Episode 19: The Basement Smells Like Uncle (Again)

In November 2005, I moved to Boise with a duffle bag of clothes, a Sony Discman and a Case Logic CD binder, and the first place I slept was the couch in my brother’s basement. It was meant to be a stopgap, a temporary measure to save money while my wife, Erica, stayed back in New Hampshire until our house sold. We figured it would only be a month or so. It ended up being four and some change, but for my own comfort and sanity, I bolted from the basement long before Erica landed in Boise on April 1, 2006.

In a micro sense, my return trip in July resembled those initial weeks in Boise 16 years ago. Twenty-four hours before my daughter, Magnolia, and I were to touch down on the tarmac, our lodging for the 16-day trip fell through, so I texted Travis to see if we could crash with his family until we sorted it out. But shortly into our stay, it became clear that, unless we ponied up for a hotel or Airbnb, we were stuck squatting on the basement sectional until the bitter end.

Parachuting into someone’s life unexpectedly, even when you share blood or a deep bond of friendship, can strain relations and test individual resolve. Years ago, Erica’s brother, Joe, flew to Boise to see us for a few days – but only a few days – and one evening over cocktails he laid out his philosophy on visiting friends and family and the science behind booking short trips over long ones. His carefully constructed argument, which may or may not have been pulled from his military training and possibly had some basis in sociology or whatever, boiled down to this: It’s best for everyone involved to get in and get out before you overstay your welcome. Sixteen days is not a quick visit; in fact, it’s a long-ass time to impose yourself on others, longer than I would have preferred regardless of our lodging situation, but this trip was more about Magnolia than it was about me. When our family made the decision to move to Ohio in 2020, Magnolia’s only request was that we flew her back to Idaho every summer to attend the YMCA’s overnight camp at Horsethief Reservoir, and no question we would make that happen for her. She also had friends in Boise she wanted to see for the first time in nearly a year, and one in particular who was celebrating a birthday a full week before Magnolia was set to go to camp, so half a month in Boise it was.

I can’t say I was super excited about the trip initially. Length aside, we were leaving 70-degree temperatures, fireflies and summer rain for endless triple digits, wildfires and a perpetual drought, and July was always, without failing, my least favorite and most mentally taxing month of the year to live and breathe in Boise. The thought of never having to suffer another hot and smoky Idaho summer while I pushed through seasonal depression was a huge factor in my longing to move back East. Thankfully, the elements weren’t nearly as bad as I had anticipated, and I was actually amazed at how quickly I adjusted to them. After Travis picked us up at the airport around midnight, the thermometer was still in the 80s as we slammed beers in his backyard and caught up, and the faint late-night breeze, however warm it may have been, was nonetheless welcoming, a reminder of the reprieve of darkness I often embraced on our back patio in the midst of a punishing Boise heatwave.

Contrary to my first trip back to Boise in June, I instantly felt grounded this time around, despite the jarring feeling of waking up that first morning somewhere familiar but foreign like my brother’s basement. I think it was jarring for my nephews, too, particularly finding Magnolia and me on the couch where they normally watched TV, played video games and hung out with their friends. They knew we were coming to town but did not know the particulars, other than we were staying somewhere else, yet suddenly we were there, in their space, for unexplained reasons, and as it turned out, we never left. Sixteen years ago, when my nephews ranged in age from 3 months to 5 years old, there was novelty in Uncle Chad’s sudden appearance in their basement, like a pepped-up clown bursting on the scene midway through a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party. Back then, the couch wasn’t nearly as nice as it is now, and after a couple of seasick nights sailing its tired springs, I abandoned ship for terra firma and moved the cushions to the floor in front of the TV. I soon realized that the three oldest boys – Nate, Ollie and Henry – woke up like clockwork at dawn and came downstairs to watch cartoons, so every morning began with a nephew or multiple nephews pouncing on my chest and/or stepping on my crotch, peppered with an enthusiastic “Hi, Uncle Chad!” It toed the line between endearing and anguishing, and after a month or so of enduring baby elephant stomps to my exterior genitalia, I found a small rental house on the Boise Bench behind the Vista Village shopping plaza and waited out the winter on a leaky air mattress waiting for my wife to arrive.

