More About My Hometown

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During high school, there were a handful of good coffeeshops downtown. I particularly liked Obadiah's by the main library on 8th street. My friends would go there every Wednesday night. It closed down after a couple of years, though.

The main library is right across the street from the art museum, the history museum, and one of the parks on the river. The Greenbelt also passes right by the library, going under the road. When the Boise River Festival still existed, it was nice to park a bit west of the library and walk to the park.

There are at least three main parks along the Greenbelt in the middle of town, all , named after the wives of city fathers: Julia Davis, Ann Morrison, and Kathryn Albertson. I like Albertson park the best. Not only is it the newest, with the nicest landscaping, but there's a large manmade pond in the middle with huge stone walls and a redwood roof. It's very peaceful.

My favorite park, though, is to the north of town a ways. The main road that winds along the base of the Foothills is, aptly, Hill Road. To reach it, you'd take Glenwood (near my highschool) north down the face of the Bench, past Chinden (with the State Fairgrounds and the baseball stadium on the right and, among other things, one run down shopping center and one bar with a long-unfinished tromp l'oeil western scene painted on the side on the left) and State Street, up Gary Lane, to Hill Road. Turn east and follow the road.

After winding past some nice neighborhoods (mostly toward the hill side) and some older neighborhoods (when you reach North Boise), you'll turn sharply to the south to find Camel's Back Park, named for the large hill.

The park has a small but decent playground, lots of green grass, though it's hilly, a couple of tennis courts, a small parking lot, and the eponymous hill. The face of it is sandy, with half-buried railroad planks shoring up the erosion possibilities. You have to be serious to climb the face; it's sixty or seventy feet tall and fairly steep. There's also a gentler trail up to the side, but it's not as much fun.

If you're really fit (or freshly twenty-five and stupid with something to prove and no great affinity for the breakfast you just ate) you can run up the face. There are scraggly sagebrush bushes to either side and at the top. The immediate view north and east isn't spectacular. There are a few houses you can see — not particularly beautiful. The view west is lovely, though. You're high enough to see much of the city, with the old trees of North Boise making the river valley look fertile.

For the best view of the city, though, you have to go further east, past Broadway and just past St. Luke's hospital, where my mother works, up to Table Rock, a plateau a couple of hundred feet above the valley floor. The best views are at night.

To reach Table Rock, you have to wind your way through a growing subdivision back and forth up the foothills. Then, the paved road ends and you need a decent car. When they grade the road or put down fresh gravel, it's not so bad, but if it's rained recently, it's a bit of a drive. The result, though, is a plateau with a huge lit cross (one of Boise's distinctive features and a matter of no small controversy) and a cold concrete bench-like sculpture (and that's pushing it) on the lip of the plateau. From there you can see for miles and miles, south to the airport and its runway lights and beyond, east to west along I-84, up the Connector, to Bronco Stadium at Boise State University by the river, through all of the lights of downtown, to Meridian and beyond to the west, with a sea of trees engulfing everything and as many stars as you can imagine overhead.

It's popular with teenagers.

It's also great during the winter, on nights when the air is cool and clear, but the wind is cold and cruel.

North Boise is the old part of town. For example, there's Harrison Boulevard, a divided street with huge trees growing in the thick median. That's why it's a boulevard. The houses there are beautiful, as rich and Victorian as they could be, for they're probably not more than 70 years old. There's Warm Springs Avenue going east from Broadway up toward Lucky Peak Dam, with the nicest houses anywhere. If you keep going, past the Pioneer Cemetary (a great place to take scenic photos), you'll pass the Natatorium, a decent and historic swimming pool with just about the only waterslide in the area since the waterslide park near the airport shut down many years ago.

The rest of North Boise has always seemed cramped to me, with tiny streets, no garages, small houses, and expensive land. Some of my friends live there and like it though, so who am I to say?

I'd probably live out on the Bench, probably in west Boise, maybe south of Overland, where they're building new subdivisions. The houses there are new, airy, with uncrowded neighborhoods, decent space between houses, and attached garages. Too much history weighs me down. That's where the real growth is, anyway. With the mall built in the late '80s, Costco soon following, the 21-tscreen movie theater opening at Cole and Overland, and Wal-Mart's first foray into the area just down the street, that's where the real growth is.

I suspect the boundaries between west Boise and Meridian will blur even further. Fairview used to be dull and boring driving west past Maple Grove or even Cloverdale. Now it's full of shops and restaurants to Eagle Road and beyond. (When I went to visit my friend Ben at the ranch, I knew I was close when I hit Eagle Road. Now there are stoplights on it!)

It's hard to say what I miss. It feels weird to drive down Maple Grove to Goddard (as if I were taking the long way to high school) where there's a stoplight now (about time, too, for turning north onto Maple Grove!). I don't miss the stoplight at Fairview and Milwaukee, cramped with mall traffic. One year, it took an hour for me to go from Maple Grove and Franklin to Milwaukee and Franklin, less than a mile, on my way to work — it was the 23rd of December.

It's not really nostalgia. Everything feels smaller now. Maybe I'm used to bigger places, or maybe I've grown.