DON’T FEED THE WILDLIFE SPOKANE CONSIDERS MAKING IT A LAW PAGE 10
NOT JUST BABY TALK
A CLOSER LOOK AT EMMA NOYES’ BABY SPEAKS SALISH BOOK PAGE 20
SEPTEMBER 10-16, 2020 | NEAR NATURE. BUT NOT LOST.
Sandpoint finds itself in a crappy situation BY WILSON CRISCIONE PAGE 12
#AwesomeTogether
One of the many things that make the Inland Northwest great is our sense of community and support for each other. Times might be challenging right now, but we know we’ll get through this together. Visit watrust.com/CaresAct for updates and helpful tips on how to stay safe and keep your money moving forward.
2 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
INSIDE VOL. 27, NO. 48 | COVER ILLUSTRATION: JEFF DREW
COMMENT 5 NEWS 8 COVER STORY 12 BACK TO BUSINESS 18
CULTURE FILM MUSIC EVENTS
20 25 26 28
I SAW YOU GREEN ZONE ADVICE GODDESS BULLETIN BOARD
30 31 36 37
EDITOR’S NOTE
WE ARE OPEN
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ometimes, we as people can’t help ourselves. We overhunt Canada GEESE, decimating their populations. We try to fix things by breeding them in captivity, but that messes up their migratory patterns. These “resident geese” put down roots and have flourished to the point that cities across America are inventing new ways to harass them in hopes of getting them to move along — largely because of the nuisance poop they leave behind. Sandpoint, the liberal blue dot in deep red North Idaho, is the middle of this particular battle, and for some residents, the stakes couldn’t be much higher. “It amounts to kind of an aviary rights problem,” one of them tells staff reporter Wilson Criscione in this week’s cover story on page 12. — JACOB H. FRIES, Editor
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FIRE, FIRE EVERYWHERE PAGE 6
SUCCESSFUL GRAINS PAGE 8
THE GENIUS OF KATE BUSH PAGE 26
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK PAGE 28 • dining • • shopping • • culture •
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DO YOU CONSIDER GEESE IN URBAN AREAS A NUISANCE?
Ted S. McGregor Jr. (tedm@inlander.com) PUBLISHER
GREG FRANCIS: It really is the poop. When I worked at Gonzaga, there were tons of geese that hung around Lake Arthur and the soccer field. They were never an issue but dodging all of their leavings kept you on your toes.
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BROCK JOHNSON: I don’t think they are a nuisance. You just need to give them their deserved space. You can never be too sure with geese. Those darned wild turkeys are a true nuisance no matter where you live though. They cause trouble in my neighborhood every year.
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EDITOR’S NOTE
Normally, we ask our question of the week of people we randomly encounter on the street. But with the coronavirus pandemic, we instead asked our followers on social media to share their thoughts.
BRANDY WAGNER: No, I love seeing any wildlife in the city. They are not a nuisance, they are nature. Only people completely out of touch with nature think they are a nuisance. In that case, it’s the people who are wrong and need to do some soul searching.
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MCCALL MELANIE: Yes. They are my mortal enemy. I cannot count the pounds of poop I had to sweep off a dock at a camp I worked at one summer. DERRICK OLIVER: Probably not as much of a nuisance as they find us.
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MARY OLSEN SCHUMACHER: They’re a nuisance everywhere humans congregate. I despise them. Stick to the forests, swamps and savannahs, birds! Or stay wherever you go in the fall. I hear it’s nice there. CHRISTINA WEBER: I honestly don’t mind them as long as they don’t attack me while I’m minding my own business. If they do attack, then they’re assholes.
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JACK O’DEA: I didn’t mind until that time I complained online about the irresponsible people who weren’t picking up after their pets and was promptly informed the mess was from geese. Embarrassing. Duh.
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SKYE DEASY: No. Animals are following their instincts, we’re the pest in their house. Geese are important to the environment. Humans, not at all. n
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Hundreds of square miles burned on Monday, prompting the evacuation of towns like Mansfield, Washington.
