.
Grandfather and Granddaughter meet for the first time.
Our first encounter was, of course, the high point of my trip. Over the weekend, the adults enjoyed a couple of days of great skiing at Palisades-Tahoe, and then another big snowstorm threatened. I moved out of my rustic cabin and into the Air B&B that the family had rented a few miles away. (Six people in the Mitchells’ party had by now left the house, leaving four adults, two kids, and the baby – and room for a grandfather as well). Just in time, as the second blizzard arrived – big time.
I had loved the rustic cabin, but being snowed in with family in a large house was much more fun. We were a jovial group, ranging in age from ten-week-old Clementine to her 82-year-old great-grandmother. The Mitchells are a family that inhales oxygen and exhale laughter, and I can relate to that.
I had to cancel a planned stop in Houston on the way home to see my other grandchildren (age two and four), and fretted about the drive back to Reno; but everyone else was headed for the Bay Area and had a more daunting drive over the Donner Pass, just west of Truckee. We were stuck there until the roads cleared, and for the most part, none too restless.
My car in the blizzard.
The house near the lake, aswirl in the deepest and softest powder snow I have ever seen, was proved an ideal setting for reading and writing. Among other things, I read the play “Dangerous Corner,” by J.B. Priestley, one of my favorite playwrights. I had seen the play performed years ago in London: a stew of secrets, lies, intrigues, surprises, and antagonisms among seven characters in an English country house. Certain parallels to my immediate situation (minus the secrets, gunshots, etc.) were evident.
Another timely read was a novella titled “Eastbound’ by the French writer Maylis De Kerangal: an absorbing page-turner about a young Russian recruit heading east with his unit on the Trans-Siberian Express, and desperate to desert. (Spoiler alert: you can hardly blame him.) He meets a middle-aged Frenchwoman who is escaping from a relationship, and who hides him in her compartment. They have no common language, but the plot thickens just the same.
The Siberian forests and snow, and the confines of the train, resonated with my snowbound situation – though it put paid to my longstanding interest in traveling on the Trans-Siberian.
As for the skiing, those two days between the blizzards were delightfully sufficient. As the second storm came in, the ski area was closed altogether due to the avalanche danger and problems accessing the mountain by car. Some sledding was accomplished; but a more amusing diversion for me was watching the Mets play spring training games in 80-degree Florida weather.
Those Tahoe days were a reminder of how conducive isolation can be (in an airplane, or in a beautiful house in a snowstorm) to reading and writing – most of all when it’s a blend of privacy and shared isolation with people you love. Along with the reading, I completed a half-dozen new blog posts. In the month following, back in New York, I only came up with one or two.
To be sure, getting home would be a relief – no more airlines, car rentals, or road worries. (I had yet another adventure in Nevada on my way back to Reno, but that will be fodder for a future post.) For a grandfather and writer – as well as a skier, reader, and baseball fan – it was an unexpectedly happy and productive week, and a big one for the memory bank.