“The fairest picture the earth affords.” –Mark Twain

Long before I visited Taos, Lake Tahoe formed the foundation of my involuntary perceptions during the best time of year. The mountains and the climate of Taos compared favorably with the clarity and coolness of Tahoe. Tahoe represented solace and serenity while Taos stimulated enduring social unrest. The citation from “Roughing It,” above, suggests a sublime observation but if you read Mark Twain’s creative Americana, you realize that the remark serves as a respite between naps and the negligent treatment of a camp fire. Twain says he very nearly burned down the forest that surrounds Lake Tahoe.

1

Each Memorial Day, the refugees from the hot, windy valleys in Nevada and California flee to the high country at Lake Tahoe. Cool air greets you. Wind rushes through the high green branches of the 100-foot tall Ponderosas. Summer rain drips down filled with the fresh smell of pine. High Sierra meadows, watered by mountain creeks, refresh man and beast. Up there, among the peaks, springs seep up like fountains between the granite and the grass. As the streams flow down the mountainsides through the meadows, they conspire to form Trout Creek. You can still see the cuts in the riverbanks in the Trout Creek meadow, where we kids crossed the creek on horseback or lay down on our bellies to drink our fill from the swirling snowmelt. We drank just like the cattle from the sweet pure water that slid by our noses and ended up a mile downstream in Lake Tahoe.

In late spring, there were two cattle drives. In one day, we made a quick trip with the yearlings. Later, we camped on Kingsbury Grade overnight as we herded a few hundred head of white-faced Hereford cows and calves up and over the pass from Carson Valley and down the steep, granite road to South Lake Tahoe. At times, a lively calf might suddenly spin 180 degrees and take off like a bullet shot out of a gun. No matter how many Washo Indian compadres were present, I’d get the cussing out from my stepdad, Knox Johnson. On the ranches, they always say that “family members can’t quit.”

The one-armed Washo Indian, Bounce, a year-round hand, acted like a foreman for the crew and sometimes spoke to me in his native tongue. I never learned the lingo, but remember the refrain “ain’t it, next,” pronounced more like “ennit nex.” When I wore my chaps, they used to tease me. “Billy, why you wearing that dress, ennit nex?” They’d laugh as my face turned red. Mostly, I remember how Bounce would stop for a smoke, pull out his white sack of Bull Durham tobacco with its blue-pack of tucked in rolling papers, carefully lick the papers and roll a cigarette. He used the stump of his left arm as a balance on which to lay the paper for the delicate operation, even if it was windy, on horseback or on foot.

“Hey, Billy, Knox gonna give you hell, ennit nex,” said one of the Washo Indian hands. Sure enough, Knox came riding up, eyes flaring, on his big roan, Blueberry, glowering at me on my black horse, aptly named Black Beauty.

“Godammit, Billy, why’d you let that calf get away?”

“How’d I know it was gonna take off?”

“You gotta know before they do it.”

That was long ago before the landscape gave way to asphalt, automobiles, wedding chapels, and high-rise glassed-in gambling halls at the state line. At Stateline, Nevada, where Nevada and California conjoin and the casino culture spells out its ode to Lady Luck, the dealers and the tourists poured out of the clubs to watch us pass. They greeted us with smiles and took our pictures.

We sat up higher in our saddles, tipped our straw cowboy hats down over our eyes, and pulled back on the reins of our tired horses to make them prance. “Ho, ha, Bossie!” we’d yell at the lagging cows and calves.

The crowds loved Sheriff George Byers, who wore a big white Stetson and a sidearm and seemed bigger than his six-foot-plus frame with his prosperous paunch. “Go get ’em, George!” they’d yell. George caught up with the cattle drive at the bottom of the Tahoe side of the grade for the final leg of the journey, the short ride—a mile or so—to the Stateline gambling clubs. He sat on his palomino, doffed his hat, and acknowledged the applause. He always got his picture on the front page of the local paper.

As the cattle moved south, leaving the glittering gold and silver of the clubs behind, and headed up the unpaved county road now called Pioneer Trail, the tired cows, tongues hanging out, began to pick up their white faces. They could smell the fresh grass in the meadows and the cool water in the creeks. After the long, slow 20-mile trek, the sweaty, burnt-red beasts began to trot. Their bawling voices exulted moo, mooo, moooo, in anticipation of summer in the cool green high country.

