'Jess Walters: The Urban Outdoors'
12:45 am
I’VE BEEN WRITING THIS urban outdoors column for about a year now and it is with a heavy heart and a blood alcohol level of .024 that I write this, my last columnfor a while.
GROWING UP IN DENMARK, I never dreamed I could be an outdoors writer. When the editors of Out There Monthly fronted my bail money and asked that I write for their publication, I agreed to do it for a year. Since then, however, I have come to the realization that I have no idea when that year started. Also, it turns out that I don’t actually go outdoors much.
I hope that maybe I can return sometime in the future, or that I can write an occasional guest column, but for the foreseeable future, outdoor readers are just going to have to make do with writers who share their interests and don’t go out of their way to mock them.
Sadly, there are some topics I never got around to writing about:
Jarts, for instance. Those were the big lawn darts my parents had when I was a kid-flying projectiles which were the second-leading cause of death in the 1970s (behind the music of Toto) and which were finally made illegal in 1988. Jarts were long sharp metal darts with plastic fins that the adults in my neighborhood threw toward plastic rings in their tiny suburban backyards at the same time they barbequed London Broil on smoking briquettes and staggered around with giant tumblers of booze while my brother Ralph and I toddled between our rusted swingset and the sotted adults throwing these bloody spears. I guess I never wrote about Jarts because I really had nothing to say about them except that by 1972 standards, I am an outstanding parent.
Also, I had hoped to finally outline my proposal for Spokane’s first Urban Fishing Derby. The rules were simple: all fish had to be taken out of the Spokane River. Corn the only allowable bait. Extra points for PCBs, deformities and mining tailings. (Only in the Spokane Urban Fishing Derby could you have a four-inch fish that, because of the heavy metal content, weighs forty-one pounds.)
I had also hoped to improve on the vague horoscopes that I see in so many publications, horoscopes that never are very specific and usually are filled with new-agey nonsense and fortune-cookie wisdom. My friend Dan and I had planned to come up with a horoscope that was more to the point, more specific and more helpful:
Aries: You left a burner on.
Taurus: Those new pants make your ass look like two marmots fighting over a ham in a gunny sack.
Gemini: You will be dead by Easter.
Cancer: Your left front tire is a few pounds low.
Leo: No one likes you.
Virgo: The moon is in the second house and so don’t be surprised if your energies flag but Saturn will return and you will once again rise to the occasion and surprise those around you. Pisces may play a role in your triumph. Also, your breath smells like bus exhaust.
Libra: You’re getting a parking ticket. Now! Go!
Scorpio: He’s lying.
Sagittarius: You dropped a quarter.
Capricorn: Your phone is going to ring in the next twelve minutes.
Aquarius: Maybe mix in a salad.
Pisces: Take two steps to the left. Duck!
Well, I suppose that’s it for now. I’ve enjoyed this brief burst of employment, and I’d especially like to thank those readers who wrote in every week demanding that I be fired. Looks like you get the last laugh.
Jess Walter’s new novel, The Zero, is available in bookstores
Jess Walters: The Urban Outdoors, Magazine Article |
12:59 am
I was just at a swanky party on the top of the Smith Tower in Seattle and I kept getting the dreaded Spokane eye. You’re having a perfectly swell conversation about politics or literature and the Seattleite asks where you’re from and when you tell them, they pretend not to be horrified, but it’s as if you’ve just casually mentioned that your hobby is collecting other people’s scabs.
“Uh … What do you do in Spokane?” the Seattler asks after a long, uncomfortable pause.
“Well, I used to sell meth but after my cousin and me got divorced and she got custody of the Siamese crack twins, I decided to put my life back together, so I got my GED and now I manage a mobile home park.”
I used to launch into my Spokane-is-Rising and You-Wouldn’t-Recognize-The-Place speech in that situation but, honestly, I’m getting tired of having to do that. I think we’ve reached a place where it’s sort of needy and pathetic, like that mother of your friend you see who insists on telling you that Eric is a stockbroker when you know perfectly well that Eric is a stockboy.
