Report from Treefort

Boise. Les Bois. City of Trees. City of Treefort. When Captain Bonneville crossed the Snake River Plain in 1833 he spied a ribbon of trees along a river pouring out of the mountains and cried: les bois, les bois! The US Army later erected a fort on that river. The fort became a town, the town a capital, and the capital a fort again, a rendezvous point for alternative bands and music lovers across the West.

A steely, windswept day. Anna and I venture out of the house in as much turmoil as the weather is making of town: scarves flying, daughter crying, a beer stuffed in the toddler bag. From the hills we can hear the soft pounding of music playing downtown. We're excited to go. We need to go. Tangled in family life, it's not often we get out to hear live music anymore. In fact if it wasn't for Radio Boise playing in the kitchen, I'd be hard pressed to name half a dozen contemporary bands. So there's urgency in our departing. We have to go, if only for a couple hours to walk among new faces, if only to catch second-hand songs over the fence of the main stage, if only to get out of the house. Greater adventures have been started with less.

All of downtown is a bustle. It seems San Francisco's Valencia Street has been diverted into Boise. Wool, beards, tight jeans. One could be cynical, but it's refreshing to see the different people, the band vans, the new and renewed fashions. The Linen District has been cordoned off and a vast tent erected over tables set up with regional wares. We stroll about, buildings echoing, food trucks smoking. The organizers have stepped it up this second go around with more bands and venues, artful touches about town. We like the oversized Treefort emblems set on tripods of cottonwood trunks. They stand at strategic corners, totems of festiveness. The raw weather, instead of dampening spirits, has concentrated them. There's a cozy, bundled holiday feeling in the air. A feeling that Boise is, strangely, at the center of things; that it's exactly the kind of off-the map, semi-desert city a festival like this needs. A city situated, geographically if not quite culturally, halfway between Portland and Salt Lake City. Surely Boise could use the festival. There's long been a respectable music scene here. But you might not realize it until you crossed five hundred miles of sage country to find local bands like Youth Lagoon or Built to Spill playing at the El Korah Shriner Club.

We go to The Modern for a drink. The gas fires are burning in the courtyard. I love the place for many reasons, not least of which is that I can bring our daughter here to sit outside with us. We find a table near the fluttering warmth of a fire. The sun moves in and out of the clouds. Anna orders prosecco, I a PBR, the poor boy's bubbly. We grow warm with drink and companionship. Friends pull up chairs, sit on the massive sandstone blocks that flicker like contented volcanoes. Ada traipses up the stairs to the veranda where she calls down to us like Juliet. Who is everybody liking? Foxygen, Karaoke from Hell, Emily Wells, Baths. Everyone's relaxed, recuperating, ordering rounds of sustenance: the wild mushrooms and chevre tart, the celery and smoke cocktails. There's so much to see. You have to be strategic, advises a friend: get in lines early for your favorite bands and don't get greedy for everything. There's just too much. Too much in our little ole Tree Town. We toast to that.

That night I have The Pass. Not just the Treefort kind but, the priceless Get-Out-of-Jail kind that comes rarely to a parent. I bicycle back downtown to the main stage. There's a good crowd. El Ten Eleven is getting started. I buy a beer and stand back in the cool afternoon sunlight. Wispy locus trees silhouette the sky above the stage. Up to me walks Al Heathcock. Now here's a guy you want to catch music with. It isn't too loud to talk. We catch up, talk books and shop. He's just come back from a book tour in the Canadian Arctic. Wind and ice in all directions. A Chinese guy there for the conference had left the village to take photos and the next day Search and Rescue found him huddled in his car under snow drifts, barely breathing. Al's ears still ring from the split second he lifted his flap and the wind frost-burned his drums. “It's wild out there,” he says in his very Chicago accent, “a choice setting for some beauty-ful dark stories.” And the locals were good to him. They fed him seal fat and played odd jokes on him. They called him their English Writer.

We listen to the bands. El Ten Eleven is good, a bit like Pinback, but prone to jammyness. They need an editor, we agree. The gal from Yacht is foxy, a remembrance of things 80's. They're catchy, but the synth stuff wears thin after a while. The show wraps up with The Walkmen. Now the heavy hitters come to stage. The lead singer hits and holds high notes attained if not by nature then by sheer will, emotion, angst. He's fleeing a ruined past, chasing visions of gold and turquoise. When it's over my mind shimmers with the intensity of the performance. I've been rapturized.

Or maybe I just need to get out of the house more often. Go West, not-so-young-anymore man, go West. And if you're already there, then go up, into the trees, and look out at the great world below in wonder. Build a tree fort up there and others will come, a great many others, bringing their quirky talents and music to your windswept town, bringing color, a touch of spring, melodies from the coast, like migrating birds stopping to sing from the high branches.