Boise Over its Banks

The Boise River pushes cold, swirling water over its banks every few years, like a person who’s held things inside too long, suddenly overcome. “The highest since 1997” the TV says but I think riverbank renovations have ameliorated high flows in recent decades. I remember them being more calamitous.

“Can you get the blue one down?” Brenna asked yesterday as I was getting our bikes out of the garage, pushing aside carpet roles and cabinets remaining from autumn remodeling. The “blue one” is Laura’s old bike, a size up from what Brenna has ridden so far. It has hung in the garage, unmoved for several years, a symbol of past and future.

The river is only a few blocks from our house so if it’s doing something interesting, we’ll certainly walk over for a look. Two-thousand-six was the first time Kayla and Hunter saw it overflow. We rode our bikes through the water.

It was a few years before we saw flooding again, the first time for Brenna. Hunter was kind to keep her feet from the cold.

The next year saw a little flooding but nothing to impede a princess.

More years have passed. Laura and Kayla are now grown, leaving the survey to our French exchange student Alexis and Brenna who is standing curiously still aside the path ahead, facing riverside brambles.

“Those squirrels are staring at me,” she explains as we approach.

“I used to work in an office there,” I say to Alexis, pointing. “I quit because it was too far from home.” He laughs since we’ve walked less than a mile.

“Those apartments weren’t here then,” I add, nodding at the neatly arrayed Rivery Quarry Apartments opposite the large parking lot.

“And before the other office was built, we worked here,” I say a hundred yards farther on, next to the orange Baybrook Court bridge. “We watched as this bridge was built.”

Brenna speeds ahead and finds a seat on a quarried block of sandstone. She looks thoughtfully at the river while waiting for us to catch up. Years before Brenna, I came out to the very same stone and looked similarly at the water, wondering where life would lead after divorce — a bit of history I don’t announce.

Bright moss on smooth basalt decorates my favorite section of the Center’s manufactured creek. The dark boulders were brought in “from the Big Wood River below Magic Reservoir Dam.”^¹

1. Morrison-Knudsen Nature Center, “Stream Walk”: idfg.idaho.gov/…/stream-walk

If you could see into the past you might observe Jess Jackson and I on one of our regular lunch walks through the Nature Center from yet another office building. Different experiences (people, places, priorities) at the seven different employers I’ve had since living in Boise seem like parallel universes, amalgamated in memory but not part of the same reality.

We cross the orange bridge and continue alongside the river past the rope swing and through Municipal Park. Alexis hasn’t seen it so we take a few minutes to loop through the small Nature Center. It’s too early for its flowers but fish are on the move.

The Nature Center offers portals into parts of the creek conducive to different phases of fish life. It makes me think of an acclaimed, classic Star Trek episode, “City on the Edge of Forever,” wherein past times and places can be viewed and traveled to through an ancient extraterrestrial portal.

Although happy to take over bicycling when Brenna tires of it after the Nature Center, Alexis isn’t ready to wear the unicorn helmet, in spite of compliments it’s garnered for Brenna today.

Later, when Brenna isn’t looking, he gives it a try.

We make burgers and beer at the RAM our terminus. We ask for seating in the area served by our neighbor Jaclyn who we’ve watched grow since she was my daughter Laura’s grade school friend.

We marvel at the new Broadway Bridge as we cross to return home on the opposite side of the river. The wooden foot bridge along this side of the river is closed as expected.

“Lift your feet. I’ll push you,” I tell Brenna. This used to be part of my year-round bike commute. I’ve ridden it many times underwater and don’t think much of it. It’s just water.

0. starPhoto by Alexis Coussa-Cariou

I find it deeper than other times I rode through. Brenna’s pleas and extra cold water convince me to retreat.

0. starPhoto by Alexis Coussa-Cariou

We pick our way through parking lots and a gap between fences to work our way around the flooding and back to the path.

Brenna, as happens more often lately, wants a few posed pictures. She props herself on her elbows for one then sits with a knee drawn up and concludes with a fierce pose on her feet

Alexis trespasses on the flooding beneath the West Parkcenter bridge and returns triumphant, powder blue girl’s bicycle notwithstanding.

Crocus are always the most eager for spring, beating even the forsythia to bloom.

Our official survey ends a few blocks from home at the head of the dirt path among riverside poplars and cottonwoods where usually we begin a walk, a path Brenna has been following her whole life.