Day Ten: Spokane to Seattle, Washington

Wednesday 2 October -- I don’t know much of anything about Spokane, and awake planning a walk.  The sky looks like one of those old-fashioned rolls of cotton batting that had some first-aid purpose, but I don’t know what.  Forgoing simile, it’s darned cloudy.  Poor Pacific Northwesters.  They should move to Detroit, where the sunshine is.  In fact, according to the Weather Channel reporter who was reporting into the breakfast room in Murdo, South Dakota, two mornings ago, this has been one of the wettest Septembers on record – maybe the wettest? – in the PacNW.  At least I have fair warning (foul-weather warning?) that I’m headed for trouble.

You can't help but love a city where the graffiti...

...is a Robert Frost poem.

The hotel also offers a fancy light fixture in my room...

But first:  Spokane, which is pronounced spo-CAN, with a long o and short a, to rhyme with toe-TAN.  The hotel offers a continental breakfast with the room, but I don’t know which continent as it includes an old-fashioned waffle iron and a large urn of batter so you can iron your own waffle.  Not as good as Magdalen’s or Iowa City’s, but a great treat.  Did I mention 70 bucks a night?

...and bicycles

The Spokane River

Spokane is a revelation.  I would not have been able to begin to guess what it might be like, but it seems like an attractive small city with the usual mix of prosperous parts and boarded-up parts – and then I get to the river.  Yowsa!  The town’s founders chose the spot because of the availability of hydro-energy, and that energy is still churning with gusto, with the city streets clustered around it.  The rapids are varying in shape and density and intervening objects (rocks, mostly, but also a small island), but they are consistently intense.  Loud, too.  I love this river!  It has lots of bridges, most of them quite high.  One former Spokaner told me that in the spring melt season, the city has to close one of the footbridges as the spray is so high and so vigorous it can be dangerous.

A little bit wilder now.

Taken from the bridge they close in melt season.

There’s also plenty of sculpture plonked around town, including a totem pole, and I like public sculpture.  City Hall is decorated with restrained, pastel-colored, art-deco friezes, which make an effective contrast with the bridge that’s decorated with cast-concrete skulls (of cattle) affixed to allegorical covered wagons.  And there’s a giant river-side park with a tramway, amphitheater, sports facilities and an arts program.  I must ask S.P. if she ever rode that tramway during her Spokane years.

The hotel kindly grants me a late check-out as I have gotten delayed by the unexpected beauty of their city.  Eventually I’m cleaned up and re-packed, and headed west again.  Spokane looks especially beautiful in the rear-view mirror, and I don’t mean that as a dig.  It’s cradled in a valley, with high mountains behind it, and I’m on a rising road, so I’m looking down at it, past a screen of trees.  The city looks nestled, sane, safe – like it’s practicing some excellent feng shui.

The clouds have thickened, but there’s no rain yet.  It’s chilly enough that I turn on the car heater for the first time on this trip.  I still have a decent view of the pine forests through which I’m driving, and it’s interesting how different they look seen from within, instead of from below, which was the view I enjoyed in Montana.  I’m seeing the trees better now; earlier, the forests were to the fore.  After a few dozen miles, the forest yields to a kind of scrubby fields, seemingly not cultivated.  There are few animals (viz cows and horses) on view.

Another dozen miles or so and cultivated fields come into the scenery, including a cornfield.  More cows appear, and a herd of burros.  My family kept an elderly donkey named Alex, briefly, when I was child, and I have an affection for the species.  Alex was beautiful:  dusty gray with a cream cross across his shoulders (donkeys supposedly have this marking because one carried Jesus into Jerusalem), and those long, furry ears, and big, heavily-lashed eyes.  He liked Canada Mints candies, and he allowed riders.  When he got tired of being ridden, he would lie down, and the rider could dismount quickly or lose a leg.  Alex didn’t seem to mind which.

I’m not sure how it came about that we had a donkey, even an old one, even briefly.  My mother loved pretty much all animals, and probably would have had twenty old donkeys if they were available and hers was the only vote.  My dad liked his animals utilitarian.  Thus, when they bought an 18^th-century farmhouse in suburban Boston a few months before my birth, they soon acquired a dog – he would be a useful guardian of the home and its contents.  He was Archie, named for Dad’s commanding general in WWII, and he was a lab mix with a compulsive eating disorder.  A couple years later they got chickens for eggs, and then of course one needs a cat or two to keep rodents out of the grain, and gradually each child (there are five of us) got her or his own dog to develop responsibility and stuff, and sister one really loves animals and should have a few goats, and we’ll drink their milk (as far as I know no one in the family could stomach goats’ milk, but I think there was a lactose-intolerant neighbor who took it off our hands), and a pig for meat and turkeys for more meat and guinea fowl to compost the entire yard and terrify the children, and then my mother came home from some country fair with two Dorset sheep, James and Sophy.  They’d been orphaned, and needed a home, and so she told my father she would learn to spin, and then their wool would be useful.  She did indeed learn to spin, and a bunch of her friends did, too, and she made new friends through spinning circles, and several times a year she’d push and pull Sophy (not James; he’d already beaten up a Volkswagen and was best left to himself) into the back of her Subaru station wagon – the one with the great smear of lanolin across the rear windshield – and take her to a local school or historical society or country fair, and show little children how wool becomes yarn.  When Sophy died, her obituary was in the town paper, since a half-generation or so of town schoolchildren knew her well.

