Emerald Bay: The View and the Island

Emerald Bay is the place people drive here to see. It is the image on the license plate frames, the calendar cover, the photograph your phone immediately wants to take. The bay is a natural cove, deep green and sheltered, with a small granite island at its center. The island, Fannette Island, is the only island in Lake Tahoe. On the island, on a small summit, there is a stone building.

The building is the Tea House that Lora Knight had built in nineteen twenty-nine. She owned the land at the head of the bay and built Vikingsholm, the Norse-style mansion at the water's edge, as her summer home. Each morning during the summer she paddled a canoe from Vikingsholm to the island and had her coffee in the Tea House. Whether you find this charming or extravagant probably says something about what you think of the American twentieth century's relationship to luxury.

The Washoe people used this bay as a seasonal fishing and gathering site long before the Tea House, before the canoe, before the notion of owning a shoreline for a summer home. They fished these waters as part of the seasonal round that organized their lives around Da ow a ga, the lake. The bay they used for subsistence is now part of Emerald Bay State Park, which is the California State Parks designation for what was once one of their primary summer sites.

The view has not changed. The water is still that color. On clear days it is possible to see why someone would want to come here every morning and drink their coffee while looking at it. The Washoe came here for thousands of years before the Tea House gave anyone a reason to explain why.