Well. The Caldor Fire has apparently topped Echo Summit and is burning downslope toward the Tahoe Basin. Summer people and year-round residents are packing up and leaving, though evacuations have not yet been ordered for the South Lake Tahoe area. The smoke, they say, is driving a lot of people to leave now rather than wait for the order.
The Lake (as it was called, still is, I imagine) was a refuge from the summer heat in the Valley. My sister's first husband's family had a "place at The Lake" that they'd go to when the Valley heat got to be too much, but by the time I knew about the Tahoe place, most of his family had either died or had moved away, so the "place at The Lake" sat empty some summers.
One year, though, we all went up there. My mother, me, my sister and her husband, and their (then) two kids.
It was kind of crowded, but we made do. The place was no mansion, but it was charming, old and a little creaky, dusty and musty. It appeared to be a log cabin -- and for a log cabin, it was very large. I learned that it wasn't actually built of logs, though. It was a straightforward frame house that had split log siding on the outside, and log-style panels applied to some rooms of the inside. There was a big rock fireplace in the living room made from rocks collected near the building site. That site was on the South Shore, right on the Lake. There was a steep stairway down to the beach and from there was a dock and boathouse. The boathouse contained a Chris Craft speed boat, very elegant but small compared to some of the other boats plying the lake, and not nearly as fast as they were either.
There was a garage on the street, and the back end of the garage was fitted up as a maid's room with a bathroom. There was no maid, though, and my brother in law said they hadn't had one for as long as he could remember. So the room in the garage was kept as a potential guest room but hadn't been used for that either.
The place/cabin/house itself had two bedrooms and a bathroom, and there was a room upstairs that had a bed in it but was really just an unfinished attic room. There was a "winter kitchen" when you entered (from the back of the house) that had a wood range, and a "summer kitchen" just beyond that had an old gas range on legs and a small old electric refrigerator.
The living room had an open ceiling, and hanging from the rafters was a huge (at least to me) gas chandelier. Well, it had originally been gas but was converted to electricity. There were other gas lights in the house that were now electric. There was a calendar in the kitchen dated 1904, and my brother-in-law said that this place was one of the first "cabins" built on the South Shore, if not the first. It was very plain and primitive compared to some of the mansions that had gone up since.
Decorating the place were many Native American baskets, some used for storage but most just on display. I'd say, thinking back, there were probably 20 or 30 altogether, mostly small or medium size, tightly woven, while a few were large and held kindling wood and paper for the fireplace. I thought they were fascinating, and I was told they were purchased from Natives that lived (at one time) in the area.
Furnishings were made of logs, though the beds were brass. There was a dining table set up in the living room. There was a big picture window in the living room facing the lake. A long, not too wide porch was accessed from the living room, but the door stuck, and so the porch was actually reached from the yard after going out the kitchen door which scraped on the floor but wasn't stuck. The yard was dotted with pine trees and was quite large, especially the front yard. The bathroom had a corner sink, a toilet with a high tank and pull chain and a clawfoot tub.
Altogether, the place seemed idyllic and I enjoyed the time we spent there. It was something completely new to me. It was something that rich people did. My brother-in-law's family was upper middle class. I thought of them as rich, but they wouldn't have agreed. When my brother-in-law's grandmother died in 1962, the place a Tahoe was sold as part of settling her estate. I don't recall the amount it was sold for, but it was not much for such a prime location, and I remember my sister said it was sold essentially for the land value, and she thought it wouldn't be there in a couple of years as the older places on the South Shore were being bought up by developers as tear-downs to be replaced with condos.
That was a sad thought, but "progress" was what it was. I didn't really think about it much after that.
Maybe ten years later, I took my wife to Lake Tahoe and drove around looking for the house. I told her I didn't think it would be there any more, that it had probably been replaced with condos like so many had been. We drove down the road on which it had been, and I didn't find it. I saw lots of condos instead, and it made me very sad.
Turns out, I hadn't driven far enough. In fact the house/cabin/place is still there, looking from the outside almost identical to what I remembered. I found it one day idylly cruising Google Street View. How about that? It surprised the heck out of me. "That's it!" Yep.
Then to my even greater surprise as I was re-viewing the area because of the looming fire catastrophe, I found a listing for it on Bookings.com -- a listing that said it wasn't available now, but had been available for short term rental since 2016. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was.
This is the listing:
https://www.booking.com/hotel/us/lakeview-holiday-home-897.html
There are 24 photos in the gallery. Some has changed, but much is as I remember it.
This is the back of the house/cabin/place. The log siding has been replaced with board siding. Where the deck is was a lean-to addition that had the wood-range in it. There was no dormer. Everything else, though, including the pine trees, is as I remember it.
This is the front porch, lake in the background. Note the slender log posts. This is as I remember it.
This is the living room. Some changes have been made. The fireplace is the same, I think even the mirror over the fireplace is the same, though the wood-stove insert is new. We had an open fire to take off the chill of morning. The picture window is similar if not identical. I don't remember the dining table in front of the window, though. I think it was on the opposite wall. What is so strikingly different, however, is the whiteness of the room and the closed ceiling. It really changes the feel of it. When I was there, the ceiling was open to the rafters above. The walls were paneled in faux logs. It was dark-feeling. But not actually dark because of the big window. The big electrified gasolier that hung from the rafters was turned on at night and despite it five or six globes, it cast a soft warm light rather than the bright light I expected. I wouldn't be surprised if the light bulbs had been there forever and were original Edison 25w or something.