And it doesn’t work in Seattle anyway. It’s plausible in every other city in the world, but in Seattle, the idea that Spokane is becoming cool or prosperous is just plain crazy talk. You may as well tell them that you’re a professional ballet dancer in Omak.
So at this party, I decided to take the opposite tactic and just reinforce their ideas about the ‘Kane. And I have to tell you, it really puts the Seattle person at ease and it’s a lot more fun.
“Isn’t Spokane supposed to be doing pretty well these days?” asked one guy.
“Oh yes. Me and my friend Cokey, we was trying to save money to build a monster truck from scratch, but he got evicted from the school bus where he was living so he got on at the rendering plant and he was saying how it used to be folks just brung their dead animals from Spokane but now they get roadkill from Canada, Clarkston, all over. Shoot, we even get meat from back east, clear to Idaho.”
It was amazing how friendly the Seattle people became when I gave them the Spokane they expected. It put their world in order and made them feel magnanimous-almost as if, by talking to a poor rube from the East Side, they were donating to charity or giving money to that homeless person who sleeps outside their condo in Belltown.
(One woman did ask about the ice-skating championships, which apparently were in Spokane last month. I didn’t see anything in the local media about it. I guess they probably just missed it … or maybe they just made the decision that to endlessly pimp some trash-sport event would make the city seem kind of provincial.)
There was one guy at the party who had just been to Spokane and he kept telling the other Seattleians how great the city was. He was threatening to ruin my whole deal.
“You wouldn’t recognize downtown Spokane,” he said. “It’s gone through quite a revitalization.”
I had to think fast. “Oh, shoot yes. We just got us a Taco Johns.” I leaned in close. “That there’s ethnic food, case you ain’t got one here. And don’t quote me … but they’re maybe gonna reopen the Woolworths.”
Jess Walter’s new novel, The Zero, is available in bookstores
Jess Walters: The Urban Outdoors, Magazine Article |
12:08 am
This is the kind of story I used to read in the Drama in Real Life section of my grandparents’ Readers Digest-one of those harrowing winter stories in which a group of intrepid adventurers treks out into the wilderness, only to have something go terribly wrong and leave them fighting for their lives.
This is what happened one harsh, unforgiving winter’s night several years ago, when I came face-to-face with death. Well, not death exactly, but a really painful case of hiccups.
I was on a bar-crawl.
For the urban outdoorsman, there’s nothing as thrilling-or dangerous-as a winter bar-crawl. First, it involves what some might consider the “questionable wisdom” of binge drinking. And it’s cold.
Our method was to choose a street (say, North Monroe) and then go on foot into every bar on that street and have at least one drink in each place. There were only two other rules: 1. No drink may be repeated. 2. Okay, there was only one rule.
The crawl ended when one person in the party either (a) couldn’t drink anymore or (b) couldn’t walk anymore. It often ended with a team member doubled over and the other team members giving him a respectable distance so as not to get vomit on their shoes.
In harrowing outdoor adventure stories like this, the group always makes some small decision that mushrooms into a tragic error and spells their doom. Maybe they don’t factor in bad weather, or they don’t pack enough food, or they ignore the “Bear Feeding Ground” signs and slather each other with turkey gravy before climbing into beef jerky sleeping bags.
It was like that for us. We made the classic mistake of deciding it would be funny to also eat something different in every bar. We sampled the worst in bar cuisine, not just Buffalo wings, but pork rinds and pickled eggs. We were approaching the eighth bar when I gasped in some cold air and got an epic case of hiccups.
I had never lost a bar crawl but my stomach was churning. There was no way I was going to make it. We staggered into a bar and ordered booze and food. I got curly fries. My brother ordered a corn dog. I watched over my brother’s shoulder as the bartender opened the freezer. He felt around for the box of corn dogs, couldn’t find it and was about to tell us they were out when he saw something in the corner of the freezer and stood up holding a single, shriveled freezer-burned corn dog-not in any kind of box or wrapper. I watched as he stared at this abomination for a few seconds, then shrugged and dropped it in the deep fryer.
