As Garrison Keillor might say, it’s been a quiet
week at Lake Silverton Shores. The lake—more of
a pond, really, but once again I won’t quibble—adjoins
the property of my friends Eva LaBarge and
Eddie Renner, who have spent the last 10 days loving
me to death and treating me like a queen. (Talk about
comfort being the wanderer’s danger!) The week
was blissfully quiet in the sense that I wasn’t
going anywhere and could both relax and get some work
done. But that doesn’t mean that nothing happened:
Like Keillor’s “News from Lake Woebegon,”
my update is full of interesting experiences great and
small.
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Sunning At Lake Tahoe
We spent the afternoon of Saturday, the 20th, at Lake
Tahoe’s Meeks Bay. The day was beautiful—hot
and sunny, but with a refreshing breeze—and the
scenery was stunning. The crystalline, aqua-colored
lake is surrounded by conifer-covered mountain peaks,
and there is no such thing as a bad view. Water temperatures,
however, are chilly: In late July, the snowmelt-fed
lake was no warmer than the mid 60s (it virtually never
rises above 70 degrees F.). Thin-blooded semi-Southerner
that I have become, I found the water too cold to swim
in; but it was a great pick-me-up after baking in the
sun.
On our way back to a Reno coffeehouse, we stopped at
the Tahoe home of one of Eva’s co-workers, Doreen
Begley. She and her husband Brent
live in Reno but escape to the Tahoe place on weekends,
and I could see why—it was an incredibly soothing
little mountain house. I knew I was in California when
we went out to the backyard and found a tiny, Zen-like
tree-and-rock garden graced by small statues of Mickey
Mouse, Buddha, and St. Francis of Assisi. The couple
certainly deserves to relax, though. Doreen spent most
of her nursing career in some of the busiest emergency
rooms on the West Coast, and has been with the Nevada
Hospital Association for only a year or so. Brent is
a lawyer-mediator. I liked them both immediately, and
since we had to dash off far too quickly, we invited
them over for dinner on Monday night.
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Double the Talent
We were going to the coffeehouse open-mic night to
hear Josh and Jake Charlebois, 20-something
twins who are superb musicians. Josh is another of Eva’s
co-workers, and early on he shared my book synopsis
with his father, a member of the National Writers’
Project. Dave Charlebois had become one of my biggest
supporters, and I was dying to meet him—but it
was not to be. He was off to the Sierras for a weekend
of hiking with a friend, so we had to settle for a brief
phone conversation. One of these days we will meet;
but that evening I had the great pleasure of making
the acquaintance of his wife, sons, and future daughters-in-law.
Josh and Jake are not only great performers, but they
also write great songs. If they don’t land a recording
contract one of these days, there is truly no justice
in the world. I look forward to being able to say I
knew them before they were famous.
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Good Food, Good Company
Sunday evening Eva, Eddie, and I feasted on six of
the biggest, sweetest Dungeness crabs any of us had
ever had, and Monday evening I cooked a big Italian
meal for them and Doreen and Brent. (In the past two
months I hadn’t made anything more complicated
than what I could prepare on my one-burner propane stove,
and I was itching to cook up a storm. So it was love
at first sight when I entered the large, efficient kitchen
in my friends’ new house; I knew I would enjoy
cooking in it. “Someone should!,” said Eva.)
Doreen kept us in stitches with funny ER war stories,
such as the tale of the couple who crashed while doing
things they shouldn’t have been doing in a moving
vehicle. Doreen said she asked the other nurse as they
started working on them if she didn’t notice something
odd—they hadn’t even had to strip them.
“We always did it without even thinking, so we
almost didn’t notice that they came in naked,”
she said, mischievously telling Eddie she could strip
him in 12 seconds flat. She is a dynamo, and it was
easy to imagine her taking charge in an emergency room.
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The New Tool/Toy
There were other memorable feasts: the seafood dish
Eva brought home for me one night when I decided I really
ought to keep working; the sushi on the beach; the family-style
meal we had in a Basque restaurant. Believe it or not,
though, we did do something other than eat. The biggest—or
at least most expensive—thing I did was buy a
new laptop. The old one had been giving me some scares,
and it seemed wise to replace it while I was in Reno.