This is the opposite wall of the living room. I won't say for certain, but it's possible this is the same furniture as was there when I was there, just with new-ish cushions. What was there was made of logs, so... could be. There was no wall heater, no heat at all except for the fireplace, the walls were the faux log paneling, the ceiling was open, and there was no opening in the wall from the kitchen. Other than that, the table and chairs were on this wall, the sofa up against the picture window, and the other chairs were by the fireplace.
Another view of the living room. The corner cupboard was there. Filled with Native baskets and odds and ends. The door to the porch, I think, had glass in it but I could be wrong. All the windows had to be shuttered for the winter, and the shutters were kept in the garage. Taking down all the shutters was quite a job.
This is the kitchen. It's hardly changed at all. You can see the bathroom through the door at the end. What's different is newish flooring -- I remember rough boards. The walls are white. I remember a kind of buff tending toward orange. The stove is newish, but it's in the same place as the leggy gas stove that I remember. Beside the sink is a laundry tub but the sink is the same, the laundry tub is the same, and the window is the same. There was no window into the living room above the stove though. The open shelves look to be the same as well except for the color. The butcher block next to the stove actually may have been there, but I don't remember it. The ceiling in this part of the house was enclosed as it is now.
This is the bathroom. The sink and little medicine cabinet are the same. The glassed in shower, no. As I say, there was a clawfoot tub. It may or may not have had a shower attachment and one of those oval shower curtain rods. I think it did, but I can't be sure. I know it smelled a little musty. The toilet was where the camera is for the photo.
This is the front bedroom where my sister and her husband slept on a brass double bed. The chair may be original, the bed and nightstands aren't. The enclosed ceiling, though, is what I remember.
This is the back bedroom where my mother and I slept on two twin sized brass beds. I don't know how they fit in there, but they did! The kids, I remember, slept in the living room, one on the couch (the girl) and one in a sleeping bag on the floor (the boy.)
This is the lake-side front of the house. Except for the dormer, it's the same.
And finally, this is the lake view from the front. You can barely make out the stairs to the beach in the distance. There was a dock and a boathouse with a motor-boat, but they're gone now, I suspect lost in one of the storms that rocked the Lake some years ago. They may have been removed due to policy changes. I don't know. But they're gone.
I also don't know if the fire will get as far as the South Shore. Probably not, but just the chance that it might is disturbing, depressing. I've been seeing some of the consequences of the fires in California on the
AlertWildFire website, and it's terrible.
I don't think California will come out of this fire season the same at all. I grieve for what has been lost, as I did when Paradise burned to the ground. Ironic? Emblematic? I don't know.
There have been many wild fires in California in the past, and when I was a kid, I used to watch the San Gabriel Mountains burn every year. But this time... it's different.
I'm planning a trip to California -- probably for the last time -- in October. I hope the fires will be at least contained if not out. But you never know.
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Going back and embiggening the pictures, there's no doubt that this is the house/cabin/place at The Lake I visited and stayed at many years ago, but my memories of it are... cough... somewhat faulty.
First, I'm not sure now that the interior and exterior were log or imitation log. That's how I remember it, but looking at the pictures, I suspect the board siding was what was on the place when I stayed there and the interior was wood paneled but not to resemble logs. The rooms were not painted white. The kitchen and bathroom were painted, I think, but none of the other rooms were. The living room had a ceiling over part of the space, but there was no ceiling over the picture window and fireplace area. I note in the pictures that there is a lean-to addition at one end of the kitchen but I remember one where the back deck is now. My memory also turns the kitchen around. What I'm wondering is whether there was an entrance door through the current lean-to as well as an entrance in the now-gone lean-to. There had to be some place for the wood-burning range, and there appears to be no place for it in the current arrangement.
As I've said before, memory can play strange tricks on us. Sometimes the most crystal clear memories are, for lack of a better word, false. Other times, they're like dreams. Elements are real enough, while a good deal of what we may remember is not real. It didn't happen, or maybe it happened but not the way we remember it.
This is the place at The Lake, no doubt about it. And it's much the same as I remember it. But details, let's say, are not as sharp as I would like to think of them.
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So the fires were diverted to Kirkwood, and all is sort of kind of well at SLT these days, smoke or no.
I loved the media narrative that the folks who had to evacuate were "blue collar workers" who can't afford to live anywhere else in the Tahoe Basin. Yeah, right.
No, most weren't. They were year-round and summer people, newcomers and long timers who see The Lake as a kind of Paradise Escape, who -- mostly -- brought the suburbs with them, and their condos and "cabins" showed it. Their places, for the most part, weren't the mansions of the hyper-rich that dot The Lake's margins, but they were by no means shacks of the poor and working class. They are very much upper middle class substantial suburban houses and condos set in the forest. Had the fires come into South Lake Tahoe they would have wiped out this expensive notion of Paradise, like many suburban Paradises -- including Paradise, California -- have been wiped out before. It would have been sad, and for some, tragic. I wouldn't have liked to see it at all.
But if these people were "blue collar" the notion has no meaning at all.
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