I knew I should say something, but I was crazy with booze and hiccups. As often happens in survival situations, it became every drunk for himself. I watched as the corn dog was delivered to our table, looking like something that had fallen off a cadaver.
That’s when I realized I couldn’t do this to my own brother. I opened my mouth to warn him. “Hic.”
“Ha ha!” my brother said. “Him’s got the hiccups!”
I closed my mouth. To this day, I am haunted by my decision. Until I remember my brother doubled over on the sidewalk. And then I laugh really hard.
Jess Walter’s new novel, The Zero, is available in bookstores
Jess Walters: The Urban Outdoors, Magazine Article |
12:01 am
There was six inches of fresh powder over a righteous base and I was seriously shredding-practically cliff-hucking, and that’s when I caught more air than I’d intended and found myself about to go tree-jibbing. So I bailed, dude.
I rolled off my sled.
Went home and had some cocoa.
See, I’m a sledder. I don’t even know what most of that stuff in the first paragraph means.
For too long, sledders like me have been ignored by the outdoors media and by the recreation marketplace. Where’s the sled swap at the beginning of every season? Where’s Warren Miller’s movie about extreme sledding? (With a wide shot of a sun-silhouetted crevasse as I sail over it sitting cross-legged on a ketchup-colored saucer.)
I also ski a little, but my real winter sport is sledding. Honestly, skiing is too much work. With sledding, you don’t have to leave the city. It’s cheap. It doesn’t take all day. And best of all, you don’t have to endure snobbish and self-important skiers or snowboarders looking down on you because you don’t happen to own ski clothes and happen to be skiing in gray sweatpants and a suede coat.
With my kids, I go to the usual sledding resorts-Indian Canyon and Downriver golf courses, Mission and Manito parks. But for real extreme sledding, like skiing, you have to venture off the beaten path to those overlooked places-South Hill streets and ungroomed urban hillsides. My personal favorite used to be the Post Street Hill near Garland.
And to think I almost quit my favorite sport once.
It was many years ago. I had gone sledding with one of my previous wives and another couple at Mission Park in the Valley. At one point the male in this other couple made the seemingly harmless suggestion that I sled with his wife and that he go down the hill with mine.
So this attractive woman climbs on my plastic sled and nestles in behind me. Right away, I notice that she’s squeezing me pretty tight and in a somewhat unorthodox way. Then, as we’re soaring down the hill, one of her hands wanders and approaches my … uh, well, the demilitarized zone.
Like most men, I have a Pavlovian response when someone’s hand crosses the Mason Dixon line, so by the time we got to the bottom of the hill I had to stall for a few minutes before I could climb off the slide. (“No, I’m just going to sit here for a seconds until I remember where I put my car keys.”)
That’s when gropie’s husband came racing down the hill with my wife, and at first I was afraid she was going to see my condition through my gray sweatpants, and that’s when I noticed this other guy draped over my wife like leather on a cow.
Needless to say, we got out of there as quickly as possible. Uh, after ten or fifteen more runs. We had apparently stumbled on some kind of sledding swingers community, right here in Spokane. (I imagine their sick, cocoa-and-ecstasy fueled orgies and it disgusts me … well, actually it intrigues me just a little, but then I really like cocoa.)
Jess Walter’s new novel, The Zero, is available in bookstores
Jess Walters: The Urban Outdoors, Magazine Article |
12:33 am
Lately, people in downtown Spokane have been stopping me on the street to ask how the urban outdoorsperson should vote in this month’s election.
“Hey,” the curious voter will often say, “can I have some money to buy a forty or some crystal meth?”
“Good question,” I’ll say. “So what you’re really asking is about our uncertain political future and what we can do locally in the face of such massive problems as global warming or the Iraq war?”
“No. I just want to get wasted.”
“To escape the grim political reality.”
“No. Because I’m a junkie.”
“Because of the failed policies of the last six years.”
“No. I was getting stewed long before that.”
“So you’re saying both parties have failed you.”
“If I say yes will you give me fifty cents.”
