I had a chance to travel anywhere. Why did I pick Spokane? (SLNYT)

September 22, 2021 10:52 AM

Link to NYT article Having been to Spokane on more than one occasion, I couldn't resist clicking this link. Instead of a snarky takedown, I found a poignant reflection on Covid, parenthood, and what we are leaving our children. There's also a lot about baseball :). (Mirror link)

This is the quote that got me as a parent and as someone who loves the outdoors.

"I missed my older daughter — a contemplative and perceptive girl who, a few days earlier, when we had our first bout of summer smoke at home, looked up from our driveway and wondered aloud if her own children would think the yellow suns she drew as a kid were strange, because, by then, the sun would always look red. In that moment, I understood that I was failing them. I don’t mean as a father, not one on one. I mean as part of a society that seemed, with increasing bluntness, to be sending its children signals that it would not prioritize their well-being or their future — that it would not keep them safe."

posted by elmay (24 comments total)

Mostly I read this thinking, "Yeah, why did you go to Spokane?" But the ending was very poignant.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:35 AM on September 22, 2021

Without having RTFA, I can attest that there are far worse places to visit in the West, without even having to leave Eastern Washington (looking at you, Tri-Cities).

Off to read the thing now…
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 11:45 AM on September 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

I have no interest in permanently moving there, Spokane is perhaps Washington's okayest city. Which makes it okay!

It's actually not bad. They have food co ops, progressive little shops, etc. It's distantly taking on a Boise/PDX influence, and who knows, maybe in a few years it'll do so more intensely.


The ending is* poignant.
posted by firstdaffodils at 11:50 AM on September 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

It just reminds me of how back in April, freshly vaxxed and waiting to do something, anything, finally... I spent time trying to figure out the best way to do a California Minor League road trip. And then Delta spiked that so... weeee....
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:24 PM on September 22, 2021

We've visited Spokane a few times in the last few years. We had firm plans to go again in June 2020 until the pandemic kiboshed that (my sister in law lives there). We're looking at making a trip next year (maybe) depending on the state of the pandemic.

I was stopped on the street here in Toronto by a guy who asked me where I got my A Clockwork Orange vintage book cover T-shirt and I said, "A cool bookstore in Spokane called Auntie's." He said, "Oh. That's far."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:42 PM on September 22, 2021

I used to take a summer road trip from Seattle to Atlanta. First night was always Spokane. Walk along the river from my hotel to the No-Li brewery, through Gonzage university's campus. Ah, the before times...

But, not moving there from Seattle
posted by Windopaene at 1:48 PM on September 22, 2021

And it's the home of Cyan, the creators of Myst, and lots of other goodness. Great people, an amazing facility. Plus, I remember a fantastic hotel downtown, worth a visit. Had lunch there once when we were exploring the notion of a Myst tv show, ala Lost, which was big at the time.
posted by emmet at 2:05 PM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

I spent the night there, and just remember hiking up from the Bowl and Pitcher area past the water management facility up a hill to a road and to some well-deserved 'za and beer at Flying Goat.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:06 PM on September 22, 2021

This was a really touching article.
posted by PussKillian at 2:15 PM on September 22, 2021

Jon Mooallem is such a good writer. Thanks for posting this!
posted by Lexica at 2:17 PM on September 22, 2021

Not being a baseball person, I had no idea about Ribby the Redband Trout, but that's a great mascot.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:19 PM on September 22, 2021

Let’s just say, I felt as if I were moldering in place.

What a perfect description of what I've been calling the pandemic doldrums.
posted by lunasol at 3:06 PM on September 22, 2021

This piece really isn't about Spokane.

I'm still processing it.
posted by bumpkin at 3:20 PM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

(looking at you, Tri-Cities).

Oh you mean the Dry Shitties? Yeah, intimately familiar with the place, being my place of birth and fostering. Still, returning to the states to visit my folks via Spokane at their new digs in Northern Idaho I exposed my daughter to the most horrendous case of publically expressed racism I have ever experienced at Geiger Field. I mean yeah, there were always undertones but the Trump years allowed a whole different layer of reactionary politics to come to the fore, and I am forever ashamed of the inalnd empire of my youth and the raw intolerance it corrupted my daughter's innocence with. The whole Redoubt bullshit is an indelible stain that will forever mark the region. OK off to read TFA if my browser allows.
posted by St. Oops at 4:43 PM on September 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

This piece is more foreign to my experience than the best interstellar-first-contact-themed science fiction. I'm very happy to have read it. I don't claim to actually understand it.
posted by eotvos at 4:51 PM on September 22, 2021

I live in the greater Spokane area, have for nearly 20 years now, I love it here. It's a city without being a City. Lots to do (in the before times, anyway), and plenty of bits that I like visiting over and over. Some incredible formal gardens and other parks, more corner coffee stands than you can believe (think of how many you imagine, now double that. really)... it's a wonderful place.

I've been to a few Indians games, too. At one point when I was managing a division of a delivery company I took my team there as a company group a couple of times. They give big discounts for groups like that, so it was cheap for me, and a good way to build a team.