A Hard Day’s Night
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Through fires, darkness and falling trees BY JACOB H. FRIES
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aaahhhhaannnnnnnnneeerrrrrr. The huge air horns blasted again and again over the tiny town of Mansfield, Washington, late Sunday, waking us, waking our 1-year-old baby girl, signaling to everyone for miles that fire was coming, but from what direction we did not know. Dawn was hours away. Waaahhhhaannnnnnnnneeerrrrrr. My wife’s grandparents checked the police scanner — farmers in the middle of nowhere Washington have police scanners — but details were sketchy. We checked Facebook, Google, Twitter, Douglas County websites, local news outlets. Nothing told us what to do about these blaring sirens. Grandma called my mother-in-law who was sleeping at the family ranch a few miles away, too far to hear the horn, and woke her in time to see the wildfire rapidly LETTERS advancing toSend comments to ward her. She editor@inlander.com. and other relatives quickly escaped to town, the sirens stopped, tears fell, neighbors checked on each other, and though the fate of the ranch was unknown, Grandma said as she fixed us all biscuits and gravy, “Let’s try to keep things in perspective.” Fed and with the immediate danger apparently over, Michelle and I decided to pack our two girls and two dogs into the car and head home to Spokane. The main road out of town was impassable, so we started west, the back way, in hopes of connecting with the U.S. 2 highway.
Unrelenting winds blew dust and smoke. Julia, 3, said from her carseat, “Eww, it’s so foggy out.” We didn’t correct her, or let on that we were beginning to think we had made a terrible mistake. U.S. 2 turned from white to gray to black. It was 8:30 in the morning, and it was the darkest night I could remember. Michelle slowed the car to a crawl. We could just barely see the road and then, up ahead, a little flashing blue light. The road was closed, and with our hazard lights on, unsure if anyone could see us, we nervously turned around. We continued driving southwest, looking for a way to connect with Interstate 90. As far as Google Maps and our car’s navigation system could tell us, it was smooth sailing all around. We tried a small highway near Moses Lake, but again the sky quickly went from light gray to pitch-dark. Michelle, our courageous pilot on this trip, turned us around. We couldn’t keep going on like this, but we couldn’t stop either. What had we done? How stupid could we be?
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he girls were sound asleep when we finally reached I-90, near George, Washington, and pointed the car east. We started to get text messages from family still in Mansfield. More fire was coming their way. Some houses had reportedly burned to the ground. All the roads leading out were now closed. The lights went out. They were told to evacuate to the high school, located just a couple football fields away
on the edge of the town. They waited in their cars and texted pictures of the foreboding sky. Back on the interstate, our journey wasn’t over either. Any minute, we figured, it would shut down. Wrecks lined the roadway. I checked my phone: Wildfires and windstorms were hitting huge swaths of Washington and Idaho on what was a long Labor Day weekend, when families across America usually mark the waning days of summer with barbecues and beer — if not, you know, for the pandemic that has kept everyone at a distance. Say something, my wife demanded from behind the wheel. Talk to me. I’m scared. You’re doing great, I said as enthusiastically as I could manage. Keep going. Twenty more minutes, and we should be through the worst of it, I lied. I was scared, too.
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“Is everyone OK”? I asked, and as they started to answer, a second tree broke in half. I sprinted down the street as the tree tumbled onto our next-door neighbor’s house and car. Finally, a half hour outside of Spokane, we could see blue skies and white puffs of cloud. We made it. At home, we hugged, full of gratitude and a little guilt that we had left. We checked in with the people in Mansfield. They had been told to leave the high school and head back home. The power was still out, and fires burned all around them. No one was going anywhere, but at least they were safe. The girls and dogs were delighted to be back in our own yard after the long, hard weekend. Then, after maybe an hour, we heard a loud crack, followed by a ground-shaking thump. A towering, maybe 80-foot-tall tree crashed two doors down, landing on a truck, blocking the road and pulling down power lines in the process. Barefoot, I walked toward the neighbors gathered where the tree had once stood. “Is everyone OK?” I asked, and as they started to answer, a second tree broke in half. I sprinted down the street as the tree tumbled onto our next-door neighbor’s house and car, parked only a few feet from ours. Michelle grabbed the girls and dogs, and we huddled in the basement — safe, but still unsure which direction the danger would come at us from next. Like tens of thousands of people across the region, our power was now out, and I pulled out the camping lamps that I bought the last time we had to huddle in the dark.
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oon, we heard the reassuring sounds of chainsaws. Neighbors had returned to the fallen trees and began chopping them up — not for any reason besides it needed to be done and they were able to do it. And then around 2 am Tuesday morning, about 12 hours after the trees came down, I woke to the wonderful beep-beep-beep of what I could only assume was a utility truck backing up after having restored power to our block. Naturally, it’s easy to be struck by the heroics of firefighters and utility workers who race into danger while the rest of us huddle under blankets. It’s also not hard to see that moments like these can bring out the best in people. But I also hear Grandma Sheila reminding us to keep things in perspective. Michelle and I were certainly lucky, but the world is still burning around us. Windstorms are bringing down trees. Day is becoming night. Public health is becoming partisan. Lies are becoming truth. Too many of us are looking not to fix things, but to purposely add fuel to the fires blocking our path forward. And then I’m reminded of that road getting darker by the second, of Michelle shaking behind the wheel, of our babies dozing in the backseat, and of this realization: Sometimes, we have no choice but to turn around and try another way home, one guided by a bit more light. n
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Now on Inlander.com: National and international stories from the New York Times to go with the fresh, local news we deliver every day
Jacob H. Fries is the editor of the Inlander.
