Delivered into the world at Tahoe Forest Hospital, our Tahoe-Truckee kids soon are hiking to the shores of Emerald Bay, skiing at Squaw Valley or Tahoe Cross-Country, and swimming in Donner Lake and Lake Tahoe (yes, sometimes all of that on the same day). As they grow up, they love our community, develop an incredible group of friends in high school, and then we pack them up, kiss them goodbye, and drive them many hours away to college. Some come back for summers for the next few years, but many only come back to visit…leaving Tahoe and Truckee behind.
Upon graduation, Tahoe-Truckee kids seek out warm beaches and coastal fog or the enchantment of living in the big city for the first time. While they love the mountains and their friends, they can’t wait to try something else. They find what they did not find here: crowded urban places with more things to do in a day than they could find to do at home in a month, if at all. They find a wide diversity of opinions, religions, races and lifestyles. It’s all new, exciting and different, and they have escaped the perceived clutches of our small communities, where they can’t walk around town without seeing 10 people they know. They move on and quickly find new friends and adventures.
After a few years of hard partying – I mean studying – at UC Berkeley, UCLA or UC Santa Barbara, they find a passion, a love, a career in L.A., or San Diego or Santa Clara or Seattle. They get married and have kids and watch their kids play soccer in San Rafael or run track in Chico. They come up to visit now and then and marvel at the beauty of the place where they grew up, the smell of the pine trees, the way a windy day makes Lake Tahoe such a deep blue. They are reminded of the wonder of a quiet, snowy day. Then they smile ruefully and say, ‘Man, it would be so cool to be able to live here again.’ But there are no jobs here in marine biology, or IT or working for Google or Apple. So they give us hugs and leave the mountains once again.
Every year we lose some of our best and brightest locals as they head off to the city and the suburbs, to the colleges and the jobs. This has been the trend in Tahoe and Truckee for generations. It’s a rarity to find a North Tahoe or Truckee High School Grad that is still here 20 years after their graduation. Once they get that first job and head towards a career or get married to someone with connections to another place, they are off and running…and it’s hard to turn back.
A few of our progeny, however, do return. They come back as engineers, or physical therapists, or contractors, or realtors, or to teach skiing, or more likely they start a business, which probably has absolutely nothing to do with what they learned in college, but it is an interesting passion and, most importantly to them, allows them to live here.
These returnees come back with fresh perspective. They learned a lot while away, but they also learned that Tahoe and Truckee was in them. That even though they give up lots of money and perhaps a career to be here, this is home. In fact, once you have left for a few years, and discovered other places, our mountain towns have an even more powerful allure. It is in leaving that you truly discover what you left.
This fall I dropped my daughter off for her freshman year at UC Santa Barbara. Like many of our kids, she spent her entire life in the same house at Tahoe. As we made the long trip there, I watched her send text messages, call and email her high school buddies, who are now in places like Vallejo, Berkeley, Sonoma, L.A., Reno and Austria. Although far flung, they are still communicating. Will these lifelong friends be able to continue this level of communication as the years go by? Tradition says no, but perhaps this is a new generation who will be able to stay connected through technology. The availability of instant, anywhere communication may also open up new possibilities for our graduates to return to the mountains after they graduate.
Or perhaps the opening of the new Sierra College in Truckee will keep some of our kids here. I hope so, because if you were like lucky like me to have spent much time with the great group of young adults that graduated this past year, you miss them already, and look forward to their return to our community.
