It was a beautiful afternoon for exploring the grounds of Boise’s depot. People were strolling through Platt Gardens, chatting on the hillside next to the railroad tracks.
A young mother, seeing that her son was getting bored, decided to take him for a walk. She’d stopped to talk to some people when the boy pulled away and ran to the railroad trestle bridge over Capitol Boulevard..
“Oh, my God!” she said, running after him as he climbed the stairs to one of its narrow walkways.
The boy was fast, but the mother was faster. She caught him and scooped him up just as he was venturing out onto the walkway.
“You can’t go out there!” she said, close to panic. “You could fall onto those cars down there!”
She was right. He could have fallen very easily.
This is the trestle bridge we’ve all driven under hundred of times, the one at the top of the hill by the depot, where Capitol Boulevard meets Vista Avenue. You drive under it in a blink, not giving a moment’s thought to the possibility that it could be dangerous. It’s roughly 20 to 30 feet above multiple lanes of traffic. A fall from it would kill or seriously injure you, even if you were lucky enough not to get hit by a car.
The bridge has walkways on either side of its railroad track, elevated several feet above the level of the track. Railings line the walkways, but their vertical bars are at least four feet apart, with horizontal bars some two feet above the walking surface. While this may be adequate protection for grownups, how many little kids do you know who can’t get through a two- by four-foot space? There were no gates blocking access to the stairs or the walkways. No warning signs or no-trespassing signs.
That was last spring. As a concerned citizen, I sent an email to Boise Mayor Dave Bieter’s office asking whether someone from the city or the railroad could do something to make the walkways safer. My email was forwarded to Boise Valley Railroad, which operates that stretch of tracks. (In its defense, the trestle pre-dated BVRR’s existence by many years.) Its response was that no-trespassing signs should have been posted there and that the railroad would look into the adequacy of the railings.
Fast forward six months. I hadn’t noticed any changes while driving by, so last week I stopped to have a look.
To its credit, the railroad had prominently posted signs by the steps:
“Keep off of Bridge. No Trespassing. No recreational vehicles. All trespassers will be prosecuted.”
A good start. But with due respect, it seems as if the signs are as much about protecting the railroad’s interests as they are about protecting the public. Small children – those who most easily could fall from the walkways – can’t read the signs. There are no “danger” signs, no gates to prevent access.
Am I overreacting to think this is an accident waiting to happen?
Not necessarily. While I was checking out the signs, a man rode over the bridge on a bicycle. He smiled and said hello as he passed, continued for a short distance, then turned around and came back.
“Are you Tim Woodward?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
His name was Randy Strong, and he wanted to talk to me about part of an old sign he’d found, with a faded hamburger and the words “red devil” printed on it. Because I grew up in Boise, he thought I might know the name of the restaurant it identified. (I don’t, but if you do please email me at the address below so I can put his mind at ease.) Then the conversation turned to the walkways.
“It’s good that they put those signs up,” he said. “But it would still be easy for someone to walk out there. It’s a really dangerous situation.”
So I’m not the only one.
Readers may be wondering why I became so interested in this. A fair question.
The little boy on the trestle? He’s my three-year-old great grandson. We were there to see Union Pacific’s steam locomotive 844, “the Living Legend.” There was a big crowd at the depot that day. Lots of people, lots of kids.
Six months later, there still are no physical barriers to keep a child from running onto one of the walkways.
So I called BVRR’s Nampa office to ask what, if anything, was being done about that. My call was referred to Tracie Van Becelaere, communications director for Kansas-based Watco Transportation Services, which owns the railroad.
“It’s a very odd setup there,” she said, referring to the trestle’s being over Capitol Boulevard. “It’s right over a highway.”
Technically, it isn’t. But it might as well be.
I asked her whether BVRR was, as promised, looking into railing adequacy.
“They’re doing that right now,” she said. “They’re going to put up gates to keep people off of the walkways.”
Will that take another six months?
“I’m not sure how long it will take. But it’s a very high priority for them.”
As it should be. Nobody wants to see a kid on one of those walkways.
Or, worse, lying in the middle of the street below it.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Know someone who’d make a good column subject for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

(Note to readers:  In the rapidly changing newspaper business, online page views are critical. They can mean the difference between stories and columns being published or discontinued. In hopes of avoiding the latter, I’m asking those of you who are tech savvy to go to idahostatesman.com every other Sunday, click on my columns and share the links to them on your Facebook pages. It might help me avoid going the way of the dinosaurs. Thanks. — Tim)

 