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 INLANDER 7
ECONOMY
SUCCESSFUL GRAINS As demand for dried goods soared, Palouse Brand used massive Amazon success to put locals to work BY SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL
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or more than a decade, Sara Mader and her family have understood that people want high-quality, healthy food, they want to know where it comes from, and they would like the convenience of buying that food online. Mader, husband Kevin and their larger family have been growing things like garbanzo beans, lentils, split peas and wheat berries on their farm near Pullman for generations. But for the last 10 years or so, Mader also put her technology background to use, taking the Palouse Brand online to sell directly to customers. “In my heart of hearts, I had a feeling our country was heading toward people wanting to know their farm-
ers and their food,” Mader says. Palouse Brand prides itself on how much consumers know about their food. A QR code on the bag will tell you exactly which field those garbanzos were grown in. The company grows, cleans and packages their own food, so they can tell you with certainty where it came from and which farming practices were used. That differs from other practices where, say, beans or lentils might be purchased by a grain company and sold to a food processor, which might then combine resources from around the world before a can of beans would wind up on your pantry shelf. For Palouse Brand, moving to sell directly to custom-
ers through their own website and other online retailers was great, but significantly, Mader says, selling through Amazon has been key. At no time did that become more evident than when a global pandemic hit early this year. With a rush on dried goods and pantry staples at local grocery stores around the country, Palouse Brand became a smash success online, even having one of Amazon’s top-selling items for a time this spring. So, while Amazon, the world’s biggest retailer, is often cast as a small-business-killing monopoly — one that many lawmakers and consumer advocates would like to break up — in this particular case the story is different.
Sara Mader (second from left) and her family behind their booming business. PALOUSE BRAND PHOTO
8 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
“Amazon truly is my biggest partner,” Mader says. “When COVID hit, our partnership with Amazon allowed consumers to reach us really quickly because they were having trouble finding things in grocery stores.” Palouse Brand’s ownership of nearly all elements of its process, from growing to shipping, enabled swift maneuvering to adapt to the growing demand, which in turn accelerated the already growing business’ plans. “The backside of that benefit was we were taking care of so many families on the Palouse,” Mader says.
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he first snag of the increased demand on Palouse Brand came when Mader says they ran out of packaging. The company quickly bought out every cloth-style bag that they could find in the U.S. and soon started air-freighting in bags just to meet demand. But they also had to figure out how to print their labels on those bags. “We went into J & H Printing, a local print shop here in Pullman, and they said yes, they could print on it. That happened in early March,” Mader says. “We were able to print the new bags and have a No. 1 best-selling product in 24 hours on Amazon.” Within weeks of the new demand, Palouse Brand opened a new warehouse at the edge of town, brought in J & H Printing to have their printing process happen in-house, and they hired about 100 temporary and permanent employees, many of whom had recently lost work due to COVID shutdowns, Mader says. “The demand was so high that we would literally have warm bags coming off the printer, and we’d be filling them with foods and shipping them,” she says. “It helped keep their [printing] business alive through the shutdown of the pandemic, LETTERS and it allowed families to be Send comments to fed and benefits to be paid at editor@inlander.com. multiple businesses because of the demand it generated.” The massive demand also jump-started the next big move for the company, which was already in the works: Clear Creek, by Palouse Brand. While Palouse Brand only sells products grown on the Maders’ farm, Clear Creek is doing the same thing for other regional farmers, packaging and shipping their Pacific Northwest products to customers through the same proven model. The in-house solutions that this year demanded of Palouse Brand, coupled with the speed of listing products through Amazon’s platform, will enable Clear Creek to turn products around with labels and packaging in a matter of days or weeks, Mader says. “It’s giving other farmers the chance to connect with us and get that into consumers’ hands,” Mader says. “If farmers are interested in growing their consumer brand, we have a website they can go through, we evaluate their product, what they’re selling, what they want to move, we try to get them a higher margin than more traditional options, and then we brag about them through our Clear Creek brand.” Compared to other online retailers, Mader also emphasizes that Amazon has done the most to help protect her brand and products. She’s in the process of sending cease-and-desist letters to sellers on other online marketplaces who’ve bought her products and turned around to re-sell them for higher prices. Mader says their company continues to look forward to expanding Clear Creek’s offerings, and as employment demands grow, there will also be an emphasis on hiring single moms who need work and might not get a second chance from another company. For Mader it’s important to offer a family-friendly work environment that doesn’t punish employees for things like taking care of their children. “Another large retailer here fires these moms after so many absences due to child care. We have no attendance consequences: If their kids have a problem and they need to leave, we’re able to let them do that,” Mader says. “Because of the flexibility and availability of the Amazon platform, we have this place for these women to thrive in.” n samanthaw@inlander.com
Twisted Earth Enjoy outdoor dining with a beautiful view at Twisted Earth Grill, now open for the season at Circling Raven Golf Club.
