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.   

The Experiment: Day Sixteen, the Lovely Wreckage

I am awake before dawn, 0545, the bells striking three times, far off and then a moment later very near. The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly: part of this town and happy.

                          – from Salter's A Sport and a Pastime.

Now another change. Gone is the ennui of the empty house, the clicking quiet of the wooden floors, the cool uncertain mornings, the faint despair that seeps in without having Anna and Ada with me. And while I miss them more than ever, I've gotten into a good dutiful rhythm of work and play: steady work at the house I'm remodeling, tending to the garden when I get home, a beer in the hammock with a book in my lap, or futball in the evenings with the immigrants at the park. All I seem to need – outside of my girls – is a simple life of sport and literature for work not to feel too pointless and for life to hold some beauty for me. My desires seems as reduced and refined as those of Salter's protagonist in A Sport and a Pastime; as simple and hearty as Turgenev's in Sketches from a Hunter's Album.

But of course that beauty is no more than a sugar high without the sustenance of my women folk. When I was single it wasn't that way. Beauty then was an ideal, an actual element on the chart, so real you could study it from every angle, pursue with your senses and know esthetically in your mind its existence from the materials and shapes of the world about you. I won't say that's changed. But somehow, with family, I have, or my pursuit of it has. I still value Beauty just as much, but have less time to approach it esthetically, yet more time, by demands of family life, to feel it in my heart. More time to know the beauty of my wife in the happiness and struggles of merely trying to make dinner or time to go for a walk; more time to know beauty through the dearness of my daughter growing and learning about the world. Perhaps it's a more grounded sense of beauty, a less theoretical one. Less prosody and more prose. Less prose and more pinch of Ada's plump cheeks, a cheeky question from her and a check on the old bachelor state of contemplative and sometimes self-indulgent interaction with life.

But interestingly, experimentally, it's been a state I've been able to slip back into these last weeks – which has been therapeutic for me, a good artistic relief. But now I'm ready for the lovely wreckage of family life again.

And knowing they're to return from Colorado in a couple days has had me kicking my heels in anticipation. For Ada's birthday I'm building her a playhouse in the side yard – five by five feet of salvaged lumber, two windows and a used door under a shed roof, clad horizontally in pine I'd salvaged from my job. I worked on it yesterday afternoon and into the evening, a blustery sky of chalk blue shaking the trees now and then and whirling sawdust up into my eyes. The little house came along, the framing slowly clad course by course like a sleepy girl pulling on her socks. I had meant, on my last big night solo, to ride off to a bicycle rally (the Hellodrome race put on Boise Bicycle Project), but the rhythm of work had me charging along, as did the suffusing excitement of knowing Ada and Anna were due home the next day. A beer and then a whiskey soda added to the suffusing, but not the saucing. Mixed drinks and miter saws go hand and blade. Yet I had that humming feeling, serene, that has you pausing to admire the windy light in the walnut leaves, the gliding shadows on the grass, the surging green of late spring over the valley and overhead like the whole world's a floating garden and you're just a chittering, nut-drunk squirrel tinkering away at your nest in the trees. Tinkering and sprucing and knowing your little fur family is soon to be with you, soon to be home.

While all that sounds a bit corny, it's true. And maybe that's what this three-week experiment has taught me: how much I've changed since my solo days – “grown” sounds self-congratulatory – to need my family close for any artistic effort to hold much meaning for me. Without Ada and Anna all the rest is a glorious sunset seen alone from a hilltop. That used to be alright, the being alone and the beauty just for me, perfectly alright. But it isn't anymore.