Camera Roll: High Sierra Thanksgivings

A trip up Highway 395 and down memory lane.

* Strong recommendation on hitting play before reading, as I often did at some point in my drive north.

For the better part of my adult life Thanksgiving week meant an 8 hour roadtrip from Los Angeles to the mountain town of Truckee that’s situated 30 minutes north of Lake Tahoe. I called the railroad-town-turned-winter-sports-destination home for a few years in the mid-’Aughts and have remained close with a number of people I met during era.

The last season I lived in Truckee I opted to stay for Thanksgiving rather than meet my family in Arizona and was invited over to the home of a friend who grew up there. That Thanksgiving is forever etched in my memory and changed the way I think of the holiday. Up until that year I had spent every Thanksgiving with family either in Vermont, Arizona or Manhattan. Who was involved varied year to year, but typically it was my parents, sisters and grandparents. Wherever we were it was more of an intimate and traditional sort of affair.

Over at my friend’s house there was a mix of family, friends, neighbors and a whole bunch of snowboarders that were a long way from home with nowhere else to go, except maybe Taco Bell. There was a wide variety of food and lots of it. The basement was a scene with a pool table, beer pong and a keg. Up in the loft there were constant high score attempts happening on the pinball machine and various board games happening simultaneously. We carried on as late as we could, not wanting the day to end, but also safe in the knowledge that we were invited back for leftovers after going snowboarding on Friday.

That year marked the first of many Thanksgivings in Truckee with my chosen family. A love of the mountains and winter sports drew us to there, but it was always the people that kept those of us who moved away coming back. This was especially clear the years when the forecast called for little snow or not at all. The drive up Highway 395(or “The 5” if I wasn’t stopping in Mammoth Lakes) became an annual pilgrimage not only to get back on a snowboard, but to check-in with friends and their families. Of course as so often happens as you get older I lost touch with some people, but others I became closer with every year. Some years were still big events that included two dinners at different parents houses or back-to-back days of full Thanksgiving meals. Others were smaller, but still equally as memorable, which reminded me it’s not the scale of the event, but the quality of the company present that makes the day.

I didn’t know the last time I did Thanksgiving in Truckee would be the last time. You rarely know when that’s going to be the case with anything in life. An exception would be, “the last time you do X before you become a parent”. The further into the first year of fatherhood I get, the more I understand that there are major milestones in life, but none that so clearly define the end of one era and beginning of another in the way that having a child does. Moving from Los Angeles to Nashville pales in comparison. There is simply life before you’re a parent and life after.

I’ve been thinking about this a-lot lately, but especially in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. I miss loading up the car in the dark and leaving LA while the city is still sleeping. I miss seeing dawn break over the high desert and reflect off the wind turbines in Mojave. I miss the open road filling the windshield and the ancient peaks of the Sierras towering over me. I miss the excitement of the last hour of the drive and drawing in that first breath of cold mountain air when I’d get out of the car. I miss the warm welcome from my friends at the front door and the flurry of conversation that follows.

I miss all of that and more, but not as much as I love being a husband and a father.

Now, I didn’t set out to write the piece I wrote here. Honestly this was supposed to be a quick trip down memory lane by way of photos tagged with “Thanksgiving”, “Highway 395” or “Truckee”. It was also supposed to be published yesterday. Best laid plans and all that.

There’s more I’d like to say(always is), but I’ve got to get ready for dinner with our new friends who invited us over. Rather appropriate to start a new era with a new shared table I suppose. The drive over is short, but the excitement is strangely familiar. Again, a nice setting helps, however it’s always going to be about the people. So drop a line to the ones who you’re thankful for(if you haven’t done so already) and maybe take a little trip down memory lane of your own.

Happy Thanksgiving - AM