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SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 INLANDER 9
NEWS | ANIMALS
If You Give a Squirrel a Peanut… Why the Spokane City Council may ban the feeding of deer, squirrels, turkeys, raccoons and skunks BY DANIEL WALTERS
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im Leu, a 56-year-old disabled vet living in the Fountain Terrace apartments on the lower South Hill, says he’s frustrated by his downstairs neighbor. But his beef isn’t about loud parties or parking spaces — it’s about peanuts. “The lady downstairs has a bad habit of putting unsalted peanuts out on the lawn for the squirrels,” Leu says. “The shells, oh my god, the shells are every freaking place.” And maybe that wouldn’t be a problem. Except squirrels aren’t the only creatures that love to chow down on unsalted peanuts. Whenever she leaves a pile of peanuts outside, he sees a crew of skunks take advantage of the feast before them. “I look over the balcony,” Leu says. “I see them eating from the pile and I growl like a dog and they disappear.” But sometimes, he says, something startles the skunks. “What do they do? They love to spray,” Leu says. “I didn’t start smelling it until she started feeding the damn squirrels.” Yet when he complained to the property manager, he says, he was told there was nothing they could do. It’s perfectly legal to feed most animals — squirrels, skunks, raccoons and deer — in the city of Spokane. But two City Council members, Candace Mumm and Lori Kinnear, are considering changing the law, making it illegal to feed most wild animals in Spokane.
10 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
“We should not be interacting at that level with wild animals,” Kinnear says. “They’re still wild animals.”
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t’s already illegal in Washington state to feed large wild carnivores, like bears, wolves or cougars, Mumm points out. And other cities have passed broader ordinances: In 2017, the city of Bellingham passed a law banning the intentional feeding of deer and raccoons. In 2018, Eugene, Oregon, passed a similar ordinance, banning residents from feeding most wild animals, including deer, rats and wild turkeys. And Kinnear knows all about the trouble with wild turkeys. Her district includes the South Hill, a region infamous for the turkey hordes that rove the streets and strut through suburban yards, sometimes tearing up lawns and pooping on cars. She started working with her fellow Councilman Breean Beggs on the issue over a year ago, after they were approached by a man who wanted to talk about what happened to his wife. “The turkey had made a nest under their front porch and so when the woman came up to the front porch to go to the front door, the turkey attacked,” she says. “She was injured. They go for the face.” But Kinnear says that the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife told her that they had tried all sorts of tactics to go after turkeys. They’d try to trap them, but people would sabotage the traps. They’d seek out the
nests, but the nests were hard to find. “They said, ‘The final problem is that people are feeding the turkeys,” Kinnear says. And not just turkeys. “I had one gentleman around the Cannon Hill pond who was feeding skunks,” Kinnear says. “He had a wild pet skunk.” Councilwoman Mumm says some people aren’t even intending to feed the animals. Sometimes they might be leaving their food out without realizing it. “People will leave their pet food out for cats and dogs, and it will attract other animals as well,” Mumm says. “They may not intentionally attract skunks, but they will show up.” Some people feed the wildlife because they just want to see the animals up close. Staci Lehman, a spokeswoman for Fish and Wildlife, says she had one of her own neighbors complaining to her last year about someone in their neighborhood leaving out food to lure wild animals into the range of his game cam. “I just left a business card saying, ‘Hey, give me a call about feeding wildlife,’” Lehman says. “I just wrote a smiley face and signed it.” She says she never heard anything back. Chris Bachman, wildlife director at the Lands Council, a local environmental nonprofit, says that people generally set out food to attract one set of animals, not knowing they risk inadvertently attracting more dangerous ones
Love these neighbors, but you probably shouldn’t feed them. DANIEL WALTERS PHOTOS “Anytime you have an abundance of those in the area, they are generally followed by the things that want to eat them,” he says. And so on the South Hill’s High Drive bluff, he says, black bears and cougars are sometimes spotted skulking around. “Anytime you have prey animals, you have predators,” Bachman says. Often, those feeding wildlife are the people who love animals and think they’re doing the right thing. In those cases, they can be particularly hard to persuade.