I am thinking about Sophy and Archie and Alex in part because Washington is offering really the most boring drive so far.  Perhaps if I’d started here, I would have found it fascinating, and been bored by the time I got to Illinois.  At least in Illinois I’d have better radio than eastern Washington offers:  religion, in English and Spanish, and static-y country and mariachi music.  However...

The calm Columbia

The weak sunshine suddenly strengthens about halfway to Seattle, and I round a bend in route 90, and just shut the heck out of my mouth.  Did I say boring?  There before me is the Columbia River – or at least the plunging cliffs that contain it – and a sign pointing me to a scenic viewpoint.  I can’t even gasp; it’s too awesome for that.  Majestic, dramatic, sublime, glorious.  It takes me about 15 minutes to calm down enough to realize it’s also a great spot for a picnic.

Calm but very, very large...

...and powerful.

Petrified wood, possibly pre-Columbian gingko

On the other side of the river there’s the Gingko Petrified Forest State Park, whose interpretive center isn’t open today, but there’s lots of petrified wood laid around the little office, and some helpful signs.  The place smells horrible, like a beach at low tide with a dead seagull somewhere nearby.  That might be the Columbia, but I’m guessing it’s whatever fertilizer the state park people use to keep several verdant, unnaturally perfect lawns, each with its own built-in sprinkler, so bright and green in such arid territory.

I mean, seriously petrified.

Moving into western Washington (this is tricky for me, as I keep thinking I’m going east – I am heading toward the ocean, after all, and as any child knows, the ocean is east), the hills get more mountainous, although a handful of road signs offering elevation information all show less than 3,000 feet.  It doesn’t really seem worth mentioning; even my Honda can handle 3,000 feet.

There’s a sign announcing however-many-miles to Snoqualmie Pass, and I pay little attention.  However, a second sign, combined with that name (snow?  qualms?  separately okay, or at least manageable; together not good), feels a bit ominous.  The clouds are darker ahead, about where Snoqualmie should be, and a sign that says “tune to AM 1610 for road condition updates on Snoqualmie Pass when flashing,” is flashing.  The update is about construction that will close the pass in a few hours, which I may or may not spend in a “rolling slowdown” that drops traffic speed to 30mph or lower.  Despite the slowdown, and the onset of rain from those clouds, and 44 degrees outside per a rude sign that also warns the speed limit is 55 as this long line of cars and trucks rolls slowly past at about 20, I make it through the pass before the shutdown.  Yay!

It’s a fairly quick drive from Snoqualmie to Seattle, but not quick enough for me to miss the horror of rush hour.  For ten days, I have been a happy, grateful, excited person.  But the moment I hit a true traffic jam, four lanes of vehicles pointed in the same direction and going almost nowhere, I turn crazy.  My response is so fast and so strong I know I have got to spend more time figuring out why this flips the switch the way it does for me.

Eventually I make it to B.D.’s, where they’ve held dinner for my arrival.  B.D. is one of The Founding Betties of The Uncrushable Jersey Dress, and she and I have never met.  Nonetheless, she has kicked her youngest son onto the couch to offer me a bed, spread with a gorgeous quilt she made.  She also welcomes me to the family table, where everything is homemade including the apple juice – she picked the apples from her tree that afternoon and squeezed them herself (in a juicer, you understand).  There’s pulled pork and a delicious cole slaw to stuff into B.D.’s homemade honey wheat rolls.  Her recipe is available online if you’d like to make them.  They’re a bit sweet, dark yet not dense, with enough chewiness to keep them interesting.

As I am sneaking out of their home at 4am tomorrow, B.D. and I chat while I mess around with suitcases and long johns and things.  She is lovely, and her home is gorgeous.  Having grown up in a family that numbered up to 28 kids at times, she has gotten into the habit of pulling off closet doors.  “You have a door that will close, and there’s just going to be a mess hidden away in there,” she explains.  Instead she installs shelves and nooks, and everything looks tidy and useable.  She also decorated tins to hold things in her bathroom; the one for cotton swabs has a picture of Yoda on it.  Get it?  The others are similarly witty.  B.D. has a darling grandson and a kind husband and a chatty daughter-in-law, and I am just delighted to be welcomed so warmly into their home.  Also very, very sleepy.