Sixteen years ago, someone left a baton on the floor of a multi-purpose room at an elementary school in Anaheim, Calif. A little girl saw it, picked it up and asked her mother if she could play with it.
Her life was never the same again.
The little girl had watched older girls twirl batons at her school that day and been awed by them. The baton one of them left behind was to her what ballet shoes are to a girl born to dance or a fielder’s glove is to a boy bewitched by baseball. She took it home, started practicing and the rest, as they say, is history.
Fast forward 16 years. That “little girl” is 21 now and something of a Boise icon. You may not know her name, but if you attend Boise State University football games, you’ve watched her perform and felt something of the awe she did as a kid watching baton twirlers at her school all those years ago. At BSU’s halftime shows, Marlo Birkmann and the BSU Marching Band light up the field.
Birkmann is the twirler who gets almost everyone’s attention. She throws batons high in the air and does spins and walkovers before catching them. She almost never misses. She’s a twirler, but she could easily be a juggler, keeping multiple batons aloft simultaneously. She spins batons with her neck and shoulders. The crowd watches every move, reacting with cheers, applause and, when she pulls off an especially stunning trick, a collective “wow!”
“She’s a twirler times four!” BSU fan Randy Baxter said from his seat on the 30-yard line at the BSU-Virginia game.
A reference to a routine in which Birkmann juggles four spinning batons in the air at once.
“She’s a fantastic twirler!” fan Lynn Jensen added. “She’s mesmerizing to watch. So fluid and graceful.”
What does it take to go from being a kid playing with a baton to mesmerizing people at a major college game?
“It became my life,” Birkmann said of her initial exposure to the baton. “Once I picked it up, I just dove into it. I never experienced soccer or softball or other sports kids do at that age. I just loved the baton so much.”
She started practicing with a team when she was five and, “by the time I was six or seven I was getting better and needed better teachers. Mom and I found a coach, and that coach pushed me hard to practice every day.”
That’s when it became obvious how much she loved the baton. She practiced two hours every weekday – eight hours a day on Saturdays and Sundays. NFL teams don’t practice that much.
Football players aren’t the only ones who get hurt on the field. A spinning baton may not be lethal, but it packs a punch if it hits you.
“If you want to get better, you have be more daring and take more risks,” Birkmann said. “I’ve sprained my thumb three times. I’ve been hit in face and head, broken almost all my toes, my pinkie, my nose …”
She’s attended hundreds of competitions, including the national championships at Notre Dame University 11 times. She won a national pageant competition when she was only nine.
“I went to competitions almost every weekend when I was growing up. In college, it’s more laid back. It’s easier to impress the fans than it is to impress judges at a competition. At competitions, it’s all about points.”
If you stop during your performance, you lose a point. If you don’t smile enough, have poor form, catch the baton with two hands or, God forbid, drop the baton, you lose points.
Birkmann has performed at as many as four consecutive BSU games without dropping a baton.
“When I do drop it, it’s usually when it’s cold. Your fingers get numb and you can’t catch it as well. … When I do drop it, I hear the crowd go ‘ahhhh.’ I can hear that. I hear the disappointment.”
Dropping a baton may be the worst thing than can go wrong, but it isn’t the only thing. Birkmann has multiple sets of dance shoes. At one game, she accidentally wore the wrong ones.
“I got two different sizes and was wearing one that was too small and one that was too big. One was cutting off my circulation; the other one I slipped out of. But you can’t let things like that stop you. You just have to keep smiling.”
Fans impressed by her performances would be surprised to learn that she doesn’t do her most difficult tricks on the field.
“I do some of my hard tricks, but not all of them. Twirling four at once; that’s a hard trick. I do one called an illusion, where my leg goes over my head; that’s a hard trick. But I don’t do the tricks that require me to practice every day of the week.”
Such as …
“At competitions, I throw the baton in the air and do seven spins before I catch it. On the field, I do three or four. I do tricks that are hard, but not hard enough that I’ll drop the baton. The main goal at the games is to please the crowd.”
The practice it would take to perform her most difficult tricks at games would take time away from studying. Birkmann is attending BSU on scholarships for baton twirling and academics. She has a 3.8 GPA in nursing school.
She came to BSU because, “I wanted to go somewhere where I could be alone on the field and not be part of a team. Baton twirling is very popular in the East and the South; almost every school there has a line of twirlers plus a feature twirler. Twirling isn’t as popular in the West. I wanted to be away from home, but not too far. The schools that offered what I wanted were Oregon State, Arizona State and BSU.”
She chose BSU over the other two “partly because of the blue field and because of better academics and the beauty of Idaho.”
She’s a senior this year, but isn’t quite finished with her studies. Next year she’ll be a “super senior.”
And back on the field again.
“After that I’m done with twirling,” she said. “I know my body can’t take any more. But the opportunity to twirl at a big university has been a huge honor for me because I’ve done this for so long and it’s been my life. Just the fact that I’m out there is so cool. I’m enjoying every moment.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Know someone who would make a good column subject for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

The Statesman held my column that should have run yesterday because the subject has a strong visual component and we didn’t have video in time. It will be in the Statesman next Sunday and I’ll post it here the following day.

Hint:  This of you who attend home Boise State football games should love it.

— Tim