are animal lovers,” says they managed to trap 22 skunks and 14 raccoons in one summer. Fish and Wildlife Sgt. Mike Sprecher has witnessed part of this drama play out personally. Last year, he was invited out to the neighborhood after complaints that one of the animal-feeding people went onto their neighbor’s property and illegally released a trapped wild animal. “I appreciate the fact that they love wildlife,” Sprecher says. “They love them almost too much to be honest. They think they’re helping them by doing this. … In reality, they’re putting them more at risk.” Feeding wild animals can make them more susceptible to disease. It can draw them away from their ideal habitats. It can make them act more aggressively towards humans and other animals. And it can result in wild animals darting out more often into traffic. “It’s a public safety risk to people in that neighborhood,” he says. ” Sprecher says he talked to the Shadle Park area neighbors who’d been doing the feeding, explaining to them the damage that luring in wildlife with food could do to both the neighborhood and the animals they were trying to help. He hoped they would change their ways. But a year later, he says, he got called back to speak to one of the same neighbors. A deer in the neighborhood got a small plastic disc, the sort used to secure tarps in suburban backyards, stuck in its hoof. The neighbor was worried about the deer. Sprecher says that when Fish and Wildlife came out to tranquilize the deer, remove the object, and relocate the creature, they found a bale of what appeared to be alfalfa — set out for deer to feed on during winter — and an assortment of fruits and other foods for critters to snack on laid out on the outdoor table. “This is probably a direct result of you bringing the deer back into the neighborhood to feed,” Sprecher
“I appreciate the fact that they love wildlife. They love them almost too much to be honest.” “People who feed wildlife are pretty adamant and it’s hard to get them to change their ways,” says Kile Westerman, a wildlife conflict specialist with Fish and Wildlife. “They like to have them around and provide a safe haven for them. … Sometimes they can get entrenched in that mindset even more when a neighbor is adamantly opposed.” In other words, if the guy next door keeps fighting with you over your habit of feeding turkeys, you might double down on turning your backyard into wild turkey paradise. This dynamic can set the stage for long-running neighborhood feuds, like the one that’s been simmering in a neighborhood near the Shadle Park Walmart for over a year: One set of neighbors keeps bringing in skunks, raccoons and deer by setting out a buffet spread for them. Another set of neighbors banded together to hire a certified trapper to capture the animals and relocate them. One of the neighbors, who demanded that his name not be used because there are a lot of “crazed people who
recalls saying about the deer’s injury to the neighbor. Once again, Sprecher says, he asked them not to feed the animals. “I don’t know that it’s sinking in,” he says. “I don’t have a law that I can enforce to stop them.”
W
hen Westerman, the wildlife conflict specialist, met with two City Council members last year to discuss the aggressive turkey problem, he floated the possibility of a more aggressive measure to battle the birds: paintballs. It’s not legal to shoot turkeys with paintballs in the city of Spokane, he says, but it is in Spokane Valley. “Spokane Valley is OK with us recommending the use of paintballs to harass wildlife,” Westerman says. With consistent use, he says, it can be used as a way to deter the birds from certain areas. Kinnear was horrified by the suggestion. “I looked at him and said, ‘That is not even an option. Don’t mention that in public,’” Kinnear says. “You can only imagine the consequences of saying to people, ‘Yes, you can paintball the turkeys.’” She imagines someone missing turkeys and hitting somebody’s car or another person. Or hitting the turkey, injuring it, and suddenly they have an injured animal to deal with. Instead, Kinnear and Mumm are focusing on banning feeding turkeys and other wildlife. They’re still in the beginning stages. They haven’t figured out any of the other details. “We could create a long list of animals or maybe we could just exclude a couple,” Mumm says. For now, Kinnear suggests, she would ban the feeding of all wildlife but songbirds. “People have backyard feeders. That would be ridiculous to say, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t feed birds birdseed,’” Kinnear says. “That’s not going to fly. No pun intended.” n danielw@inlander.com
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 INLANDER 11
SANDPOINT’S
WILD T
GOOSE CHASE
How an abundance of geese at a popular beach can put a city in a crappy situation
he operation begins just before dawn. A caravan of police SUVs storm the entrance to Sandpoint City Beach park, and officers lock the gate behind them. Waiting there, under the street lights, is a woman who knows exactly what’s going on: Jane Fritz. A police officer stops her as she approaches. “We’re doing maintenance, ma’am, you can’t come in,” she recalls him saying. It’s a ruse. She knows it’s about the geese. As the sun peeks above the mountains surrounding Lake Pend Oreille, Fritz can barely make out the spectacle happening in the twilight haze behind the gate: Men in blue uniforms wandering hastily through the park, chasing gaggles of geese. Within hours on the morning of June 25, 127 Canada geese are packed into two horse trailers with license plates that say “U.S. GOVERNMENT.” The trailers haul the birds far away, but maybe not far enough, to a place where they hopefully won’t bother people with their shit. That’s the reason for all of this: Literal bird shit. Western Canada geese — the ones with the white tummies, grayish backs, black necks and a white chin strap — love mowed, grassy areas by water, a trait they unfortunately share with humans. Humans, however, can go to the park bathroom to do their business. Hell, even seagulls can drop their feces in the air freely, without judgment. Canada geese? They’re molting in early summer, shedding feathers and unable to fly. So they have no choice but to poop right there in the grass, to the dismay of park lovers everywhere.
12 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
BY WILSON CRISCIONE
And it is happening everywhere. As Canada geese populations continue to grow across North America, cities like Sandpoint are constantly experimenting with new ways to harass the birds and make them go away. They try all kinds of things — dogs, fake coyotes, special lasers only geese can see. Many communities settle for the same plan that Sandpoint ended on recently: Plucking them from their home and leaving them somewhere else. What horrifies Fritz is Sandpoint’s plan for what happens next, if those geese come back. “Their secret, dark motive,” she says, “is to kill these darn birds.”
‘RACIAL BIGOTRY OF BIRDS’
Eventually, the police let Jane Fritz and some of her friends who have just arrived through the gate. By this point, most of the geese are trapped, and at the mercy of U.S. Department of Agriculture wildlife services officers. Corralling geese is actually easier than it sounds. Fritz’s friend, Chuck Smith, is a local videographer who documented the process that morning and shared the tape with the Inlander. Sandpoint city employees, along with USDA officers, raise their arms at their sides and form a wall — a scary sight, for a bird. Unable to fly, all the geese can do is stick together and speed-walk away from the danger, until suddenly they find themselves unwittingly confined in a pen. From there, the geese are totally helpless. A man wearing a camouflage hat, flannel shirt and blue jeans hovers above the birds, looking for the next one to grab.
The goslings scream and flap their wings furiously. Some try desperately to escape. Others hiss. But they are geese. They can’t hurt him, unless he overreacts to the goose’s attempts at intimidation and he hurts himself. One by one, the man grabs a goose, bends its neck back and tucks the head under a wing. As if holding a football, he hands the goose over the pen to someone on the other side. The bird’s giant webbed feet dangle hopelessly as it is flipped upside down, scrutinized for its sex, banded and then placed in a trailer with the rest of the birds. This June was the second time the geese at the park were captured and relocated, and the second time Fritz and Smith were there to witness it. As a journalist, one who has previously written articles for the Inlander, Fritz says she wants to document what she considers to be geese abuse. “I am not a wacko,” Fritz says. “I am a person who cares about wildlife.” Smith is on her side. He calls the geese “regal creatures,” like “classy, stately women going out to the opera.” It’s unsettling to see them treated this way, he says, and while he doesn’t see the corralling of geese to be as cruel as Fritz does, he does see it as an injustice. Seagulls and other birds poop at the park, he says, so why are geese singled out? “It amounts to kind of an aviary rights problem — a racial bigotry of birds,” Smith says. To be clear, Sandpoint has not killed any geese — not yet, at least. To do so, they would need a permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, since the birds are protected under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Sandpoint has applied twice for a permit to relocate geese and then kill the ones that return to the beach — this year asking to euthanize up to 150 birds — but they’ve thus far been denied the license to kill. ...continued on page 14
Canada geese populations have skyrocketed in North America since the 1950s.
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 INLANDER 13
“SANDPOINT’S WILD GOOSE CHASE,” CONTINUED... Still, the geese have been a problem at Sandpoint City Beach for decades, says Kim Woodruff, Sandpoint Parks and Recreation director. He says he used to get five or six calls a day complaining about it. There are few public spaces as accessible and as picturesque in the Inland Northwest as Sandpoint City Beach, a grass park surrounded by sandy shores on the north end of Lake Pend Oreille. There are also few places more attractive to Canada geese. The short grass is perfect for both eating and for roaming around in, and the easy access to a large body of water provides an ideal refuge from approaching predators. Woodruff stresses that he does not want to get rid of all the geese, but only to minimize the amount of poop. He describes himself as a sort of hippie — a virtue in Sandpoint, which is a liberal blue dot in deep red North Idaho. During an interview with the Inlander, he somewhat proudly notes that he doesn’t kill bugs in his home and that he doesn’t own a gun. He says he’s a guy who loves nature and wildlife and the city where he’s worked for 34 years. It’s just that a few years ago, he reached a tipping point with these geese. A family member had a work party at the park, and when he got there, it was like walking through a thin layer of mud. Except it was goose poop, inches thick in the grass. He was appalled. “That’s when I knew it was past time of being able to coexist,” Woodruff says. Goose poop can carry E. coli and salmonella, and that can be a real health concern. But realistically, the driving force behind Sandpoint’s goose management plan is the fact that people find goose poop unpleasant. It’s bad for tourism, and neither Woodruff nor City Administrator Jennifer Stapleton hide that’s a major factor in all this.
“
Jane Fritz points out that many of the geese that were relocated in June have already come back. way to get rid of geese, he says, is to euthanize them by putting the geese into a gas chamber. It may sound cruel, but it’s not uncommon. Last year, for instance, Denver killed more than 1,600 geese and donated the meat to charity to feed hungry families. “The issue with all those non-lethal attempts is that you’re not ever really solving the problem,” he says. “All you’re doing is moving that problem someplace else.” But for some Sandpoint residents, killing geese — or even moving them away — represents a betrayal of the town’s identity. One letter to the weekly paper the Sandpoint Reader noted that it’s a town that will go so far as to not light fireworks when there’s a risk of disturbing osprey nests nearby. “Sandpoint is losing its soul to money. What are we turning into?” it says. Another letter reads: “We all know what this is about: kowtowing to tourists and resort companies like the Marriott.” Fritz wrote several of her own letters to the Reader and the Bonner County Daily Bee that criticize the city for not trying other options first. She argues the city should allow dogs on the beach to deter geese. Or why not contract with a company called Away With Geese that sets up solar-powered lights that bother geese? She started petitions. She pressed local and federal officials for answers, and never felt satisfied with the response. By late spring this year, she heard that June 25 might be the day of the second goose capture. In the middle of a burgeoning civil rights movement and an ongoing pandemic, she put an ad in the paper that said “END DOMESTIC TERRORISM!” above a picture of roughly two dozen geese calmly resting in the grass. “On June 25, Parks & Rec will bend the necks of 200 geese. Do you care? Call the mayor!” it continued. She guesses her ad is the reason why so many police officers arrived to help with the goose operation this year — maybe they anticipated a protest, too. This year, however, she and Smith were determined to do what they didn’t do last year. Once the half-dozen local and federal officials finished putting the geese in the horse trailers, they want to see where the geese are dropped off. It will require them to follow the trailers full of birds down the highway.
The issue with all those non-lethal attempts is that you’re not ever really solving the problem. All you’re doing is moving that problem someplace else.”
Forcing out hundreds of geese from the park, however, is no easy task. They tried coyote statues as decoys, but before long the geese could be seen resting right by the coyote, mockingly. They tried hiring a dog handler to herd the geese off the beach, but eventually, the geese recognized the car as it pulled up, so they simply did their signature upright speed walk over to the shore and splashed into the lake for an easy escape. Other cities have been more creative. Nelson, B.C, reportedly harasses geese with drones, though it’s not unheard of for the geese to fight the drone back. Coeur d’Alene installed lasers at the beach that mess with a goose’s eyes. Spokane has focused on making landscape changes, like planting tall grasses in Riverfront Park that are less appealing to geese. Then there are more lethal measures. Many places “addle” the eggs, killing the embryo chemically but leaving the egg intact so geese don’t lay more. The problem for Sandpoint, however, is that while goose nests are likely within a 2- or 3-mile radius of the park, they may not be on Sandpoint property, and that handcuffs the city’s ability to take action. David Drake, an urban wildlife specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says it’s up to each community to decide what they can tolerate. But the surest
14 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL PHOTO
“We wanted to see it from beginning to end,” Smith says. They get in their car, ready to follow the geese. The chase is on.