Mercifully, none of my full-grown nephews still jump on me – we’re on a respectful hug and high-five basis at this point – and it was fascinating to observe their lives over the 16 days. Nate, Ollie and Henry are full-fledged adults, and at nearly 16, Ernie is close behind. They go to college, they have jobs, they have their own daily crises and triumphs. Every household has a rhythm, and for a family of six, life is in a near-constant state of motion that looks and sounds like barely-contained chaos on the verge of eruption. We did our best to stay out of the way, but the last-minute change of venue drastically altered the trajectory of the trip. Overnight, we went from the promise of comfort and quiet in a full apartment with our own beds and kitchen to squeezing our lives into a household of six with no beds to spare and little room in the fridge for our food. Magnolia wrangled multiple sleepovers at various friends’ houses before camp, but I remained stuck on the couch. Friends I planned on seeing regularly were suddenly unavailable, and conflicting schedules made it difficult to connect with others, but the lemonade I squeezed out of the couch-surfing lemon was a bushel of bonus time with Travis. Relatively speaking, we didn’t see much of each other while both of our families lived in Boise, which is difficult for others to comprehend until you paint the full picture for them. When Erica and I moved to Boise, we had not yet been married two years, and soon thereafter we welcomed Magnolia into our world. Travis and his wife, Paula, meanwhile, were in full-court-press parenthood with four boys 5 and younger. These children were and remain the focal point of our lives, and in this context, making time to drink beer with your brother on the proverbial tailgate of life is more challenging than you think, and one day you wake up and 16 years have vanished without much brotherly love to show for it.

We may not have made up for all that lost time, but a tally of the empty beer cans and whiskey bottles at the end of the 16 days will tell you we did our damndest. Even if our evening plans weren’t directly related, there was at least one (and often several) nightcaps whenever we reconvened on his patio. Together, along with our friend, Jerms, we attended our first concert since the start of the pandemic, an outdoor Built to Spill show that felt like a family reunion for Boise scenesters of a certain graying age, and it instantly found its place in the highlight reel of live music I’ve seen with Travis since he first took me to see Pink Floyd at the Horseshoe while he was studying at Ohio State. It’s astounding to think that we’ve been seeing shows together for nearly 30 years, especially when you consider there’s a decade between us and most brothers I know have distant, fractured or all-out hostile relationships with each other regardless of age. But a 10-year gap narrows drastically in adulthood, and we’ve been fortunate, despite the rare flare-ups here and there – usually when he tries to “big brother” me and/or I frustrate him with my ineptitude, impatience and/or stubbornness – to have cultivated a deep, meaningful friendship that long ago transcended our blood connection.

A week into the trip, the time came to drive Magnolia to camp, and I asked Travis to go with us and knock off for the night in the mountains before heading back to Boise the next morning. He eagerly obliged, and after drop-off we headed north, drove up a dirt road to one of his regular fishing spots on the Gold Fork and set up camp together for the first time in 13 years, our last overnight excursion coming a month before Magnolia was born in 2008. Observing us out in the woods together will reveal telling similarities and stark contrasts. Like our father, we both carry bandannas because bandannas are versatile and utilitarian, and sure enough, we ended up using mine to filter silt out of the hose water we drank from a PVC pipe mounted to the top of Trav’s pickup truck. Travis is an Eagle Scout and a retired Army National Guardsman, while I quit Cub Scouts after third grade and haven’t served my country since I was captain of the Newberry Elementary fifth grade safety patrol. We’re both planners – as that relates to the Scouts, I joke that I mic-dropped off the stage after learning “Be Prepared” – but where I’m more of a throw-shit-in-a-bag-and-go planner, even my brother’s systems have systems, and they’re all designed with maximum efficiency and user experience in mind. When you’re in the woods with Travis you’re gonna have a hell of a good, organized time, and by the end of the night your belly will be full and he’ll already be talking about what he’s going to cook you for breakfast in the morning.

