![]() The first place I experience the liberation of sleeping under the stars. The first place my parents took me hiking. Reno was a playground, full of long lost friends, and Tahoe was the vast, natural extension of that playground. It was just us, the back seat, and I Spy. ![]() There were no smart phones, iPads, or even portable gaming systems yet. And so, every summer my parents would pack my little brother Kris and I up, and we’d make the road trip back “home” to Reno, from wherever we happened to live at the time. They moved away for work, but their friends, families, and formative years remained in Nevada. They met at Wooster High, stayed friends at the University of Nevada, and got married shortly after my dad started graduate school. A warm, safe feeling washed over me: a happy place feeling. It seemed like a lifetime ago since I’d scrambled around on these rocks, but Tahoe had left its mark, and now all those dormant memories were waking up. There was only one place with that perfect combination of pine and dirt wafting through the fresh mountain air - Lake Tahoe. But the nose can sniff out nostalgia- and there was only one place that could transport me back to those endless childhood summers. We tend to focus on details rather than feelings when we’re trying to remember something. Humans don’t use emotional memory that often. Hanging out on the rocks at Secret Cove at Lake Tahoe. An emotion and a place, tangled up together forever in the cellular building blocks of our being. It was as if happy places were an imprintable trait. The world was our oyster, and this place was our pearl. They were in their happy place – and so we were free to roam. Keeping tabs on us from a distance, in that passive way that parents do when they feel at home. It made its way over to the bacon and latched on! Our little hearts raced with excitement. We watched wide eyed as a small clawed creature emerged from the darkness into the clear blue water. He carefully lowered the bacon down between two rocks with the precision of a surgeon. Cool water replaced the hot lava and Kris put a piece of bacon on the end of a clothes hanger. We scrambled from one giant boulder to the next, avoiding the hot sand that flowed below us like lava. There was a cool breeze coming off the lake. It was summertime and I was maybe 5 years old. ![]() The scent of pine sap and dirt elicited a flood of vivid childhood memories. And why shouldn’t it be? - it is the same the angels breathe.” – Mark Twain, writing about Lake Tahoe in Roughing It Scent Of A Happy Place “The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious.
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