You see, Eddie was my technological ace in the hole.
He’s a boyish 35-year-old techno-geek who does
things for the software company Intuit that I couldn’t
even imagine; the house is wired in every possible way
and full of electronic and digital toys. He’s
also an all-around great guy (all of Eva’s women
friends want to clone him), so I knew he would help
me. Actually, he did everything that needed to be done—all
I did was supply the credit card.
The night I got the Toshiba Satellite, Eddie tested
it with a DVD of the 2002 World Cup soccer match in
which the U.S. upset Portugal. The June match had started
at 4:30 AM Reno time, so Ed used his Tivo® digital
video recorder to download it from a satellite and burn
it onto a DVD while he and Eva slept. Now we were playing
that DVD on my new laptop (on battery power) as we ate
dinner on the patio and gazed at the sunset. It was
just like watching the match on TV—the resolution
and picture quality were that good—and it ended
before the battery ran out of juice. The three of us
marveled at the fact that we had the world at our fingertips,
and we had it at a price we generally could afford.
You didn’t have to have Bill Gates’ monopoly
or millions to enjoy these technological advances. And,
of course, the technicolor sunset was free.
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Techno
Ecstasy, Techno Agony
My experiment with technology on this trip has played
out like a passionate love affair: highs and lows, ecstasy
and agony. The cell phone has kept me in touch with
family and friends all over the country—but it’s
only had a signal about half of the time, and I’ve
nearly always been out of touch in the remote areas
where I’m happiest but theoretically most in need
of a lifeline. (Thank God there have been no emergencies,
and God willing there won’t be.) The old laptop
has annoyed and alarmed me to no end—but at the
ripe old age of six, it is downright ancient
now and deserves to go to the great network in the sky.
I’ve been able to pay all of my bills but one
online, but the credit-card Website is painfully slow
and I’ve sometimes had trouble printing my statements.
And so it goes. Like just about everything else in life,
technology can be both a blessing and a curse.
Which brings me to Uli’s warranty and service
contract. I said last week that I continue to refuse
to schedule the Odyssey, but I don’t think there’s
any getting around scheduling Uli’s 20K check-up.
A little over a week before I landed in Reno, I called
the local dealership in the hope that I could have him
serviced while I was here—he’s coming up
on 19K and missed the 15K oil change because we were
on the road, so this one is important. (Not to mention
that I want to be completely ready for the long stretches
of open space on the northern plains.) However, the
dealership was booked through the end of the month and
couldn’t squeeze me in. So now I’ve got
to find another dealership in the Pacific Northwest,
book a date, and put myself on a rough schedule that
will get me there on time but not rush me too badly
or keep me sitting around eating up time and money.
You can dance to a different tune, but you’ve
always got to pay the piper one way or another.
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The Bard On the Beach
This past Saturday night (the 27th), Eva, Eddie, and
I went back to Lake Tahoe, but this time to Sand Harbor
for Shakespeare rather than to Meeks Bay for sun. The
bard knew quite a bit about paying the piper, and his
glorious works remind us that the essentials of the
human condition are unchanging and there is nothing
new under the sun. So although I was sitting on a blanket
on the beach rather than in the Globe Theatre and I
was watching a “Taming of the Shrew” set
in Trinidad with a Jimmy Buffett-like manservant and
contemporary allusions, it was all the same. The play’s
the thing, indeed, and this one was very well played.
“Taming” has always been one of my favorite
of Shakespeare’s works; considering that the whole
man-mastering-woman thing makes me crazy, people who
know me might find that odd. But I suppose the play
appeals to me because it’s about people realizing
that things aren’t always as they seem but a price
always must be paid, and because Kate doesn’t
surrender anything of true importance and Petruccio
comes to appreciate the fact that she’s more than
a dowry. Both learn, I think, that the other is really
his or her perfect match.
Shakespeare and sunsets are the perfect inoculation
against the kind of hubris that builds Towers of Babel:
Technology—like life and love—is what we
make of it, and nothing more or less. It’s good
to think about that every now and then.
Stay tuned for next week’s installment. . . .
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