This Place in Incline is Nearly Perfect
We should all be so lucky to have such a moment.
“For someone whose job is deadlines, you’re perpetually late,” Joe smiled as I approached. The line sounded a little rehearsed, but he was right all the same.
It was close to eight o’clock, and I told him that I’d meet up around six earlier that day. But deadlines stretch long, even in mountain towns.
His silhouette was down at the beach about a block from my little orange-hued condo complex. He was sitting on top of a blue park bench next to a six-pack. He had Frye boots on, jeans that were rolled up but still a little wet around the cuffs, and an oversized roll-neck sweater. No jacket or cap; at the moment he was pretending that the evening wind wasn’t cutting right through him.
“A little storm’s rolling in looks like,” I said, overstating the obvious as the darkest of clouds settled over us like a giant airship. Instantly the water was colored charcoal gray, and Joe’s light blue eyes darkened with it. I watched him watch the tiny whitecaps churn and bite at the shore. He took a pull off his beer, emptying it, and plucked two more from the cardboard carrier, handing me one.
“You like it here?” He asked. I think he knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it from me.
“Sure,” I twisted the beer top, but it didn’t budge. Joe grabbed it back from me and slammed the cap down on the picnic table. Foam sprayed out, and he chuckled. He handed me his new beer, which he’d opened clean, and kept the defect for himself. I nodded and took a sip.
“You should stay here. You know that.”
“Yeah, we’ll see.”
We sat there, and it got colder and cloudier. The wind picked up, and tiny flakes started to fall sideways from the sky. Joe tilted his head back and watched them dance by. Late-spring gales weren’t super abnormal, a warning from Mother Nature, I suppose, not to get super comfortable in shorts and a sweatshirt till July or August.
It was my favorite time of year at Lake Tahoe. School wasn’t out yet, and the winter crowds were distant memories. The beaches, like this one, were empty but for folks like me and Joe and the occasional goose-chasing dog.
This was a week before Memorial Day in 2006, fifteen years ago, almost exactly. I was news editor at the local paper in Incline Village, and Joe, an Army Ranger, had just come home from a deployment in Iraq—his second. Like, literally had just gotten home. He dropped his gear off in Fayetteville and lit out for the West Coast on leave.
Joe had landed a few days earlier in SF and stayed with his best friend from high school, Jim, and Jim’s wife. He rented a car and drove up to Sac, where he grew up. He visited friends and cousins and was stopping off at the lake for a couple of days before making the last push up to Port Angeles, WA, where his mother had relocated to start a little bed and breakfast.
Joe and I met freshman year at Oregon. He was in the same dorm as a bunch of guys I knew, and we didn’t like each other right away, or at least he didn’t like me. Over time though, that went away, and we became close. An only child raised by a single mother, Joe was a scholar-athlete, an Eagle Scout, and an honor student at the University. He was a political science major and planned to make haste back to Sacramento and eventually DC once we graduated. He did all that, like everything he did, like clockwork.
Before joining the Army, Joe was the liaison to Washington, DC for the governor (Gray Davis) and a US-AID appointment under president Clinton. It was there he made friends with many of the folks who’d go on to form the nucleus of the Obama administration, and some even re-upped for the current one. It’s also where he became disillusioned with politics and moved to Israel to work on a Kibbutz.
While on the Kibbutz, 9/11 happened, and Joe felt the call to join the military. He moved back to his mother’s home, determined to shed the weight and lethargy of a half-decade of eating like shit, drinking too much, and not sleeping; he set out on a workout routine that would make him a Marine.
They didn’t want him, too old, too slow. But the Army eventually did, bum shoulder and all. He went to OCS, earned a Ranger tab, and was promoted a handful of times before his first deployment to Iraq with the 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), 82nd Airborne Division. He was promoted again and deployed his second time as the G-2 Advisor, 10th Iraqi Army Division.
Joe and I finished our beers and went out that night. First to a bar and then to a coworker friend’s house. It was her grandmother’s spot right on the beach. The place hadn’t been touched since the sixties, and the fire roared and spit in the modern wood-burning stove.
While I relaxed on the couch, talking to a few folks I knew and putting on Dean Martin records, Joe was busy in the kitchen helping make dinner. I remember walking in there to freshen up my drink, and he was chopping like a prep cook, fast and precise—apron on. A smile crossed his face. He pointed his knife in my direction and said, “Do you ever do anything?” And then laughed, his menacing, loud, good laugh. I could tell he was happy. Just the same old Joe, doing things right—the way you would if you could go back and do it all again.
Joe went on a few months later to earn his Green Beret and was promoted again, this time to the Co. C, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) where he served as Detachment Commander of Special Force Operational Detachment-Alpha 3333.
On May 29, 2011, five years after that weekend in Tahoe and ten years ago Saturday, Joe’s HUMVEE made its way through the Wardak Province of Afghanistan and ran over a plastic bag that detonated. He died along with two other soldiers, the unit’s interpreter, and their canine. He was 36.
I don’t remember much else from his Tahoe trip beyond just split seconds where I caught his eye or a flash of his grin. I do recall while we were saying our goodbyes, he told me he’d come back at some point and hoped I’d be there when he did. “There’s a lot worse places in the world to be,” he said. “But you already know that, right?”
The Captain Joseph House foundation provides a respite for Gold Star Families. Find out more or donate here.
579 N Dyer Circle Incline Village, NV 89451
I’m pretty familiar with this neighborhood, as I am with all of Incline. And this listing is notable for two reasons: 1) it’s not $3 million. And 2) there’s plenty of land and a creek running through it.
Of course, the blood-sucking realtor’s first line of the listing is: “This cabin on the creek represents one of the finest tear-down opportunities in the Tahoe Basin.” And wow. Just fuck that and fuck right off.
This place is great as-is.
It’s got a little wear-and-tear of a vacation rental complete with a handful of cheap upgrades and a composite roof where once there was metal—but the telltale signs of a real Tahoe retreat are still intact: the angular railing on the deck, the wall-to-wall support beams, the pine built-ins and cabinetry, the Whirlpool hood above the range, the wood-burning stove, and the wood-paneled bathroom, the floating stairs, and the clean-slate unit above the garage.
There’s enough there to restore and to love and more than enough to consider this more—much more—than a tear-down.
It’s actually perfect, especially in this moment.
You’ve read the news about the ridiculous price surges, the tech bros having their way, and the over-the-hill celeb- and mega-rich land grab up in the tax-friendliest woodsy surrounds. And it’s true. Tahoe, Incline especially, is currently undergoing a major overhaul both physically and perhaps spiritually.
But people are fickle, especially this current band of locusts, and some will eventually grow tired of the isolation, and the town hub being where the 7-Eleven and the small rotisserie is. They’ll move on. And wouldn’t it be nice if every relic didn’t have to be smashed up and torn down and replaced with something that resembles an airport hotel lobby or an Apple store in their wake?
This a piece of what Tahoe was—to me it is anyway. A place of calm, and tranquility, and remembrance. A rare retreat that reminds you there are worse places in the world. But you already know that, right?
