Notes from Telluride MountainFilm Festival

There's snow in the mountains — on the high glaciated valleys, the steep black faces etched with white couloirs — and dandelions in the meadows. The lush canyon floor shimmering gold and willow. Gauzy bands of leafing aspen on the hills before grey loping ridges, massive peaks adrift in the sky. It's easy to feel you're flying in this country. The thin air, the dreaminess. Telluride is the most picturesque mountain town in the American West, hands down. A Victorian mining town set within the Alpine grandeur of the San Juan Mountains. A great community of artists, activists, not to mention mountaineers and outdoors men and women of all stripes. And not a bad place for a documentary film festival either.

MountainFilm. Alright, maybe the analogy is as hippy as the longhairs who took over this town in the Sixties and Seventies, but attending MountainFilm is a bit like getting a deep massage — a spiritual massage, if you will. You know it's good by the sore spots worked over, the aches as well as the pleasure experienced. A mix of apprehension and relief, doubt and elation, sorrow and hope for our troubled race causes you to seek an equilibrium, a balanced understanding of world issues. A good movie, any good story, can cause you to root against your established views.

The documentary Pandora's Promise had just that affect: causing my views to swivel. While I've been open to the possibilities of nuclear power, I've generally been skeptical of it. Yet Robert Stone's film walks us through a sober examination of the history of nuclear power, the facts of infamous disasters like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima, and parallels that story with the transformation of views of several leading environmentalists who now believe that the only way to arrest greenhouse gas emissions and still provide power to the globe is through carbon-neutral, safe, third and fourth generation nuclear reactors. The movie both upended my preconceptions and gave me something I don't often feel when considering environmental issues: optimism. It's not the end of the discussion, but an urgent call for us to get talking fast.

The documentary Uranium Drive-In, directed by Suzan Beraza, had me hoping that the stinking uranium mine would finally be approved, just to get the locals' economic suffering over with. Watch that movie and you weirdly put aside your environmental worries for southwest Colorado as you sympathize with the poor families, the desperate community, the mine workers starving for a paycheck. Forgetting the geologic, you see things through the short lens of their lives. And short as life may be, human suffering is bottomless.

The best movie of the festival, if you ask someone who saw only six of them, was Gasland 2. It was more intense than Gasland, more dire, more evil grand scheme for world domination. While in the first documentary Josh Fox left some room for the possibility to do this nasty thing, fracking, right, the sequel takes a dark turn. The nations' leading expert on concrete casing claims that ten percent of all hydraulically fractured wells will fail upon installation, and when you track the data out to thirty years, that percentage climbs to fifty percent. The oil industry, eyeing massive shale deposits around the globe, is greenwashing themselves with “clean, natural gas.” Meanwhile the EPA, in an about face, is withholding test well data from landowners and communities who have benzene and methane bubbling through their aquifers. You know it's bad when not just poor folks but even rich ones with ten million dollar homes are getting nowhere in their lawsuits against the energy companies. You know it's bad when the mayor of Dish, Texas not only abandons his home but the Republican party because his drinking water is now stinking water.

We met Anna's friend, the filmmaker Ben Knight, at his office in town: a hermit's den in the attic of a narrow Victorian, snowy peaks leaning into the window. He was hard at work editing DamNation, a Patagonia-funded documentary which he's been filming and editing for the last couple of years. We sat on the floor of the tiny room and caught up: life, art, the migratory patterns of mutual friends from Chicago to Colorado, Idaho to San Francisco. Ben has a subtle, attentive character. You can imagine him patiently behind the camera, attune, watchful as a fisherman for any movement on the line. He showed us a cut from the movie: a beautiful dense six minutes unfurling the history of dam building in the States, from the first reclamation projects of the 1800's to the latest dam removed in Puget Sound. “That six minutes of film took four months of work — shooting, researching, and editing,” he informs us. Four months to create six minutes! It was affirming to know that we writers and painters aren't alone in our solitary struggles with our medium. Dedication, diligence, doubt, moments of delight — all for the dream that drives us, all to produce a bit of beauty in the world. And in Ben's case, for the world, and its betterment. We left him to his work, alone in his perch, watching through the telescope of editing at the details of an epic landscape, the valleys and rivers of a great and important film.

Needing some raw physicality after all that movie going, I went to play soccer. If you're in the mood for some sadistic cardiovascular punishment, try pickup futbol at 9,000 feet on the full pitch at Town Park, with a ball that plays fast and skipping in the thin air, with guys from Peru and Argentina and Mexico who've acclimated to the high altitude. We divided teams, shook hands, kicked off. A quick-footed game full of good passing and deep runs. The first twenty minutes I was breathing so hard I thought my lungs would shred. A diaphragm cramp had me doubled over on the sideline for a spell of recovery. The next hour I came around, but still you had to be strategic about your sprints. There's only so much oxygen up there to go around. The beautiful game, made more exquisite by the gleaming stadium of peaks surrounding the pitch; a game played so high in the sky it makes Azteca Stadium seem like it's at sea level.

