The Ghosts of Travelers Past

By whatever name you call it – The City of Trees, Les Bois, River City – I’m still inspired daily by living here. From the Mesa to the Bench, North to East end, there is no collection of neighborhoods quite like our own. I’ve gone today from Table Rock to the Capitol and beyond. My hands sting from the bite of cold air, but I’m still willing to flex my frozen fingers to type the praises of my home city here now.

There’s just something about Boise in the winter: the muted colors dimmed by inversion clouds; the days you’re actually glad Boise is tight-knit, walking all the way across town in an hour; jealous of not Paris, Montreal or New York in regard to weather; being able to live humbly and within your means; still paying only $1.50 for a whisky at the right bar and savoring every heart-warming second of it; getting snubbed by the bartender for not tipping well, but knowing that even you lean

on another.

It’s this interesting sort of symbiosis that gets me going on a bike ride like the one I took last Saturday afternoon. Driven by a buildup of winter-break hibernation deposits (read: beer gut), I took a blind route up the Bench. At one point, I crossed Federal Way, Capital Boulevard and Vista Avenue within a minute, shouldering my bike on a graffitied

railway overpass.

I landed on the clay-colored bricks of Boise’s most famed landmark: the Spanish-style train station, known formally as Boise’s old Union Pacific Railroad Depot. The structure, built in 1925, looked ghostly in the opaque light of day. I knew train service to the depot stopped in 1971, but I still felt the hustle and grind of the place – its history sits in the pavement, locked in the mortar and flowing along the rails.

Although I’ve lived in Boise nearly all my life, I remember only Fourth of Julys under the shadow of the bell tower; it’s really a whole new experience with the gardens frigid and emptied, the water still and cool. From the top of the hill, Boise stretches to the edge of the valley. Frozen in the gray and blue of early January, the city looks frigid, iced and completely digestible. Tchaikovsky spinning in his grave, I think of a glass of Riesling, hop on my bike and take the hill downtown. Sure the city still inspired me, but I can only stand out in the cold for so long.

DALE W. EISINGER
Culture Editor

Related Posts: