Sunday's postcard, and a day in, and out, of the river

August 27, 2023

Western kingbird pair near Sprague Lake

A good chore, and a good swim…

Not to give too much away but I’ve been composing, in recent days, my next feature article for The Pacific Northwest Inlander which, to a large degree, focuses on two of my swimming companions. They’re both fish. You’ll enjoy meeting them, at least in print, next month. They’re both wild and beautiful and enigmatic in the ways that wild things are.

For obvious reasons, it’s a lot of work to successfully approach a wild fish, inasmuch as we humans—like river otters and osprey—are primarily interested in them as a source of delicious protein. I can’t talk underwater but to the extent I try to communicate it’s with body language that says ’I’m not here to hook or eat you.’

How’s that for a pick-up line?

For most of the 20th century, the Spokane was a battered river. There’s nobody alive who remembers it the way it was before 1910, when it was home to a prolific run of Chinook salmon and anadromous steelhead. Until the 1950s, the city dumped raw sewage right into the river, a practice some actually defended by saying it was good for the remaining fish. It wasn’t. It finally took a herculean civic effort to initiate its recovery, to comply with the federal Clean Water Act so the river that flows through the heart of our downtown could be the flowing centerpiece of Expo ’74.

The wild redband trout are a living symbol of that success but so is the human, recreational traffic on the river. Yesterday, I literally had to tread water for a bit to let a flotilla of kayakers pass by before I could swim back across the river to be reunited with my backpack and bicycle.

Council candidate and Logan neighborhood activist Lindsey Show (fist on hip in center) with intrepid volunteers for yesterday morning’s river cleanup at Upriver Park.

That was in the afternoon. In the morning I was in northeast Spokane where I joined city council candidate (District #1) Lindsey Shaw and a group of her supporters and volunteers to clean up a stretch of the river east of Mission Park. (Kudos to the Spokane Riverkeeper staff who gave their Saturday morning to help organize the effort and cart away the hundreds of pounds of debris we collected from the river bank.)

I’ve pitched in at river cleanups before and it is—how should I write this?—sobering and revealing work. But a pearl of truth is that the companionship and humor is first rate. The people who volunteer for these efforts are invariably wonderful, so if you’re having a boo-boo face about the state of humanity then you should enlist for one of these outings. It makes even more sense for someone like me. I swim in the river as much as anyone (nearly every day from June to mid-October) so I was literally working to improve my aquatic watershed yesterday morning while chatting it up with Lindsey & company.

Spokane River in the valley looking east from Mirabeau

If you’d like to learn more and support Lindsey’s campaign you can do so here. If you’d like to learn more about the Spokane Riverkeeper project, and support its remarkable work to protect the vulnerable, living wilderness of the Spokane River you can do so here. Oh, and please share this post, especially to your friends who frolick in the river or simply enjoy a walk along its banks.

Further related reading at Rhubarb Skies: Confessions of a Soap Sample Boy

tjc