Ditches of Boise
By Ryan Gossen
Ditches
Walk down a dusty street in Boise and you will come across a ditch. It seems natural here in the dusty grid, but the water in it is out of place, like a streak of color in a black and white movie. It's not raining. Is someone emptying out a swimming pool? A few blocks later, a larger ditch, and then, what can only be described as a canal.
These lines of water move quickly down the edges of streets, bisect a green cemetery, shoot across someone’s backyard and duck under the road.
I've only been here a day and I don't understand this place, but it is hot. Purely out of reflex, I scan to see if anyone is looking. If I peeled off my clothes here, how bad would that be?
Forgive me, I am a refugee from the Texas summer, where cold, fast running water is not left unattended. Where is the crowd of yahoos with coolers and dogs?
This roadside creek is just three doors down from our Airbnb, on a shoulder off the road where people park. We are staying in “The Bench,” an alluvial plain flattened out above downtown, the beginning of the great desert that fades into eastern Oregon. These are not veins draining a wet landscape, they are capillaries pushing the river into the desert.
Money
Here’s what happened. In the 1880s, investment bankers in New York City invested in a land development scheme to divert a piece of the Boise River and build a long canal across the western desert. They would sell farmers water, then reinvest the proceeds into mining. It was a reasonable plan, but the money ran out buying up water rights and there wasn't much left for construction.
Then an economic depression changed how these investors thought about money, and they wanted out. The contractor doing the actual digging wasn't getting paid, so he did a lien against the investment company, which went bankrupt, and then he bought the rest at auction. Swoop!
He sold the works to the farmers, who formed a cooperative. They then sold it to the federal government, who finally completed and opened the canal.
Capitalism, insolvency, socialism.
Suburbs
A hundred years later the area is no longer farmland, but a series of housing developments with an incredible volume of water hauling ass through everything.
The city offers guidance on how to set up pressure irrigation, should you decide to grow wheat in your ¼ acre yard, but mostly it's a hazard. Otto Otter is the water safety mascot and he spends most of his time begging, pleading with children, adults, and their pets to stay the fuck out of the canals, where they are known to drown.
But it's kind of like telling kids not to play with sticks.
When bankers want to make some money, this water is a “natural resource,” but when kids want to play, it becomes “industrial infrastructure,” and Otto Otter is deployed. He can be found in coloring books, school assemblies, and signs posted at grocery stores.
Somewhere in the closet of an efficiency apartment on The Bench hangs a head-to-toe Otto Otter costume. The costume is a little threadbare and has a smell that does not align with Otto’s official backstory. Out of view, in the living room, a television is on. It's always on. He is asleep on the couch and we can see his socks cantilevered off the armrest.
What kind of pattern has someone asleep at seven in the evening?
I've never met this man but I feel I know him.
Sediment
I'm a fan of rewilding, but re-wilding this place would mean turning it back into a desert plateau and I love the bizarre interdimensional nature of The Bench. The humans that live here are eclectic. This is not the fancy part of town, that would be the precious turn of the century neighborhood downtown that was the original suburb (or the mountain chalets between there and the ski resort). On The Bench, people talk to each other on the street. There is a trailer park. Some of the apartment complexes might have a meth-y feeling.
Danny, who lives next door, says people get in the canals all the time. According to Danny, if you go for a run and come back via the cemetery, it's perfectly fine to take a little dip in the three-foot-deep channel that runs between the graves. He realized it was a ghetto a year after he moved in. So it's the kind of ghetto you might not notice immediately.
The houses are small and there is no wave of MacMansion rehabs moving down the street, raising property taxes, and notifying slackers that they are now old and poor. Danny is a 60-something-year-old transplant from Hawaii via the Rockies. This is the summer of COVID but he gets to the gym every morning.
He is one of those retirees that was lured by freedom but has too much energy to appreciate sloth. After the gym, he runs power tools in his backyard.
The Bench relaxes me. There is a sense here that anyone you meet might be working hard to make ends meet, obsessed with a personal project, or sitting around with time on their hands. This suits me because I cycle between these states, but most places I've lived want me to remain in one, possibly two of them, but never all three.
The exception was South Austin in the 90s, before gentrification.
Gentrification is the feeling of living with a girlfriend who gets a really great job and starts dressing differently. She leaves the house when you're still on the couch and you feel that you live here more than she does. You're really more a part of the place, even though she pays more of the rent. She doesn't have time to hang out and becomes unfamiliar with the changes of the trees and configurations of neighbors' curtains and parked cars. She is not known to dogs in yards along the road to downtown. She is at work. She is commuting. She is meeting friends for drinks. That phase of her life is over.
No, Boise doesn't feel like that, but it feels like she has a few resumes out and is taking a hard look at her life.
I'd like to buy a place here that pays the note with rental income, and maybe stay here sometimes. The ski resort is only thirty minutes away. The only thing Boise lacks is anyone I know.
I would be a pioneer. It's appealing to start fresh in a town that doesn't know me, but I don't have a sense of how much of me it would require, and how parts of me would be drained out of other places. I only feel my own surface water.
