For Thursday, January 9, 1997 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 717 words

Wet and wild

The New Year was a big splash in Tahoe. We got caught in the flood. It didn't bother our property much, but it sure put a damper on our holiday activities.

We took family and friends for a week of frolic - skiing, sledding, snowmobiling, building snowmen and snowballs - and instead spent a week indoors looking out at the rain.

Nine shared the experience - the wife and kids, the Wests and kid, future son-in-law Chad and his brother Brad. When I tell you what we did, many may yawn, but some may empathize with the intimate tranquility that evolved.

Each morning we cooked big breakfasts. Eating together allowed us to joke ourselves awake as we looked out at the storm. Then the day's activities began. Two usually went straight to work in the recliners, reading their own or someone else's Christmas book. We had a stack of them. Others, mostly the young, lined up at the CD player to put their music in queue for the day.

Someone would volunteer each morning to go buy newspapers and trade in the three videos for three new ones. Someone else would light the fire, or try to bring a football game in on the rabbit ears.

A card table was opened in the living room where we dumped out the 1000 puzzle pieces of the annual jigsaw. We've sure grown fond of the jigsaw tradition. That puzzle, an animated scene of the Las Vegas Strip, took all week to finish. Whenever people grew restless, they could sit a spell at the puzzle table.

We also had Jenga, Trivial Pursuits, cards, dice, and on day four Ron West broke down and bought a Risk game.

And we talked. Boy, did we talk. We let the college boys -- Adam, Scott, and Brad -- share all their new knowledge and views. We learned from Adam about Latin and how some students at Santa Cruz walk around naked. We learned chemistry from Scott and how Davis frat parties avoided raids. Brad shared his thoughts on choosing a major and why Chico is still the wildest campus in California.

We debated music a lot. Everyone had different tastes -- jazz, rock, blues, classical, and rap. As each new CD was played, the room would fill with critics, defenders, and quiet eclectics who tossed in their two cents from time to time.

Scott is a rap fan, so we asked him to play the CD that he thought would be the most offensive. "Make us livid," we said, then we'll analyze it. He played something about cop killers and female dogs. It was loaded with profanity. He defended the language as free expression that was brutally true, honest, and direct. Critics said the language was too unsettling and angry to enjoy. It sounded more like a trial than poetry, and the profane words were so striking that the message got lost. I thought about Lenny Bruce. Would he be a rap fan?

On New Year's Eve we saw Paula Poundstone's pallid performance at the Horizon, front row. She mumbled a few jokes about her asexuality and love of cats, then asked the audience a lot of "Where you from?" questions, filling most of her $25 hour with impromptu humor. One poor woman came in late and got grilled for 20 minutes. Where was she from? Benicia.

Her group was a few tables from ours, so we cheered and waved wildly. This started Poundstone on a Benicia inquisition. My wife yelled out that Benicia was once a state capital. For the rest of the night, any time a California city got mentioned, Poundstone would come over to Susan and ask if it had ever been a state capital.

At midnight we were standing in the rain outside of Harvey's Casino watching the throng. Considering we had no master countdown clock and hundreds of wristwatches that were off by a minute or more in either direction, everyone celebrated the sacred second for a good five minutes. It was a time warp hoot.

By Thursday the storm grew serious, and we started home down the only escape route in the basin - little route 267 to Truckee. We left at 1:30 p.m. and at 4 p.m. we could still see the lake. It took ten hours to reach Benicia.