With that in mind, here is my 2006 urban outdoor voters guide:
- Initiatives: It’s confusing because for the first time since the late 1800s, there is no initiative floated by Tim Eyman to get Tim Eyman out of paying Tim Eyman’s taxes. (To save trouble, I think we should have an initiative once and for all establishing Tim Eyman as a tax-exempt entity so he can go back to harvesting kittens or whatever he did before he wrote tax initiatives.)
Still there are some important initiatives:
- I-920 would finally repeal the repressive estate tax unfairly put upon multi-millionaires and billionaires whose coke-addled, trust-funded children often have to sell off one of their Sun Valley condos just to pay the taxes on … Uh … NO.
- I-933 seeks to limit government regulation of private property and give every landowner the right to have his cow shit in a wetland, and allow small farmers to turn pastures into sprawling mini-malls with Quiznos and tanning salons. NO.
- I-937 is the green energy mandate, which would require energy companies to have fifteen percent of their energy be “renewable” by the year 2020. Opponents make a pretty good argument this is totally unrealistic and could lead to economic ruin, anarchy and cannibalism. Enough said. YES.
- U.S. Senate: Maria Cantwell vs. Mike McGavick. If you’re a true greenie, or if you’re fed up with mealy Dems like Cantwell who voted for the Iraq war, you might be tempted to vote for the Green Party candidate, Aaron Dixon, but I believe he has a ponytail. Men with ponytails are only qualified to run three things: vans, jazz saxophones and juice bars. Cantwell.
- U.S. Representative District 5: Cathy McMorris is running against Peter Goldmark. While McMorris is no friend to the environment, I wonder about Goldmark’s trademark cowboy hat. I guess he’s a real cowboy, but honestly, who wears a cowboy hat? Do politicians stand before a wall of props, thinking, I could go with the pirate eyepatch? No. How about the suit of armor? Hey, a cowboy hat! You don’t see Republicans wearing tie-dye or growing dreadlocks to looks less conservative, so why do Western Democrats insist on wearing cowboy hats? Still … Goldmark.
Jess Walter’s new novel, The Zero, is available in bookstores
Jess Walters: The Urban Outdoors, Magazine Article |
12:49 am
I have sort of an embarrassing problem with this month’s urban outdoors column (and I’m not talking about the above illustration which often portrays me wearing suspenders and shorts, like a Von Trapp family singer.) Here’s my problem: I haven’t actually been “outdoors.”
Instead, I spent the month in a series of hotels and airplanes, where I invariably encountered chatty retirees demanding to know: a. where I’m coming from; b. where I’m going; and c. whether it’s wise to drink a tenth airline bottle of rum before takeoff. (Distrustful of that whole seat cushion business, I stockpile the little bottles just in case, “during the unlikely event of a water landing,” I need to make my own flotation device.)
“So … Spokane,” the passenger next to me will usually say. “What’s that like?”
“Oh, you know. Sophisticated. Urbane. The Paris of Eastern Washington.”
“What are the big industries there?”
“Abstract painting. Interpretive dance. Carnie training.”
“Is there a lot of traffic?”
“There would be, but almost everyone kayaks to work.”
One thing I’ve noticed about Spokanites: when we’re here, we mostly complain about it. But when we travel, it’s suddenly heaven. I know I do this. And when I talk about Spokane’s charms, I inevitably find myself bragging about our many outdoor sports and activities, even though I practice almost none of them. For instance I’ll go on about the great snow skiing, even though I only go once a year. I’ll even brag about rock climbing, mountain biking, parasailing, anything I can think of.
“Do you parasail?” the retiree will ask.
“Honestly,” I’ll say, draining another rum, “I don’t even know what that is.”
So, recently, I vowed to only brag about the outdoor events that I actually participate in.
This happened on my last cross-country flight, returning to lovely Spokane. I was hoping to sleep but I found myself wedged next to a sumo wrestler (in uniform) apparently suffering from Ebola virus. Various parts of him spilled over onto my seat and when I sat, we were … sort of … as one.
He coughed on me. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay.”
The woman on the other side of me was homicidally cheerful. She kept smiling at me and kept grabbing my arm to tell me how friendly the flight crew was. “It’s like they take happy pills, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So where are you from?” the woman asked cheerfully.
