Salmon at Taylor Creek

Finally, after five years of wanting to go to Taylor Creek in Lake Tahoe during the annual salmon run, Joel and I made the trip.

When I was at King's College in London, my friend Ben, who loved to cook, made some lovely salmon in a caper-lemon-cream sauce, little red potatoes, and green beans for me one night. We also had a lot of white wine, and that night when I went to sleep full and a little drunk, I had an extremely vivid dream. I was a salmon turning red, developing a hook jaw, and swimming up stream. I could feel my body starting to decay and I was surrounded by other salmon that were dying. To escape my salmony fate, I crawled up on the shore and caught a commuter bus towards a city I could see in the distance. I'm not a spirit animal type of person, but after that dream I didn't eat salmon for about two years. But I'm back on the pony now.



At Taylor Creek, you walk down this beautiful little path through aspen groves and past wetlands. Eventually you get to the stream, where you can go out onto the sandy bank and watch the fish. The creek was packed. Some fish were, as advertised, swimming upstream; others were just hanging out, guarding egg packets they had already deposited in creek bottom from other fish and hungry ducks. Already there were a lot of dead fish washed up on the bank and floating against rocks. I overheard a woman say that if you got there at five in the morning you could often see black bears come down to the stream and feast.