Upon arrival, we both cracked open our first afternoon beer and breathed in the mountain air, and you could visibly see us shake off whatever it was we each left behind in the city. And while Travis donned his bait vest and assembled his fly fishing rod, I changed into the French women’s basketball jersey I purchased 20 years ago at a Paris vintage shop and sat down in the sun with a book. Throughout my life, I’ve often struggled to reconcile my lack of alignment with traditional standards of masculinity, one of the reasons being I’m not good at doing stuff. I’m not a fix-it guy. I don’t tinker. I will never wow you with a miter saw or break you off from the pack to show off an engine rebuild or whatever. Travis, meanwhile, is really good at doing stuff, the quote-unquote guy stuff, and in that way he’s cut from the same cloth as our father. Whenever I’m around my brother, I feel like my common sense IQ drops 50 points, and there wasn’t much there to begin with. So when he asked me to give fly fishing a try, even after he laid out his philosophy on fishing and gushed about the grace of the fly rod cast and the spiritual fulfillment he derives from the experience, I initially passed. While I understand its appeal, I’ve only been fishing maybe five times in my life, and I was perfectly content sitting there in the sun in my women’s basketball jersey, reading my book and drinking my beer. But this was clearly important to my brother, and he was eager to share the moment with me, so I graciously put down my book and my beer and joined him in the river.

I won’t get into the differences between fly fishing and spin and bait fishing because I don’t know enough about them to sound even remotely educated on the subject, but I will say that holding and casting the fly rod, I could see why Travis equates this type of fishing with ballet. There is a certain fluid, meditative beauty to it that you don’t get with the rigid mechanics of traditional rod-and-reel fishing. Which isn’t to say it’s any easier, but there’s a tangible feel to it that contributes to fly fishing’s allure. As Travis and countless other fishing enthusiasts are quick to point out, it’s often less about the results than it is about being there, in the moment, and removing yourself from everything else in your life. So I sunk into the moment as Travis showed me how to cast and watched me work the river until I had successfully caught and released my first and only trout. I don’t think he cried, but if he did, I’m glad I wasn’t looking.

As night fell, Travis made gourmet burritos on the butane stove and we switched gears from beer to bourbon, settling into conversation about life, family and all the other deep talk brothers dive into in moments like these. When I was 16, Travis had a hand in the first time I got drunk – as in, he handed me a can of Diet Coke that he had discreetly filled halfway with rum while no one was looking. We were on a big beach vacation in the Outer Banks with our family of five, our grandparents, an aunt, uncle and two cousins, and lastly, but no less important to this story, Travis’ girlfriend at the time. The drive from Ohio to North Carolina was a good 12 hours, so we stopped overnight in a cheap motel somewhere in Virginia or Maryland. Travis and I were assigned a room with Grandma and Grandpa, while my parents, sister and Trav’s girlfriend bunked in the room next to us. At some point during the night, Travis had apparently forgotten that he was sharing a bed not with his girlfriend but with his brother, and I woke up in horror to find him spooning me and cradling me with his arm. It took a Herculean effort to elbow him awake, eventually yelling, “Get off of me!”, and our grandfather, stirred awake by the commotion in the neighboring bed, yelled back, “What’s going on over there?!” It’s a tale we’ve told and retold over the years, and we laughed about it again over the last bit of bourbon before climbing into the back of Trav’s truck to share a platform bed decked out with a foam pad, sleeping bags, pillows and an extra blanket. I warned him that my elbow has only sharpened over time, but thankfully, it was a spoon-free night of rest, better than any sleep I had on the basement couch, and I woke up refreshed and reinvigorated, vowing not to let another 13 years slip away before we do it again.

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