“Spokane.”
“I’ve heard that’s a great outdoors town.”
And vowing to only mention the things I actually do outdoors, I said, “Yes. There’s wonderful lawn mowing. And raking. It’s a great place to walk to your car.”
And right then, the sumo wrestler shifted and I wished to God I hadn’t worn my shorts and suspenders because the rubbing of our haunches sparked a small fire that quickly engulfed the wing and as the plane dipped I clung to my little booze bottles, and prayed that in the unlikely event of a water landing we wouldn’t hit any commuting kayakers.
Jess Walter’s new novel, The Zero, is available in bookstores
Jess Walters: The Urban Outdoors, Magazine Article |
12:20 am
My brother and I were making preparations for our annual State of the Spokane River Float (this mostly involves getting my brother out of his home-detention ankle bracelet) when a Montana “friend” made a snarky comment about our beloved river. “Do you actually go in that water?” he sniffed, like a French wine snob over a box of Gallo. “Isn’t that, like, one of the most polluted rivers in the country?”
Damn you Montanans and your crystalline streams and poetic fly fishermen. Maybe if Ted Turner would buy up our whole state for emu farming, then our river would be undeveloped and gin-clear, too. (A side note: do you ever notice how many Montanans live here and pine for the Big Empty? So here’s a question: if Montana is so freaking perfect, why don’t any of you live there?)
So I said, “Sorry goat boy, but we have an urban river and if you think we’re going to apologize for the fact that our river foams like a poured Guinness and has more heavy metal than a 1988 record store, then you need to go back to Flathead Lake, rent a studio apartment for $1850 a month and get a job cleaning the back hair out of Sylvester Stallone’s hot tub.”
The truth is, the Spokane River gets a little cleaner every year-at least every year that the city doesn’t dump raw sewage into it. Although it’s counterintuitive, I think the recent and proposed development along the river canyon downtown could bode well for the river’s long-term health. Right now you’re more likely to see rusted Oly cans than fish, but if there’s one thing rich people hate, it’s litter in their front yards, so they’re at least going to keep the banks clean.
My brother and I got a good look at those banks on our annual state-of-the-river float. We put in below his house in Peaceful Valley and finally flopped out of the water beneath the T.J. Meenach Bridge, near my house. It was one of those 160-degree days and so the riverbank was packed with people standing up to the threads of their cutoffs, drinking cans of Keystone and huffing glue. Some days, floating the river is like being in a parade in the Ozarks. Yet even the toothless mountain people laugh at us.
My brother and I make the same mistake every year during the State of the River Float. We do a hurried count and then buy a “two-person” raft, which translated, means “one-person” unless you’re talking about two persons who have a level of intimacy that, frankly, my brother and I simply don’t have. (“I wish I could quit you,” I whispered as we snuggled in the raft like two fingers in a glove hole).
It really is a stunning river, alternately calm and roiling and you can find yourself in stretches that defy description. We were in one of those places, shaded by leaning firs, our raft barely above water level, my brother and I wedged into it like Scandinavians in a two-man luge, when we happened to float by a drunk guy holding a forty in one hand and his George W. in the other (perhaps figuring his piss just ends up in the river anyway, he was skipping the middle-man). He pointed at us with his big beer. “Rub-a-dub-dub,” he said, “two men in a tub.”
It was at that point my brother said, “Hey, your oar keeps poking me in the back.”
“That,” I said, “is not my oar.”
Jess Walter’s new novel The Zero is available in bookstores.
Jess Walters: The Urban Outdoors, Magazine Article |
12:44 am
Recently I was challenged by a poet in Lycra bike shorts to write an entire column about bicycling without making fun of the way people look in Lycra bike shorts (which, by the way, I believe should be regulated no less strenuously than, say, automatic handguns-with permits, 5-day waiting periods and restrictions on public display.) Given my leanings toward humor that could sometimes be described as “sophomoric”-if this description weren’t so offensive to actual sophomores-this has proven to be somewhat difficult for me. The very same day, two people said to me, independent of one another, “I thought of you when I saw that raw sewage had leaked into the river,” no doubt, assuming that I am incapable of resisting brown trout jokes. (It’s catch and reflush season on the Spokane River.) But since I was planning to write about bicycling anyway, I decided to take my friend’s challenge and write an intelligent and tasteful piece about bicycling without once mentioning how men in bike shorts look like hairy boars being swallowed by Lycra snakes. And that one doesn’t count because it was in the introductory section to this column and not the actual text of the column, which begins immediately below, with these words: One day a bicyclist drafted off my car.