I wonder what "cavernous" hotel lobby he was in. Probably the Davenport, which is the place to stay if you have NYT expense account money to spend. Teddy Roosevelt stayed there once, when he was in town to turn the first spade for the building of the Masonic Temple downtown.

Anyway, I love this place. It has its challenges. Its city politics are really peculiar and are queered by an overly-powerful newspaper-owning family. But it has a deep sense of history and it really, truly beautiful. And just a short while until you're in something completely rural, or mountains and forest... Climate change is taking its toll on this place, but I hope it lasts another 20 or 30 years at least, so I don't have to watch it fall apart.
posted by hippybear at 7:59 PM on September 22, 2021 [7 favorites]

more corner coffee stands than you can believe

They're everywhere! I guess, being coffee people, it's a thing that stood out for us the first time we were there.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:14 PM on September 22, 2021

I just bought my first home in Montana, but I was living in Seattle during the five month long process of doing so- which meant a lot of driving back and forth. I'd never been to Spokane before this year, but now I've stopped there for lunch plenty of times and I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. The Riverfront Park is great, all the restaurants I ate at were tasty, Bowl and Pitcher blew my non PNW-dwelling sister's mind when I took her there (we aptly had a picnic at Picnicker's Paradise)... if only there weren't so many Trump bumper sticker-covered trucks and white guys wearing InfoWars t-shirts, I'd consider living there someday.
posted by mollywas at 8:53 PM on September 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

I refer to them as the asshole contingent. They take a lot of forms, some more scary than a Trump bumper sticker. The Idaho Panhandle is another log up the scale, which is annoying.

But the city as a whole is more forward thinking than clinging to the past, and I appreciate that. Things have changed A LOT since I moved here. I have tales. It's been an interesting ride.
posted by hippybear at 9:00 PM on September 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

Hm.. Spokane you?


..perhaps we (Spo)kane.

Sorry, RTFA now.
posted by firstdaffodils at 9:53 PM on September 22, 2021

If you want some possible context on why the New York Times would send a correspondent to Spokane, every time they've tried to run an article about international travel since the pandemic started the response from their own comments section has been at best mixed and at worst brutally negative.

You can see a representative comments section on this trip to Hawaii.

They keep sticking their fingers in the meat grinder every few months though, perhaps because the international travel articles are contractually related to big ad buys.
posted by zymil at 5:07 AM on September 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I still see constant fancy travel articles (go to Montserrat!) all the time, though.

And even if comments are all negative, it's still "audience engagement!"
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:16 AM on September 23, 2021

I liked this. We have a minor league baseball team here—the Lansing Lugnuts, an homage to the automobile industry that used to support so many people here and has left us with vast tracts of abandoned factories, or, where they have been torn down, wastelands of concrete and debris.

I always want to like baseball more than I do. It seems like such a great way to while away an afternoon or evening, watching this complicated game play out with a drink in one hand and a hot dog in the other. I think the movie Bull Durham made me kind of yearn to love the sport. But I don't, alas. I do get to a game from time to time.

I liked this because I like unpretentious things that are valuable to the people who love them. I like local stories, and trips that can be taken by car. I like finding the value in things other people might overlook. I liked the honest but loving sketches of his daughters:

Suddenly, something surprising happened to me. I missed my own children, the same two girls from whom I’d wanted to peel myself away for a year and a half, who had infuriated me, depleted me, screamed at me, taken me for granted, picked insultingly at the dinners I cooked. I missed my younger daughter: a sweet, complicated, anxious and stupefyingly talkative child, who had been marooned with a Chromebook at our kitchen table with an agonizing backlog of things to worry about and say. And I missed my older daughter — a contemplative and perceptive girl who, a few days earlier, when we had our first bout of summer smoke at home, looked up from our driveway and wondered aloud if her own children would think the yellow suns she drew as a kid were strange, because, by then, the sun would always look red.

Maybe it's because I have four kids myself, but I felt like these quick sketches were really evocative and let me see his daughters, and his exasperation and his love for them.
posted by Orlop at 1:40 PM on September 23, 2021 [7 favorites]

My mother's house was one change of the wind away from burning down in the Ford-Corkscrew fire mentioned in this article. She had to evacuate and stay away from her house for days, wondering if it would still be standing when she came back. (It was.)

During the evacuation, the mayor of Springdale (a little suburb of Spokane) saw my mom trying to evacuate with a cat and two dogs and offered to take the cat and let the cat stay with her, at city hall during the day, and at the mayor's house at night, for the duration, since the temporary evacuation shelter space for animals was already full. So my mom's cat spent a week as unofficial deputy mayor of Springdale.

Spokane is that kind of place.

I was terrified when my vaccinated, disabled mother first evacuated and had not yet found a place to stay that she might catch COVID in a shelter from one of the many, many unvaccinated people in her town because Spokane is that kind of place, too.

Luckily some vaccinated friends allowed her to stay in their house.

There were many days this summer when we could see and breathe the smoke from those western wildfires all the way over in St. Louis, where I live (too, too far away to offer my mother shelter from disaster in a time when it's doesn't feel safe to her to fly). The sun was red here, too. I also wonder if my grandchildren will ever know another color.
posted by BlueJae at 7:48 AM on September 24, 2021 [1 favorite]