For decades, the locals had managed to cheerily disguise their resentment of the gapers, their derisive term for non-locals. But on one snowy winter day, this facade was removed, and the town’s dark capacity for evil showed its face.
It started as a typical day in an exceptional season featuring record snowfalls perfectly timed for holidays and school vacations. Fat flakes poured from the heavens. Blue sky and sunlight occasionally broke through the clouds. Waves of flatlanders ascended to the greater Tahoe Basin to capture winter’s endless possibilities. As they played, they didn’t notice the weather over the pass had turned brooding and ominous.
What exactly triggered the madness, or whether it was anything in particular, remains in dispute. According to local legend, it started with a bumbling city slicker walking in designer ski boots on the sidewalk. He stumbled over a dog outside a local watering hole. The dog howled.
‘Get out of my way, stupid dog,’ the man said. ‘Get back to the Bay Area, gaper,’ snarled a contingent of locals smoking cigarettes outside the bar. ‘Get a real job, townie,’ the man’s friends snapped back. A small rumpus ensued. The gaper contingent got the worst of it, and retreated to their condos and their wine pairings.
Now the mad genie was out of the box. It was as if the locals had acquired a hive mind wired with contempt for gapers.
Snowboarders from Manteca loitering outside the 7-11 were spontaneously pelted with ice balls. Security camera footage shows a woman in Uggs slipping and falling ridiculously on the ice, and locals pointing and laughing. Other footage shows hotel staff throwing what are clearly gaper belongings into the snow, and a rental shop employee haranguing gapers for being ‘slow, stupid, and unable to follow simple directions.’ A popular restaurant posted a sign, more like a warning: ‘We do not serve Red Bull with anything.’
Semi-locals stuck inside their second homes dialed in vain for plow service that would not come, while the local radio station warned of ‘the growing gaper menace.’
After a mob set fire to an Escalade parked diagonally across five spaces at the grocery store, a committee of high-minded locals posted an emergency proclamation making it illegal to be a gaper within the city limits. The police began profiling gapers with impunity, handing out DWG citations.
A panicky gaper caravan — people in SUVs and AWDs wearing snow hats, mostly — escaped town just before the worst of the storm blew in. But a party of three gaper families dawdled too long. Drifts of blowing snow mixed with swirling bullets of ice forced them to camp in a gas station parking lot east of Donner Lake.
The storm raged. The interstate closed in both directions. When the highway patrol finally got through to the camps, they found a pathetic scene: strung-out gapers surviving on sunflower seeds, Yoo-Hoos, and orange marshmallow candies shaped like giant peanuts.
Lest we judge the locals too harshly, keep in mind there had been a round of bad times. The vacation home market had collapsed, jobs were scarce, wages low, and prospects grim. This partially explains why industrious gapers with too much disposable income whose wanton spending virtually underwrote what remained of the miserable local economy suddenly became the town’s reviled scapegoats.
The storm broke, and the remaining gapers crawled towards home. The madness cleared as well, and the locals silently, shamefully confronted what they’d done. The hasty proposal to outlaw gapers within the city limits never came to a vote. Today, local authorities downplay the episode, while the gracious local ambassadors of goodwill use the tale to entertain tourists.
Bio: Doug Meier is a Truckee resident who beams back and forth from his job in Silicon Valley and home. In his spare time he likes to write, snowboard, and spend time with family.
