Enjoy Your Labor Day

Posted on August 31, 2007

Victorian Psychedelic

Photo by Erika Ramel: We’re proud to present our first reader photograph. These Victorians are a stone’s throw from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. What better way to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love?

Wanna share a picture from your own Walkabout Jones? Send your pictures to walkaboutjones@gmail.com

Where’s My Laptop?

Posted on August 30, 2007

 Dreamer’s Coffee House and Deli, Reno, Nevada

Morning, North Lake Tahoe

Posted on August 29, 2007

Just one of those mornings. Cold shower. Phantom stain on my favorite shirt. I back out of the driveway and in less than a minute, I’m pulled over by the highway patrol. Dude walks like a cowboy as he fondles his holster. “What did I do, officer?” I’ve forgotten to affix my registration sticker. I’m to go home and take care of it, stat. He runs a lengthy background check and lets me go with a stern warning. I wonder—What the hell was that? I drive down Highway 28 to my friendly mountain convenience store. I crave my national newspaper fix, but by the time I get there, cold, stained, reeking of bacon, the newsrack’s as bare as a bronco’s back. I trudge to my neighborhood coffee house, where they’ve jacked the price another nickel and my favorite pastry has sold out. I sit in a giant latte puddle. Soon, I’m limping through Tahoe City—wet butt, hungry, culturally deprived, hassled by the man, poor, foul and shivering—and it seems like nothing in the world could make me feel better.

Then I look to my left. People have gathered along the railing as though something has drawn them to it. Nobody speaks. Maybe a bright-eyed, “Look at that.” Or a woman whispering, “Beautiful.” We watch the sun dance on the lake. Rays leap off ripples until the water appears electric. On the surface, everything’s at peace: Little boats bobbing. The pier glistening. Purple mountains majesty along the Nevada coast. A breeze flows through in calm, cool tufts, and for a moment everything is right. I raise my camera, hold it straight and try to do it justice.

“Stop, dude. Dude, stop.”

Posted on August 27, 2007

 Commons Beach, Tahoe City, California

Early Afternoon Saloon, Virginia City

Posted on August 25, 2007

Ask historians about Virginia City, Nevada, and they’ll tell you that it’s the nation’s largest historic landmark. But ask any merrymaker—whether they’re apple-cheeked granddads or Harley-clad motorcycle mamas—and they’ll tell you the star of Virginia City is its saloons. Two churches and 900 bars, or so the adage goes. It might be a small exaggeration, but one thing is true. Since the 1860’s, saloons have been the only businesses in the city to steadily survive. The look of today’s watering holes vary. Some hardly resemble the old west, while others have every trapping of a saucy biker bar.

Occasionally, you’ll walk into a place where Skynard isn’t rocking, the TV isn’t squawking, and the rough-hewn baseboards hearken back to days long before our earthly joyride. When we came upon this saloon, it was one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and the bar’s pin drop silence seemed almost incongruous with the revelry outside. The gentleman sitting in the foreground, a historic worker, was dressed in 1880’s garb. He finished a beer while in quiet conversation with the two women beside him. My friend, following a Virginia City protocol to buy a beer in every bar, bellied up and bought his bottle. We slipped inside a backroom—an old gentleman’s social club—and while I pondered the ghost of Ulysses S. Grant, I leaned through the doorway and took this photo. Calm and intimate. It’s easy to idealize such simple moments. I dreamed of days-long-since-past when the backbeat was softer and strangers knew a thing about hospitality. A trip to Virginia City’s cemetery offered a look at the flipside. Many who lived in this bustling boomtown (which once had 30,000 residents) didn’t survive past thirty-five.

Valhalla Estate, Southwest Shore

Posted on August 24, 2007

Valhalla in Norwegian means “heavenly place” and Lake Tahoe’s version is heaven deluxe. Tahoe’s Valhalla Estate is situated on the lake’s southwest corner, less than 20 minutes from the uber-jingle of slot machines on the south shore. It’s an even faster drive to Emerald Bay—perhaps the lake’s most dizzying panoply of breathtaking vistas.