One day a bicyclist drafted off my car.
This has probably happened to you-blithely tooling along on some vital mission (it was visitors day at my brother’s rehab clinic) in your “polar-icecap-destroying motor vehicle” when an FOE (friend of the environment) suddenly settles in behind you, perched over his handlebars, gliding in the slipstream of your car.
For me, it was a moment of pure camaraderie, the bicyclist recognizing a fellow FOE temporarily encased in aluminum, and I welcomed him as though he were wearing the yellow jersey and I were the pack at the Tour de West Central. Settle in, my pedaling friend, I thought, and let my combustion engine do the work for us both. I even felt a burst of ecological pride: my car gets only twenty miles per gallon, but between the two of us we were getting forty.
Then the light changed and I had to stop.
Done with me, my bicycle buddy quickly veered around me, went up on the curb and zipped across the crosswalk. This is something I occasionally do, too. I bristle at the way drivers in Spokane don’t treat me as a legitimate vehicle on my $10 bike, but then, when it suits my interest, I don’t hesitate to become a pedestrian. This is known, in the bicycling world, as bad form.
It turned out this bicyclist was stopping at the same coffee shop as me. He came in wearing a pair of Lycra shorts that were…um…well, they looked…um…just fine. Really …aerodynamic.
“Hi,” I said.
And bike guy said, “That’s a pretty crappy car for someone so famous.”
I was driving my wife’s newer Subaru, so I wasn’t sure where to start, with his flawed definition of the word “crappy” or his complete misunderstanding of the word “famous.” But I let it go because he was a fellow bicycling enthusiast and we had a nice conversation about bikes. And that’s all I have to say about bicycling.
“Hey buddy,” I yelled as he pedaled away. “Nadia Comaneci called. She wants her leotard back.”
Jess Walter’s novel, Citizen Vince, is available in bookstores.
Jess Walters: The Urban Outdoors, Magazine Article |
12:03 am
DUE TO A REPORTING ERROR I recently found myself at a public hearing. The topic was Kendall Yards, KY as I affectionately call it, the 77-acre town of Sandpoint that developer Marshall Chesrown plans to gently ram into my neighborhood over the next decade.
Like a lot of West Centralites, I’m guardedly optimistic about development on the north shore of the Spokane River, for several reasons:
- I support packing the urban core, increasing density, saving gasoline, and keeping the rapacious Spokane County Commissioners from cul-de-sacking every last bit of forest.
- Kendall Yards is being built on once-polluted railroad land, what is commonly called “a brownfield.” (Coincidentally, this was my brother’s nickname in gym class, for reasons I’d rather not get into.)
- The development-condos, townhouses and plazas-has a certain urban cool factor. (Although California splits were also “cool” once.)
- Housing prices in my neighborhood are finally going up and I stand to make money on a Spokane home for the first time. (I lived in one house seven years and lost $30K; when I tell this to friends in other parts of the country, they look at me like I’m speaking Urdu.)
So while I’m hopeful, I went to the hearing because we must be diligent guardians of a section of riverfront that has largely escaped human traffic, except for those humans looking for a place to get stoned.
At the hearing I sat next to my smarter friend Ken (not his real name).While I gleefully fell for the developers’ Jetson’s vision of sophisticated urban dwellers in jetpacks with clones to do their bidding, Ken (okay, it is his real name) came armed with a list of comments. (“Your traffic study’ appears to have been done on Etch-a- Sketch.”)
The planners dismissed Ken’s traffic worries by saying the 5,500 new West Central residents (a 60 percent increase) would largely be pedestrian and light rail commuters.