2

My parents, two sisters, and I spent the summers in a one-bedroom log cabin with a loft on the Trout Creek meadow. Bounded on the north and south by sagebrush hills with intermittent stands of 100-foot ponderosa pines, the broad green meadow glinted in the morning dew as the sun shone. Trout Creek, big enough to serve up swimming holes for boys and girls riding horseback, meanders through willows and deep grass.

I can still feel the scars from scraping my bare legs against the sagebrush and trees, when my horse got away from me. On bare feet, my toes squeezed the fine dark dirt that stained the skin a dark gray color. The breeze blows in from the lake and cools the log cabin and the place where I used to sit at the old picnic table under the pines, looking up at the sandy saddle between Freel Peak and Job’s Sister, the highest peaks in that part of the Sierras.

On the southeast corner of the cabin, there’s a handprint in the poured concrete corner with my name and the date, Sept. 29, 1952, which marks the year my stepfather laid the first two logs of the cabin. He and his helpers, Washo Indians, cut the trees down and pulled the logs out of the forest, crashing through the brush with a team of work horses, a big black Percheron and a big sorrel-colored Belgian.

Knox and the crew stacked up the logs first, then cut out the doors and windows and added a huge brick fireplace. Knox, whom I called Knoxie to his face but Dad behind his back, chose a long, hand-hewn, 12-inch beam for the fireplace mantle, a beam he found in the ruins of the Sierra House pony express station. The smaller beams in the cathedral ceiling came from a famous old Baldwin boathouse on Lake Tahoe.

Just up from the cabin on Blue Lake Avenue, which adjoins Highway 50, I hung out at Upham’s Trout Farm (the fish pond, we called it). The tourists fished and paid by the inch for their freshly caught trout. I cleaned hundreds of farm-bred rainbow trout between sneaking tiny bites of frozen horseflesh from the bait jars. It has a sweet taste. For my duties, I got paid, maybe, 50 cents, and an occasional Sidewalk Sunday ice cream bar at the end of the day.

Other days I caught my black horse at the pasture next to the trout farm and rode out across the meadow and across Trout Creek, through the forest and up to the back entrance of Art Davenport’s Trout Creek stables. Art’s cowboy hat carried several years of dust on its broad brim. His stomach protruded and suggested years of living on flapjacks. He supervised the donkey ring where kids went round and round for 25 cents a circuit and entertained their parents with one story after another. Tourists paid a dollar an hour to ride the horses. And you could look at Art’s animal show—the six-legged sheep or two-headed calf—for free. Sometimes I guided the dudes out on the trail or got down off my horse and shoveled manure into a beat-up wheelbarrow. At the end of the day, Art bought us kids a soda pop for helping out.

The trout farm is still open just down the street from the log cabin on Blue Lake Avenue. But the riding stable—like the strawberry patch next to it, where you could pick strawberries for 50 cents a basket—was vanquished a long time ago by a supermarket and super drugstore. Still, behind the shopping center and throughout the meadow and forest, I can see the trails, the same bent trees, a rock here or depression in the earth there that speak to me like old friends, reminding me of those days spent so happily in the cool shadows of the log cabin. I guess I’ve been headed back to that cabin every summer, from then until now, sometimes physically, sometimes in my daydreams.

3

Back then, we used to race our horses up and down a dirt road where Al Tahoe Boulevard cuts through the forest from Highway 50 to Pioneer Trail. Once, a bunch of us who hung out at the stable all got on our horses and went out to see a proposed race between two older college-age kids who had been bragging about their horses. They were from Sacramento or the Sierra foothills and had a lot of fancy riding gear—boots, saddles, tie-downs, and martingales. I was about 10 or 11 and riding my big black horse, named Black Beauty. I rode bareback, clad in tennis shoes, a tee-shirt, and jeans.

When we got up to the starting line, they asked me if I would count down for the start. Something came over me. “I’m going to race,” I said. They looked at me, surprised, and shrugged. Older kids and adults would always say something like, “Hey, nice pony, kid.” They didn’t really look at my horse, not really, which was part thoroughbred and part quarter horse and way bigger than some pony. They couldn’t see the rider, either. Somebody else started us. We took off. Black Beauty loved to run and she kicked their asses in the quarter mile, more or less.

