1. When we lived in Greenbelt, Maryland, I was determined to stop white-knuckle driving in heavy traffic, learn to use Washington, DC roundabouts, and trust that if I made a mistake following a route, that I could eventually correct it.
In other words, I was determined to relax while driving.
Driving to Spokane from Kellogg on a dark and rainy November 10th late afternoon and driving back around 8:30 or so put my determination to relax to the test.
I passed.
Visibility was difficult. But two things were working very well. First, our windshield wipers worked beautifully. Secondly, the mass of people with whom I shared I-90, especially between CdA and downtown Spokane drove sanely. The traffic moved at a stable and moderate speed. No one did anything crazy. I was relieved that in both Idaho and Washington, I shared the freeway with drivers who accepted the challenging conditions and drove according to them.
2. We arrived in downtown Spokane about an hour and fifteen minutes ahead of the Northwest Passages program we'd be attending and, as planned, we had a light dinner at the Griffin Tavern.
I enjoyed my smoked pork street tacos, but even more I enjoyed our ebullient server who cheerfully bantered with us as she took our orders, even going so far as to tell us how she'd "tripped on nothing" on the sidewalk earlier that day and regained her balance and didn't fall. I can't tell it with the self-effacing good humor and theatrical gestures she did, but it was one of many moments that made the dinner fun.
3. We then walked half a block west on 1st Avenue and attended the launching of the book, Smoke, Ash and Fire, a collection of the Spokesman Review's written and photographic accounts of the fires that struck Northwest Spokane and surrounding areas this past August.
The evening featured a brief talk by Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown that highlighted the H.O.M.E. Starts Here fund which has been activated to accept donations for people impacted by the fires. She reported that the fund has raised over a million dollars. She also noted that relief would be greatly enhanced if the federal government would declare the 2026 Eastern Washington and Spokane fires a major disaster.
For the remainder of the evening we heard reporters Alexander Duggan, Eleana Perry, Nick Gibson, and Matthew Callaghan talk about what they experienced and the truth they worked hard to report on the days of the fires and in the aftermath. Tyler Tjomsland, a Spokesman Review photojournalist, spoke about the challenges of capturing pictures of what happened during the fires and focused on one particular image of a woman and her dog being dramatically reunited as the woman's property and structures burned.
The evening took me back to 1977-78 when I was married to a writer for the Spokane Daily Chronicle. My then wife was a feature writer and religion reporter -- among many other articles, she wrote an in-depth piece on Anita Bryant after interviewing her in Spokane and I remember her going to Mt. St. Michael to prepare and write a feature on the Tridentine Latin Rite Church which had recently taken over the site.
I bring up my former wife because of how young she was (and so was I in my jobs at Whitworth) and the amount of responsibility she carried in her job at the Chronicle.
The men and women who spoke today were not all the same age, but at least three of them were recent college graduates, leading me to marvel at how much trust the paper had invested in them to report on this intense story of destruction, despair, courage, and neighborly outreach by those within the fires' boundaries and by countless people outside the where the fire burned.