Ken: “Then you’re putting in light rail tracks?”
Developer: “Uh. No.”
Ken: “Why not?”
Developer: “The city isn’t requiring it.”
Ken: “But you’re putting in an easement.”
Developer: “Uh. No.”
Ken: “Why not?”
Developer: “The city isn’t requiring it.”
Jess: “Ooh, how about an Orange Julius!”
While I left the meeting still cautiously optimistic, it’s become clear that the city and county are so horny for development they’ll give it up to anyone with a real estate license and a tassled loafer. I know they’ve been waiting eighty years for this boom, but they’re blowing a great opportunity. Just look at Seattle, where twenty years into its economic explosion, public transportation still somehow involves the monorail, a form of transit that exists only at Disneyland.
This is why the city should demand that light rail easements be a part of every new development within three miles of downtown. With a little tax money, in five years we could have light rail stripping the north side of the river, dropping down into Peaceful Valley and going up into Brown’s Addition, cutting to Gonzaga, the lower South Hill, and over the river to SFCC. According to his website, Mr. Chesrown views KY as his “chance to give back to the community” (Wasn’t it the Vikings, describing their raiding and plundering, who coined this phrase, “give back to the community”?) For the record: I don’t blame Chesrown. It’d be nice if he “gave the community” a strip of light rail track, but he’s a developer who got a huge chunk of land for peanuts and stands to make eleventy kabillion dollars. Fine. If he can get Spokane people to live close together and walk four blocks to get coffee (and maybe get me a jet pack) I don’t care how much dough he makes.
The city and county, however, need to wake up. Inviting developers into your neighborhoods to do as they please is a like asking a meth addict to house-sit. When it goes badly, there’s no one to blame but yourself.
Jess Walters: The Urban Outdoors, Magazine Article |
12:33 am
Someone once called golf a good walk spoiled. But I’ll tell you what really spoils a good walk: man scat. Big. Human. Turds. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been walking along the river only to find that someone has loafed on the trail.
“This is my number one outdoors issue,” I told the editors of Out There Monthly when they first contacted me about writing this column. (Full disclosure: Initially, I returned their call because I misheard the magazine’s name and thought I was being publicly linked with Tom Cruise again.) As I explained to the editors, I consider myself an “urban outdoorsman,” a man whose entire relationship with nature takes place within the city. I am king of the white-trash frontier.
So I have rafted the mighty Spokane towing an inner tube of beer. I have fished beneath bridges for bottom-feeders so loaded with heavy metals that you weigh them with a Geiger counter. I have sledded the great peaks of Manito Park and watched drunken rock climbers scale the brick faces of those handful of old buildings that we haven’t turned into Diamond lots. This is what I want to write about, I told the editors, the outdoor opportunities and issues right here in the bespoiled heart of our city. And the biggest issue I see right now is this public display of defecation, the trail of turds. I have lived on the river most of my life. I’ve taken thousands of walks along our great urban stream and have seen man scat roughly, oh, every single freaking time.
For years, I did what anyone does when I saw trail dung. I ran away. But hunters don’t run when they come across deer droppings. Conservationists and biologists don’t run from bear scat. They study it. They poke at it with sticks, take it back to the lab to dissect and analyze. There is no better way to learn about something than to study its shit.
So, in my desire to understand why people crap on trails, I began crouching along the offending stool like those trackers hired by posses in old Westerns. (It’s usually a stoic Indian played by Ricardo Montalban, who holds up a broken twig and then calmly announces that three men and a mule passed by nine hours ago, that one of the men was wearing dance tights and that the mule was clinically depressed.)
Here’s what I’ve learned by studying path poop:
1. The people who do this are either horribly backed up or this is a breed of shitting giants (I mistook one of these things for a fumbled football and in a fit of muscle memory, nearly pounced on it.)
2. Too much Fritos, not enough salad.
3. Trail dumpers exclusively drink malt liquor. There are always malt liquor cans nearby. If I were in the malt liquor industry, I’d stop marketing to rap fans and go for the lucrative outdoor shitter market.
Jess Walters: The Urban Outdoors, Magazine Article |
