The fires at Lake Tahoe (sad, drought, brave firefighters, very sad) remind me of a circumnavigation of Lake Tahoe that I made two years ago. A US Forest Service exec, who'd engaged me to do a workshop for his organization, asked if I'd like to see the lake. No hesitation in responding to that invitation. Here's the report I posted to the first edition of Endless Knots in July 2005:
So a sheltered woman from the East walks into a casino in the West, stays for a week, and never touches a slot machine (even though her cousin sends her numbers to play and there are, say, 10k machines outside the bathroom, on the way to restaurants, on the way to conference rooms, mine called Pinion).
The US National Forest Service got me there. Remember Reinventing Government, the craze that swept the world in 1993? There were reinvention efforts everywhere—towns, states, countries, even. In the US, the effort that began in the Executive Office Building under then Vice-President Gore still lives today in the government’s Reinvention Labs in the US Department of Agriculture. Thanks to Libba and Gifford Pinchot and their pioneering efforts at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, I was invited to spend last week working with TEAMS, one of 10 “enterprises” in the Forest Service. (To save money, they held the event in a hotel that was entirely neon—inside.)
In the case of seven-year-old TEAMS, about 115 people, give or take, work together virtually to plan and implement projects for the Forest Service. They are their own little business within the government, competing with private industry, and working interdependently on some complex projects. A typical successful project: Angelos National Forest, where community, industry, and the Forest Service came together to clean-up, or at least lower the risk, of a tinderbox in Southern California. Or reintroducing the bull trout to the Willamette River, which one of the fish biologists attending the training recently accomplished. Less successful projects sometimes end in lawsuits. Not easy work.
Their “interdisciplinary” project teams are made up of “ologists”—among them, arche-, soci-, wildlife bi-, ge- --and a landscape architect or two. They respond to projects that the Forest Service needs done. Contentious territories, these.
They work completely virtually. Most work from home. They spend a lot of time in the woods. So the kind of stuff we do is useful to them.
Thus, the Casino in Reno. Six days in a freezing building in a city where the temp was 95. “At least it’s not humid,” my friend Carole, about whom more below, said.
The Casino. Many on oxygen. Two bottles of beer in front of one skinny gray-hair in tattered clothes playing the slots at 8 am. De-pressing. Depressing. Depress-ing.
Until the last night, when Ranger Bob, let’s call him that, though he’s not a ranger and he’s not named Bob, but he does know his forests, asks if I want to see Lake Tahoe. For someone who’s seen a lot of the world, I haven’t seen a lot of the US West so I’m game. We climb into his red Toyota pick-up--no electronics, which don’t make sense given where this vehicle usually travels; I have to ask to turn on the AC, as I’m sweltering and he’s used to it--and we’re off around the lake via Mount Rose, past the Ponderosa Ranch, across Stateline, and into California.
Soft granite. White bark pine. Incense cedar. Jeffrey Pine. Ranger Bob knows every tree, every project, every forest along the route.
At 8000 feet, I realize that I’m probably going to pass my friend Carole’s family house at Tahoe, so I call her in Boston, she gives us directions, just on the north side of Emerald Bay, and in no time at all, we’re sitting on the cliff where her house is built on National Forest Service land, looking at the huge pine that’s dripping sap on her porch.
By 8:15, we’re travelling south along the Truckee River and into Truckee itself. Where to eat? The Truckee Hotel, of course, where was consumed one of the truly great meals: four kinds of organic heirloom tomatoes with an equal number of salts (sea, Hawaiian, French, and herb) and fresh basil; hamachi crudo, meaning very thinly sliced sashimi with two kinds of roe, some kind of crazy spicy flakes, and pickled radish; Dungeness crab with hearts of palm and avocado (the nouns tell the story); al ceppo pasta with pine nuts and garlic; and…wild king salmon with wasabi cream sauce on creamed corn served with corn fritters.
Drive immediately there. Order this meal and tell me how good it is.
