By McAvoy Layne…For forty years, I honored an imperative that every other book I picked up to read would be non-Twain. This little rule of mine kept me from going down the rabbit hole and not coming up. But now that I’m retired and content in welcoming small groups into my home for An Evening with Mark Twain, I feel free to skip along happy-go-lucky and revisit my favorite Twain books, interspersed only by the likes of Michael Makley’s excellent book, Saving Lake Tahoe.
In Twain’s A Tramp Abroad, Sam visits the Sea of Galilee, and suggests that Lake Tahoe throws the Sea of Galilee into the shade…
“And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow.”
As one lucky boy who has been in love with Lake Tahoe since that wonderful summer of 1961 when I was a seventeen-year-old lifeguard at South Shore, I could not agree more heartily. I oftentimes picture Sam gazing out across Tahoe in 1861, thinking to himself, “This must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.”
In a letter to his sister, Samuel lavishes praise upon his newfound talisman, “Mela, you must come out here to Lake Tahoe…inside of three weeks you’ll have the strength to knock a bull down with your fist if you want to. Three weeks of camp life at Lake Tahoe will restore an Egyptian mummy to its pristine vigor. I don’t mean the oldest and driest of mummies -but the fresher ones.”
In his western memoir, Roughing It, Sam lays it out there for us…
“We never slept in our Tahoe home. We didn’t want to strain it. Yet if there is any happier life than the life we led on our timber ranch for those two or three weeks, it must be the sort of life which I have not read of in books. The eye suffered but one grief, that it must close sometimes in sleep. It was a veritable habitation with the gods. No, if Lake Tahoe does not cure whatever ails you, I’ll bury you at my own expense.”
Doesn’t that make you love Mark Twain almost as much as you love Tahoe? Me too.
It’s been a while since I was up there in that lifeguard tower, but when I walk to the lake these days, I feel a little like that seventeen-year-old kid again. There’s something about our lake that imbues a youthful ambiance, makes us feel like Olympians, and the lake is our coach.
How thankful I am to have The Lady of the Lake so close as to be able to feel her power each and every day of my long life. In fact, were you to ask me to what I attribute my longevity, I might like to answer, “Probably the air that angels breathe. I’m no angel, but for a few moments each day, I can feel like one, thanks to Lake Tahoe, and Mark Twain.”
Audio: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Fhv4PrH1UuwlhbnTT23zO
— For more than 35 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American.”