Days after the festival, we hiked the Jud Wiebe trail right out of town. After the foot bridge over a crashing creek, a steep and steady climb up the canyon side. Red rocks and leafing aspen, a slate sky behind electric green trees. After ten minutes Ada was tuckered out. “Daddy, uppy,” she begged, slumping on the trail, immovable as a ruined mule. No amount of prodding or cajoling – or the sight of her mother and grandmother Claudia disappearing around the next bend – could influence her. Soon I was the mule, loaded with a suddenly cheery princess on my shoulders, holding her by the ankles as she sang out the swollen letters carved into aspen trunks. The trail ran west a half mile, then switch-backed grandly onto a terrace of white sandstone. Wild iris, some kind of purple-petaled daisy in bloom. We sat on an overlook, drank water and ate nuts, snapped some pictures, held Ada back from jumping off the ledge into the clouds. High ridge lines saddled with snow; steep mountain faces lined with couloirs. A strange contentment to be sitting there with family, not tempted by the peaks. I still hear their call, but for now, for once, the summits don't taunt me as they once did. These days I've got other mountains on my shoulders.

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.   

Shifting Greys

Morning fog clings to the trees, encloses the black figures of houses, telephone wires, bare limbs in a gentle grip of clouds. We have lost our house. It happened so suddenly. One morning we're negotiating the price with the landlord, our excitement tempered by cautious restraint. A night later he calls to tell us that a couple from Seattle has offered him twenty grand more than we could ever afford, in cash. After two years of taking care of the house as though it were ours, believing in our hearts that it was, instantly it was not. I fought for a day, scrambling with mortgage brokers to see what we could summon to match the offer. But it was hopeless: a day of death throes.

And now the house is a ghost house, a house of shifting greys. The ideas and visions we had imbued the rooms with have been spirited away. Everything appears flat, lifeless, like a wall scraped of it's mural. I look away from views that once charmed me, rooms that tempted me with dreams of us living here, Ada growing up here. Or rather, I can't look into them the way I once did – the way you can't look into the eyes of someone who's betrayed you. A jolt of fate, or crude circumstance? Yellow stalks in the garden we planted last May; the leaf-strewn mounds sleeping until spring. Fog curls away from the warming earth; our souls pull away from this place.

As we ate breakfast, a great-horned owl swooped down from the trees, a shadow gliding out of the fog, to perch in the sycamore tree before us. He saw and didn't see us. The V of his intense eyes; the agile rotating head atop a lordly mass of feathers. He perceives everything, he sees through everything, the apparitions of this world. He is a lesson to us. An admonition not to be fooled by figures in the mist.

Newtown, Our Town

We stretch the skins across our skis, throw the hinges of our bindings, and with the snow falling in delicate curtains that hide the mountains, that make us forget the depths of loss that lie behind the lightness, begin our climb. A ravine of willows reaching out of the powder, red limbs fine and tapering into the gentle cascade. The snowy ridge dissolves in cloud, and when we gain it, the next ridge too is washed away. The faint squeak of our skis slipping through powder. Icicles hanging from the fir trees like Christmas ornaments, make cool suckers that wet the throat and slow your breath. 

We don't talk so much this time. The first climb we bubbled over like two college kids meeting on campus, talking in Italian and American, trading stories, translations of poetry, the pieces of our lives that show the whole. Now it's different. Now we are like old brothers who know already what the other is thinking. And besides there is little to say: the mountain decides our steps.

And beyond the mountain is a story we can hardly talk about. On the other side of that white and forested ridge, on the far side of the continent, is the classroom where it happened, the small winter town collapsed in grief, the parents hugging memories like shards of glass to their hearts. They are parents like us. Like us, not because we have lost like they have, but because we share the same great love, the same great risk. A love that holds open our souls to the pain of the world and makes us shake at even the smallest thought of suffering. Their children are our children, and our legs strain with the hard steps of the next turn, the hard doubt of its worth.

Random images sift out of the sky. Our wives and children asleep in warm beds as we unzip our coats to the thin cold. Rabbit tracks like pearls over a crest. A flash of the impossible, crimson on white, and then a shake of the head to clear the mind. Lanes of forest submerged in a charcoal sky.

