3 minute read
The Editor’s Note
ay back in the B.C. (Before Covid) days, when
Wmany of us still worked in the office, my then coworker Christina called to my attention a news blurb she saw online.
“The (Seattle) Seahawks are expected to sign Jared Allen,” she said about the veteran All-Pro defensive end who was linked to our favorite football team and a player I admired for his tenacity.
Allen was near the end of his great career, but he still could have helped the defending-champion Seahawks get back to the Super Bowl in 2014 (they made it anyway!), but alas, he signed for more money with the Chicago Bears. Fast forward to 2022 and I was chatting with Allen for the profile running this month (page 18). You can guess what my first comment was to the 40-year-old likely future Pro Football Hall of Famer …
“I really wished you would have signed with the Seahawks.”
“It was close,” Allen teased. “I tell people all the time thatprobably my biggest regret of my career was not signing with Seattle and not taking the money and going to Chicago.”
It turns out that regret is not the only common ground we shared. Both Allen and I grew up in the Bay Area and made several trips up I-80 to Lake Tahoe.
Since I’ve moved away from the Bay Area and now have experienced the international travel bug, my visits to Tahoe are sporadic these days, but Allen, his wife and two daughters own a home at South Shore, so Jared can rekindle childhood memories and make new ones with the family.
“We love it. I grew up skiing there and would go in both the summers and winters. Tahoe summers are amazing. We get the mountain bikes out. And the fishing is fun. We started setting crawdad traps in the summer. It’s been a fun deal to go out there and be on the lake,” Allen told me. I too carry plenty of nostalgia about crawdad fishing on the lake as a kid.
“We’ll go out by Emerald Bay and set out traps overnight or sometimes camp on the boat and drop them. But I found out the hard way – and I hate to say this – that crawdads still need air. We caught some in the morning – we probably had about 25 – and I filled up the cooler with water without thinking when I shut the top, and they all ended up dead. But we used them for bait for the next day’s crawdad pots.”
As a regular Tahoe visitor, it’s easy to understand why anyone would love to return regularly. Certainly Allen, who stays busy in retirement owning a restaurant and running a charity to help military veterans buy their own homes, is at home in the high Sierra when he goes back.
“It’s a place where you go out and spend all day on the water doing stuff. You don’t even realize what you’re doing; it’s just hop on the boat in the morning and go fishing, come back to the dock and my daughters will fish for bluegills there. Then we’ll go water skiing; it’s an absolute blast.”
I concur. -Chris Cocoles
