Spokane, WA

Spokane is fairly large rural hub in Washington State just south of the border Canadian border.It’s got a population of more than half a million people and a fairly large business district cut right through by roaring waterfalls that form the spillway for the city’s hydro power station. As a first introduction to the US it’s dizzying in its American-ness. Neat little houses in the burbs with flags in the front gardens, a timber caddyshack-style clubhouse on a private golf course off the highway, a beautiful vintage carousel in the centre of downtown and an endless series of neon-lit fast food joints on the main road into town.

Looking at the more spread-out extremities of Spokane I’m reminded of this wonderfully sarcastic TED talk on urban planning and architecture by James Kunstler.

When we get into town the ‘March Madness’ month of college basketball is kicking into gear and the local team from the Gonzaga University is cleaning up. Instead of specials every restaurant and drive-through in the city has ‘go zags’ written on their signboards. Every bar in the city appears to be a sports bar and every sports bar appears to be solely interested in basketball.

As with Canada in Spokane it’s difficult to order a drink at the bar and pay for it then and there. Table service with a tab is the order of the day and that always involves a few too many unnecessary interactions with the wait staff. And those staff are always just a little bit sycophantic because it’s a tip-driven hospitality industry.

By this stage I’ve finally worked out why it rubs me the wrong way. It’s the necessity of having to play into a little bit of theatre every time you go to a bar or a restaurant. The waiter pretends to care about your meal, you pretend to be evaluating the meal and the service and then you both pretend like the gratuity is something other than simply what’s required. I think deep down I hold to some weird socialist idea that people should be paid even if they’re not all that great at their job.

By the time I’ve left Spokane I’ve had a few interactions with Americans but it’s hard to know how much their sentiments reflect the prevailing attitude. Two people we’ve met stand out in my mind. The bloke who took us across the border into Spokane told us, without our our prompting, about his suspicion of the federal government and that Australian ‘sin taxes’ on cigarettes and alcohol made our home country sound like a place that wasn’t very free. He said the only reason he wasn’t carrying one of his half a dozen handguns on this journey was because it’s a hassle bringing them back and forth across the border.

Likewise when we called a Taxi to take us to the airport the man who rocked up was a friendly, talkative middle aged guy. But when we told him we were headed to Detroit and New York he smiled and said ‘you’re gonna need one of these’ and whipped a handgun out from underneath his t-shirt. When Mars said she’d never held a real gun before he casually dropped the magazine onto the front seat, ejected the round from the chamber and handed it back for her to fondle.

It seemed very surreal at the time. But conversation never really seems to be too far from crime, personal safety and terrorism.

Spokane airport had some choice US television as well including one show that looked just like the pretend ‘When Buildings Explode’ show on the Simpsons. On ESPN they were showing a bizarre special called The Greatest Athletes of All Time where they did a side-by-side comparisons of sportspeople like ‘Mohammad Ali vs Wayne Gretzke’ or ‘Michael Jordan vs Michael Phelps’ and my favourite – ‘Tony Hawke vs Pele’. Even stranger, one of the criteria was ‘difficulty of sport’.

Certainly the hardest thing about skateboarding is telling your parents you want to be a pro skater.