The climb becomes a meditation, a practice of measuring the chill on your neck against the sorrow inside. The work of knowing loss while moving on, moving with it. Our capacity for love is a capacity for loss. The sensitivity of our hearts, of the hearts belayed to ours, is an awareness that at any moment, at any misstep, the beauty of the world can become an avalanche of suffering.

Yet we must carry on climbing. The next ski brought forward, weight shifted from one board to the other as you make the hairpin switchback, nearly falling back, catching yourself, a scent of fir brushed from heavy limbs.

A Drive with My Nonno

A drive with my nonno through the Venetian countryside: a cool bright morning of bare poplar trees, silt-dark fields that plane to the horizon, the grassy lane of a canal, fields tilled right to the edges of stone farmhouses. Everything is still but the rushing car. The exhilaration of the present. The countryside, ancient and smelling of woodsmoke, holds motionless for history to pass through. The narrow road curves through ranks of sycamore trees. In the distance we see the church spire of Ceggia, tile rooftops. Outside of town there's a crane and scaffolding – condominiums going up where a field once lay. My nonno gestures proudly with his cigarette at the progress. He is a boy again thrilled by the roads and machinery of Mussolini, the potency of speed.

We come to a small gas station so full of windows it could be a cafe. A lean kid fills his motor scooter at the pump. In suede jacket and defiant eyes I see my uncle in him: he's ridden right out of the Seventies and will find his gang of friends down a dirt road under the trees smoking cigarettes rolled with hashish, watching for the mountains to appear above the fields. A man in well-ironed coveralls steps from the station to help us, suddenly important in a day of boredom. The kid rides off, scooter whining, and I watch him grow small as the old men talk of the price of benzine.

We drive into town. The streets are quiet, banked by curving stone walls with the plaster pealing away; high forgotten windows that hold mysteries within their wooden shutters. A piazza fronted by bakeries, newspaper and clothing shops, a cafe who's small clinking sounds echo into the street. Bicycles left standing at the curb. A few people come and go on the narrow walk, passing each other with the polite brevity of family.

Inside the cafe, a coolness of tile floors, a faint sweetness of pastries and oranges from Sicilia wrapped in tissue paper. Before the hissing machina the barista works quietly. Young men read newspapers half standing in their stools, while the tables are taken over by retirees playing cards. My nonno orders coffee, but when I ask for a spritz a pause of disapproval narrows his eyes, not because I ordered wine, but because I ordered it out of season, the day's season.

He stands at the bar, the black potent drink before him, a cigarette held backwards in his cupped hand, content but noncommittal, prepared to return to the Alfa Romeo and the few errands that give our drive purpose, should he find the place lacking. He is a proud man, precise and controlled, with glinting blue eyes and good manners but never, you feel, one who truly listens to you. He is a man who knows very well how to do things, how things ought to be done, good with tools and gardens, yet his competency is limited to what he understands, and when the barista bumps his elbow while wiping the counter he smiles awkwardly to cover his disapproval. To improvise is to invite criticism.

Why is it, he once asked me, that the New World is not as good as this one? Why in a country so rich as America are the houses made of wood, the coffee made of water, the cars and women with no lines at all? I couldn't answer him, couldn't argue, in part because I didn't entirely disagree with the indictment, but mostly out of respect for him. He was as right as any old man deserves to be after living through the exactness of their lives. And who was I to say differently?

My disagreements are more subtle, there for him to narrow his eyes at or ignore. I order wine instead of coffee, I bicycle to Caole instead of taking the bus. But I try never to argue with him. That would be as pointless as arguing with the past. As cruel as waking someone from a dream.

And I rarely argue because I'm usually quite content. Like now, my elbow on the counter, a smooth euphoria rising in me with each sip of sparkling wine. Thin sunlight through the windows, shining the tables, the tiles at the feet of the old men playing cards. They play efficiently, leaving room between hands for more elaborate gestures. When the deck is finished a bit of laughter and kidding, then new rounds are dealt and their faces go serious: the unturned cards slim as blades on the table. We watch. The stillness of the cafe has made old men of us all. All but the card players with blood in them. Even the barista has grown ancient with watching; satisfied to let others make their moves, their mistakes. I could almost fall sleep in the ease of my contentment.

Then a click of heals on tile and everything changes. A dark-haired, slender woman has come into the cafe. She is not bad looking, she is fair game. The boys look past their newspapers, pleased to give up calcio and cards for that other more important sport. My nonno pretends not to notice her and here I couldn't disagree more with him. He returns to the card game and I watch my every move so as not to appear obvious. She sets her purse on the counter, smiles mildly at the barista, asks in a quiet but certain voice for a coffee, then searches in her purse for something that doesn't exist – a pause that gives her a moment to feel the eyes on her, to asses the room and how guarded or casual she must be. When she looks up it's with a slightly raised chin so that her eyes have the excuse of keeping above the men's glances. She takes in the street beyond the window. She's petite but her body carries a larger strength. She knows not to be flattered by the attention these men give, that to accept is to ask for more. Slowly, like tired children, the men's gazes fall away and return to the idle of their papers, their empty cups.