And anyway, I'm not me now, I'm three people.
Us
Electric scooters are scattered around downtown. My wife, Laura, my 13-year-old daughter Eliza, and I download the apps and complete the initial scavenger hunt. At home, I consider the scooters a pestilence; debris on sidewalks and another challenge to the sovereignty of bikes and pedestrians.
They are cheating, but in a new city, cheating is what we want.
I twist the throttle forward and there is no response until near the end when the thing tries to jump out from underneath me. My bones urgently remind me they are old and brittle like sticks, and I try to find the middle ground.
Eliza is instantly in the groove, the line, the lean. She and Laura look happy and we flit around like pigeons. There is a paved trail along the river. We watch out for the places where tree roots push up the pavement.
Playing on the jungle gym. Credit: Ryan Gossen.
We go to Eliza’s favorite pizza chain.
A loose dog runs up the sidewalk, pursued by a stressed-looking boy carrying a leash clipped to an empty collar. I stop and look as he catches the dog, a young herding breed who has not acknowledged the boy as having any authority over him. It bites him as he pulls it by the scruff down the sidewalk. It's not a serious bite but it hurts, and the boy has tears but he doesn't let go.
He gets the dog into the fenced outdoor seating, and a lady there helps him with the leash. Dad is ordering pizza inside and is unaware. I go in and tell him his son needs his help. I'm proud of the boy, I want to reward him somehow, but I'm afraid I got him in trouble.
If this is a story he remembers for the rest of his life, I feel it's a toss-up as to whether it will go down as a victory or trauma.
People downtown wear the masks. There is a sushi place with a crowd of Tinder dates waiting for a table. When they sit down, they take their masks off, which must be quite a moment.
After dinner, we find an enormous jungle gym in a fancy office park and spend a solid thirty minutes on it.
There is barely enough battery left in the scooters to get back across town. It's harder to see the bumps in the dark. I fight crankiness as my buzz from a beer with the pizza wears off. We return to our house on The Bench.
Slacker Town
Those of us who were not born in Austin but moved there more than a decade ago are always on the lookout for the next town that will give us that feeling of being where interesting things are happening but where little is expected of us.
A place with enough space to pursue projects that have nothing to do with money.
A slacker town.
This is as much a time as it is a place. San Francisco in the 60s. Berlin in the 30s and again in the 90s. I've heard good things about Omaha. It has the familiar ring of the industrial era, promising decline and decay, low housing costs, rich soil. A few friends could rent a house as long as one or two had a job.
An educated town like Austin could only take so much idleness and creative energy before things got serious. People have ideas, make plans, start companies, and find investors. Warehouse districts become skyscraper blocks, moldy houses on the east side become unaffordable, and are eventually rehabbed. The necessity for a high volume of money flowing through at all times means that to live here, all of one’s time must be accounted for.
No more idle weeks when one decides to build a canoe from plywood scraps. No more days of random encounters culminating in the backyard firepit party. Life is no longer performance art. What was an art district is now a gallery district. There is a microbrewery and a pet spa.
Rural folks drive in on the weekend to walk around and gape at weirdos, but they see mostly each other.
Not too many hippies or slackers are left, only those that found money. Poetry slams, jewelry making, and the garage band didn't pan out, but the studio the bass player bought is worth a fortune. The rest are pushed to the outskirts, out of the urban spotlight, where their stories unfold anticlimactically, with few witnesses.
Mudfish bury themselves when their pond is drying out and survive in a desiccated hibernation, re-appearing when the waters return. Slackerfish thrash in the hypoxic puddles, their mouths gaping open at the surface, where they can see the boulders they once swam around, now dry overhead, not understanding why things changed, only that they should not have.
I didn't meet them, but I strongly suspect that the cool people in Boise say it's not cool anymore.
The retirees next door, on the other side of us from Danny, are addressing the heat by positioning chairs around a kiddie pool in the backyard and wielding large, stainless steel tumblers with large bore straws. I say hello and this is enough for them to decide we are alright and they invite us to spend the day in their backyard.
I am humbled. Friendliness is a form of adventurousness, and it takes me back, again, to South Austin in the 90s, where a conversation could change the course of an unplanned day. I ask them about the owners of our Airbnb.
They shrug. “We don’t see them much, just renters like you.”
It's a relief to me that they are old and still living here. With any luck, they won’t be priced out before it’s time to move into an assisted living facility, or whatever it is they must do.
But we don’t have time to put our feet in their kiddie pool, we are moving out. I'll drive for at least five hours before finding somewhere to cook dinner and watch the sunset before we fall asleep in our van. Probably somewhere in Utah, with nothing man-made in sight but the road, ideally near a creek.
There is something about sleeping near water.
Ryan Gossen is a writer living in Austin, Texas, where he also pursues dance, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and climbing, and is an active member of Texas Search and Rescue. He has had many vocations, including user experience (UX) designer, experimental psychologist, construction worker, arborist, and ski bum. He writes mostly about man’s interaction with nature. More of his writing can be found on his website.
