This Place in Stowe is Not on Fire
As the West burns we look to the other coast—the one with trees—for solace
On the afternoon of June 24, 2007 I was covering some old Tahoe money fundraiser at the Thunderbird Lodge, former home to known white supremacist incel lumber baron George Whittell, who built the sprawling six-acre estate on Tahoe’s East Shore. There, he’d booze, host racist recluses like Ty Cobb and Howard Hughes, and even kept live tigers in this weird sex-slash-exoctic-animal dungeon that tour guides refer to as the “card house.”
The three-course dinner in the home’s main dining area—a fundraiser to keep the property, a non-profit, museum, and “educational center,” educating people on the coked-up habits of old ghosts, I assume—was interrupted by a plume of smoke that suddenly came into view as the steak and salmon were dropped in front of the Tommy Bahamas and Chico’s crowd.
I looked at the photographer and gave her the go nod, and twenty minutes later, we were first on the scene of the Angora Fire, named after the Angora Lakes in South Lake Tahoe where the conflagration began.
At that point, there was probably only a handful of fire personnel trying to establish lines and even fewer sheriffs figuring out how to get people in and out. There was no yellow tape to duck, so she got busy snapping what she could.
The blaze, which had started a few hours earlier from an illegal campfire, didn’t seem so bad up close, but it was, as they say, its own living, breathing monster. It was clear there at the onset there would be no controlling it. Like a bachelorette party stumbling into nearby Harrah’s, Angora was going to go where it wanted to go, do what it wanted to do.
The fire burned into a South Lake neighborhood, taking down 3,100 acres in little more than a week. It was declared contained on July 2 but caused more than $140 million in property damage. The local community college was turned into an emergency shelter, smoke blanketed the Tahoe Basin, and Fourth of July revelers was encouraged to stay home (narrator: "They didn’t!"). I’d never seen anything like it.
The photographer won some state and national awards for her spot coverage. In follow-up stories later that summer, I talked to several climatologists who worked for institutions like the Desert Research Institute (DRI) and Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA), who basically said Angora was a warning and we got off easy. “Just give it a decade,” one said, off the record.
Fast-forward fourteen years, and the Caldor Fire, which also started in El Dorado County in the woods just northeast of Sacramento, has burned nearly 115,000 acres and destroyed 447 homes in just over a week.
Containment has risen to 9% after remaining at zero for the first seven days of the blaze, but the fire is now “creeping on South Lake Tahoe’s door,” Cal Fire officials said Tuesday morning. Some 17,000 structures are currently threatened, according to the agency’s latest incident report.
On Monday afternoon, Tahoe Vista, a census-designated place on the north shore of the lake, had an AQI rating of 558, the worst in the world right now and 58 times the World Health Organization’s exposure recommendation. *Deep breath* and we haven’t even mentioned the 750,000-acre Dixie Fire, which has already taken out half a national park and is still burning just to the north. Both of these fires are so grandiose it’s like the $4 trillion price tag of the war in Afghanistan. So massive, so staggering—it feels like nothing.
Here’s the haunted landscape of the Tahoe’s West shore this morning; it’s normally cobalt blue, its beaches crowded with families and locals enjoying one last end-of-summer dip.
So welcome to hell. Like we knew it was coming/here but also didn’t know it would be so hardcore and so like on-the-nose hell. The “regular” hell we ordered up in 2016 seemed to sufficed—and lingers—then the REAL hell of 2019 to present seemed just hellish enough; but now actual HELL that’s literally burning LIKE HELL on top of everything else is just—the most hell ever.
107 Sunset Ave Stowe, VT 05672
Some smart person on Twitter recently said they’ve discovered after the last couple of years that it’s OK to quit, it’s OK to run. Sometimes the shit just gets so real and so toxic that leaving it behind is the only way to go. A California native, I never thought I’d be that person to say “die.”
And let me be VERY clear about the horrifying ex-pats/pensioners this state—which shrunk for the first time in five decades—is exporting out into the world right now to go jam up your roads and gum up the minds of folks in Boise, Bend, Bozeman (all the small/previously idyllic “B” metros.) Good riddance. (And also, sorry!)
Don’t worry; we still have tens of millions of white supremacist wellness gurus, brainwashed Orange County yoga-wine moms, and Central Valley bible thumpers refusing to take a vaccine based on their “medical rights,” making life here more miserable than it ought to be. All of whom have fomented into one ill-fitted leggings-and-American flag T-shirt mob and somehow collected enough signatures to unseat the governor to replace him with that lady in the pink Corvette you see on billboards in LA.
So, I don’t know. The state’s on fire, the vaccination rate has ground to a halt like the In-n-Out drive-thru at lunch hour, and the best of what we had left—is burning.
…BTW nobody can breathe.
So maybe it IS time to light out for Stowe, wagon’s East and all that. THere’s plenty of water and (healthy) foliage in this little Vermont Christmas village.
Imagine greeting your day on your porch, fresh cup of coffee in hand, waving to passersby—taking in the air fresh as if it’s just passed through a Brita filter. Imagine hanging your country’s flag up in a way that isn’t a threat of violence to everyone, walking to schools, art galleries, and restaurants. Imagine the town’s trailhead dumping 100 feet from your backyard and just seven miles from Stowe Mountain Resort.
No, it’s not the permanent answer. The answer is really complete societal rewiring, now. Our climate catastrophe in the West will be felt in the not-far-off-future in the East (it’s the only time we actually get to show THEM what’s coming), and hellfire will eventually engulf and collapse this tiny village in due time—just give it a decade.