“I didn’t think that old mare had it in her,” the drugstore cowboy college kids said, grudgingly, after the race.

As I leaned over and patted her neck, I whispered in her ear, “I knew you could run, Blackie.” All I had to do was turn her loose and cluck my tongue a little. She did the rest.

I learned early on that riding horses was a contact sport. I got bucked off, scraped off on trees, fell off, and run away with until I jumped off. The horse usually stopped after getting rid of the rider. You just got back up on the horse and kept on going. Horses have a sense of humor.

4

By midsummer, a timeless rhythm took over our lives, especially when we visited the pristine sandy beaches. In the afternoons at Lake Tahoe, we would swim out to rafts set on pontoons, get up, and dive back into the emerald green and turquoise blue water. Speedboats roared by carrying famous singers like Peggy Lee. The valley basin at 6,200 feet slopes down to the broad sandy beaches below the 10,000-foot peaks, marked by patches of snow left over from winter’s dress. The water in Lake Tahoe, famously cold, warms up in late July and August.

When Knox started irrigating the meadow, the water got deep enough behind the irrigation dam to swim our horses in Trout Creek. For kicks, we chased trespassers: the fishermen or suburbanites who were on foot and scared to death of small kids on big horses. I developed a neat trick where I could make my horse stop and rear up. At night, riding without saddles or bridles, we played hide and seek on our horses among the thick willow bushes in the pasture next to the Trout Farm.

Whether riding, fishing, or swimming, the days passed lazily through morning sunshine and afternoon thunderstorms. Sometimes at night we went to the drive-in and watched double features or played miniature golf. Or we lay out under the stars and peered into the firmament asking each other questions.

“Who made the sky?”

“God.”

“Who made God?”

“I forget ….”

“Damn. The only guy who knows forgot.”

5

At the end of summer, you could smell the burnt aroma of the dead, brown pine needles. The cattle began to drift down from the high mountain meadows. Roundup time. I’d get my orders from the boss, Knox: “Go get that old cow with the torn ear that always hangs round the flat rock by the big tree next to the manzanita brush by that turn in the creek across from that bunch of rocks up at the Fountain Place.” Sure, I said to myself, next to the place where the old chipmunk lives. Maybe my horse knows where that cow is, I thought to myself. And sometimes she did.

Knox knew how to think like a horse or a cow, knew where they hung out, where they were headed, and when. He was six feet, four inches and had wrists and arms the size of overgrown saplings. He rode that big blueberry roan that nobody else could ride or even catch. I could chase horses all day and not catch them in the spring. He’d walk up to them in the middle of a 200-acre pasture and bridle them. A kid or a calf was no match for Knox Johnson. He turned a desk over on a realtor once because the guy wouldn’t pay his rent for an office leased from the family. Everyone at Lake Tahoe had a Johnson story.

One time, he hired a farrier (we called ’em horseshoers) named Cecil to shoe the horses in the pasture next to the Trout Farm. Cecil did okay with the first six or seven horses. But then he ran up against Knox’s two favorites, Blueberry and Queenie, a strawberry roan. Cecil got the two horses all tangled up in ropes. Hooves were flying. He yelled and cussed. The two horses reared up and fought back. Finally, Cecil says to me, “Goddamn sonofabitch, you tell Knox he can do it.” I wondered what the tourists at the Trout Farm were thinking as the farrier whacked Blueberry and Queenie with his metal rasp, when they tried to bite or kick him.

Finally, Knox came by, about five o’clock. He said a few words and the two horses stood there like docile lambs. He scraped their hooves, filed them, and nailed on the iron shoes. It was like magic.

One time a horse outsmarted him, though, a brown gelding named Joe. Joe had a reputation for opening barbed-wire gates. That summer, the horses got out of the pasture a few times. ’Course I got the blame.

“You didn’t close the gate, Billy.”

“I think Joey’s leadin’ ’em out under the highway bridge.”

“Bull. He’s not that smart.”

Sure enough. We caught him in the act.

6

At the end of summer, after Labor Day, all I could think about was how my summer friends left for the valleys and how quiet everything got at Lake Tahoe. And I always remember how wonderfully cool and free the summers were for a young boy. He lives there still, inside my heart, alongside Trout Creek in a log cabin.