She watches the street earnestly now. She is alone and content. She is thinking of someone, perhaps, and does not notice the small white cup and saucer placed near her elbow. Her eyes crinkle with concentration, with recognition: an old woman walking past the glass, a thin skirt hugging her brute hips. She waves but the old woman is charging straight ahead. A moment of indecision, and just as her lips part to call she catches herself, unwilling to wreck the island she's made for herself. She finds her coffee and reaches for a packet of sugar. The little spoon clinks soothingly against the cup. She is alone now, belonging to the cafe, as forgotten as the old newspapers on spools hanging from the wall. When her coffee is finished she stands a few minutes longer, still looking out the window, before reaching into her purse to pay.

Midflight/Landlocked

1.

We lay in the hammock, a little shocked to be home.

In the September sky a lingering blue

of the coast,

of small white clouds and screeching sea birds,

the fizzing waves

of an ocean that only moments before

– wasn't it only moments before? –

held us by the ankles,

let us lean far out over that crinkling plane

and away

from the desert that awaited

our crossing.

2.        

Sebastopol, hazy vineyards and a brackish smell of the bay, Novato, Vacaville, ferocious traffic, a death race of freeways, Sacramento, Grass Valley, wispy foothills before the granite waves of the Sierra Nevada, then the fast dive to Reno, train trellises linking the cliffs, Lovelock, broken ridges sliding against a burnt sky, Winnemucca, a cheap motel room for the night. Then with morning, off the interstate and north through the sweeping desert, sagebrush and blond light, the dusty towns of McDermitt, Rome, Jordan Valley on the long shoulders of the horizon; the lone settler cabin on the climb over the Owyhee Mountains, the high broken rhyolite spine and down onto the Snake River Plain, sudden civilization, the river town of Marsing, apple orchards and withered corn fields, tractors pulling veils of dust into the sky, mint smell, the sprawl town of Nampa.

When we get to Boise the skies are milky with smoke from the forest fires in the region. The green of the valley after an endless desert; the trees of the North End cozy as a nest against the bare foothills. We begin unpacking the car while Ada sleeps in the back seat. The house feels vacant, like a face missing its eyes. I'm so disoriented, so doubtful, stunned as a bird batted out of the sky midflight, that after one bag I stand staring out the window at the horizon. I want to drink a bottle of wine and lay with old friends under the live oaks by the sea like we were doing another life ago. When Ada awakens I take her to the hammock and she nestles into my chest. The thought comes to me, Our souls haven't caught up to us yet. . . but they will . . . after a little work, they will.

Ada begins to get restless, to play the “Climb the Prow of the Ship Game”, shimmying high up onto the point of the hammock before tumbling back into my arms. Anna calls out the window for us to help with unpacking. We lay a bit longer, pointing out the wine colors beginning to show in the trees. “Will it still be automn when we get home home?” Ada had asked many times on our trip, excited to see Fall and very concerned the season would come and go before we got back. She was happy now to see the first colors, the fallen sycamore leaves and crab apples in the yard, the wilting garden. “What should we do,” I ask, feeling a bit restless myself, “go inside, or rake up the yard?”

And she shouts out her reply.   

At the End of the Tunnel

What Nick Garcia and The Empty Boat Theatre Company have done with his new play, There's Chinese Tunnels Under Boise, is create an archeological experience of the soul. Or rather, the soul of an Eighties hesher grappling with life, the loss of a girlfriend, and the wisdom burried in a video game. But I can't tell you anything more about the plot. For like any top-secret dig in the middle of the desert — yes, even the barrens of Boise, Idaho — Garcia's esoteric finds can't be revealed to the (unpaying) public until a deeper understanding of our memories and motives is decoded from the middens. Or from the Iron Maiden posters on the wall, the Schaefer beer cans littering the road. We may think we know the ghosts of our past, but what do they know about us? What do they have to show us about the false perceptions, the misplaced nostalgia, we pad around the clay-brittle edges of our most cherished memories? 

Like Elliot's The Wasteland, Tunnels floods the viewer's senses with cultural references only an initiate can fully appreciate. Yet this dizzyingly funny story runs deeper than it's cave paintings. Mixing comedy with tragedy, the play is a redemption song set to 70's and 80's rock and roll. And by the last scene we are left searching under the couch cushions for lost insights, broken joysticks, ancient clues as to who we think we are and why.