Look at it just right, and the whole story of Spokane is along Sprague Avenue. It spends the day suspended over the lavish Davenport Hotel and the bustling bus plaza, little houses and dark dive bars, strip malls and the Deja Vu. In the shadow of Interstate 90, Sprague connects us from east to west and divides our north and south. Yet all along, something more has been there: A crooked, imperfect spine holding the whole city in place, carrying our successes alongside our failures, our past next to our future.
Along the way, we walked both the dark corners and the bright spots, finding peaceful sleepers, acid trips, joy in an untamed field and rebirth at a wounded church. We listened and watched, taking note of the things you see on Sprague, the things you overhear and the things you just feel. This is a collection of what we found, a portrait of our city, a patchwork of weird. Stoplights and asphalt. Six lanes and turn lanes, suicide lanes and more stoplights. On one side of the street, veterans holding signs, on the other, slick men hawking cars.
You see pot holes and blown reds, meat markets and pawn shops. Few streets define a town, but we have a heart, north from south. Blast-cut basalt, exposed hexagonal piers. The gravel that remainedβcrushed and made into road. High water table means spring ponds means ducks means my father on his deck at sunup every morning, binoculars in one hand, bird guide in the other, enthusiasm like a child as the ducks returnβteals, wood ducks, green-headed mallards.
Some call it quits, make his deep water pond their home forever. He builds them shelter, keeps them fed all winter. We travel so many roads and arterialsβveins. Always between here and there, every way the way to someplace else.
Through industrial parks and the run-down. Past everything we show out-of-towners. The Davenport, the Bing and Fox. View this poem in its own page with audio here. Photo by Jacob Jones. Revving two-stroke engines cut the air as dozens of nearby dirt bikers lean into the banked curves winding through the Airway Motocross Park. In the final race of the day, elementary-age riders buzz around the dirt track on 60cc motorcycles, catching pint-sized air off each jump.