The day of this photo, I’d been invited to Valhalla for what was peripherally described as a Gatsby Day. When we arrived, the estate was chockablock with dedicated ‘Gatsbyphiles’ dressed in Roaring Twenties ware. There was even a live auction—and had bids been inflation adjusted, I might have purchased something. Too bad they weren’t; or that so many in attendance looked like they’d been drinking with Daisy Buchanan the first time around. Read more

Where’s My Laptop?

Posted on August 23, 2007

Syd’s Bagelry, Tahoe City, California

First Stop: Lake Tahoe

Posted on August 22, 2007

To the uninitiated, Lake Tahoe might as well be Lake Winapantonka. Or Lake Kitchamabitcha. Or the Goodship Lollypop. Who cares about its ethereal beauty? That its still waters served as a spiritual sanctuary for not one—but three Indian nations. How its sapphire splendor earned it the nom de guerre, “Lake of the Sky.”

Never mind that it’s the second largest alpine lake on earth. Only Peru’s Lake Titicaca is situated at a higher elevation and bigger. Or that it’s the third deepest lake in North America, and the eighth deepest in the world. Who gives a fig that Mark Twain, upon seeing its brilliance for the first time described it as: “A noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the seas, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft a full three thousand feet higher still!” Twain, who loved traveling almost as much as he loved cheap tobacco, later wrote of his first glimpse of Eden, “As it lay there with the shadows of mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole world affords.”

Mountains? Snowcaps? Mile high waters? Pfft. Nature is so Discovery Channel. Unless you live in California or Nevada (the two states that Lake Tahoe bisects) you probably know almost nothing about it. For many, the question is neatly summed up by taking bonehead to the second power: Lake + Truck Name = Middle of Nowhere.

But-oh-how-wrong-they-are. Did you know, for example, that the opening of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather II” takes place on Lake Tahoe’s west shore? Or that Frank Sinatra opened a swinging resort casino—not in Vegas—but on the lake’s north end? Or that Squaw Valley, one of the Tahoe’s 15 premiere ski resorts, hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics? Who was its Director of Pageantry? Walt Disney. Or that Marilyn Monroe kept a cabin in the northeast woods? (President Kennedy was rumored to visit.) Or that the famous Ponderosa, home of Ben Cartwright on the long-running TV western “Bonanza,” was rooted on the lake’s Nevada coast? Beaches in Nevada? Did you know about those? Read more

Goodbye Big City

Posted on August 13, 2007

I decided to leave Los Angeles for all of the usual reasons that people leave hell. I had some money in the bank, much of it culled from dawdling debts I had finally seen to getting repaid. I had friends scattered across the country who wrote me short, insistent letters that I should come pay them a visit. They knew about my recent struggles and the strain which they had placed upon me. I’d recently battled a serious illness, of which the details aren’t important, except that it made me feel old and feeble well before my time. At its worst, it sucked the life straight out, forcing me toward indescribable moments when I wondered if I was going to die. But all of that was in the past. I’d taken lately to writing back that visits were starting to seem more plausible. They wrote that they would love to see me, and how was I feeling, and what was I planning to do for work now that I was getting better, and what were the happyhaps in LA? And so on, as it is with friends.

When I answered, they didn’t like my answer. Some responded with “???” While others rebutted with “!!!” Others wrote with awesome candor how they’d thought about my big idea, and though they wished me great success, and truly wanted to be supportive, if they were going to be completely honest, it didn’t make one lick of sense at all.

My friends are kind and decent people. Like patron saints, selflessly giving, they’ve welcomed moi into their lives with a measure of fidelity one rarely sees around these days. They’re like the golden-hearted grandmother who adopts the rangy, three-legged dog. I’m the dog in this analogy. And how do I repay such kindness? I piss on her rugs, and feast on her pillows, and drink from her toilets, and howl-ll at three o’clock in the morning. It’s a mystery why my friends keep me around. I guess to absolve their smallest of sins and assure their easy passage to heaven. Otherwise, it beats the crap out of me. Read more

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