THE REAL PROBLEM
Fritz and Smith lose the geese before they even leave Sandpoint. But it just so happens that when the two pull into a gas station, they find the pickup trucks carrying the geese in the trailers. They start tailing them down U.S. Highway 95 towards Coeur d’Alene when another federal truck passes them and slows down. Fritz and Smith assume it’s one of the USDA employees, trying to block them from seeing where the geese go. Smith has to speed up and pass the truck in order to catch up. “It felt like a police chase,” Fritz says. A spokeswoman for USDA wildlife services, Tanya Espinosa, confirms that people opposed to the plan were “tailgating our vehicles” in the two-lane highway and through the dirt roads. “Our program focuses on the safety of animals, residents and employees,” she says in an email. “Unfortunately, harassment and attempts were made to crowd our vehicles.” It ends, anticlimactically, some 90 miles down from Sandpoint, in a lake south of Lake Coeur d’Alene. Fritz and Smith keep their eyes on the wildlife officers, making sure all the geese make it out, filming their every move. Here, the geese are meant to live from now on. If all goes as planned, they will stay. But that’s unlikely. Canada geese weren’t always a nuisance to humans. Native to North America, Canada geese are migratory, flying to Canada in the summertime, then back down south to the Lower 48 states in the winter in search of open water. But by the early 20th century, there weren’t many around, due largely to overhunting. By the middle of the century, as part of an effort to rebuild goose populations, humans released Canada geese that had been bred in captivity. Since the 1950s, their populations have skyrocketed, increasing by millions. But because the geese had been captive, they didn’t migrate the same way they used to. They could migrate if needed, says Drake, the wildlife specialist. But why would they? Humans can give them everything they need, without the hassle of flying thousands of miles. Those are the geese, called “resident geese,” that crowd public parks, golf courses and university campuses. ...continued on page 16
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Geese are corralled in a pen on June 25 before their trip south in a horse trailer.
JANE FRITZ PHOTO
“SANDPOINT’S WILD GOOSE CHASE,” CONTINUED... “It’s the way we develop the landscape that “Unless there’s a real change in overall habiallows these animals to really thrive,” says Drake. tat that initially attracted them to that area, it’s It’s not unique to geese — the same can be going to be difficult to keep them out of there in said for deer, raccoons and turkeys. We provide the long-term,” Dooley says. the perfect conditions for them to achieve maxiAll of this only makes things more of a chalmum reproduction, then call them a nuisance. lenge for a city like Sandpoint that just wants to In the mid-2000s, the Fish and Wildlife get rid of bird poop. Move the birds, and they’ll Service created an environmental impact statecome back. Euthanize them, and others might fill ment meant to provide more options in dealing the void. Do nothing, and you’re covered in shit. with human-goose conflicts, including a permitFor his part, Woodruff, Sandpoint’s parks ting process enabling cities to kill geese, and director, says he’s pleased with the goose relocaexpanding hunting opportunities. But there are tion operations that have been carried out the 11 subspecies of Canada geese in North America, past two summers. Rarely anymore does he get and seven of those can be found in the Pacific complaints about fecal matter at the park. He has Northwest, says Josh Dooley, a wildlife biologist no idea, however, what happened to the geese with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife dropped off to the south, Service. It creates inherent chalhe says. Once the geese are lenges in goose management on out of sight, they’re out of a larger level. While some submind. species are rising in numbers, That’s more than unsetothers are dwindling, which is tling to Fritz. She worries ABOUT itself a concern for the federal about what happens once THE government. the geese are dropped far “That’s what’s difficult with away from their home. Do AUTHOR Canada geese,” Dooley says. the young die from all the Wilson Criscione is a staff writer “Trying to regulate and manage stress? Are they hunted? Is for the Inlander who writes about all these different populations.” there some other unforeschools, social services and other Western Canada geese, the seen impact? news. When he’s not writing, he’s ones you’ll likely see at Sand“I don’t think anybody usually staring at the sky looking for point, have increased in populareally thinks about the birds. Reach him at 509-325-0634 tion by 5 or 6 percent in the last long-term consequences to Ext. 282 or wilsonc@inlander.com. 10 years alone, Dooley says. these invasive and abusive The whole not-migrating-longactions,” she says. “But I distances thing has worked out pretty well. Keep do. I care.” in mind, this is the same species that ingeniously For the geese and for the people of Sandhas mastered the flying-V. They’re birds who point, the future is uncertain. When asked if the mate for life. They find something that works city will again apply for a permit to euthanize and stick to it, and that means if they are moved geese, Woodruff won’t say. But he insists that to another location, they’re not just going to whatever happens, it’s not out of any malice blindly accept it. Often, even if geese are moved, toward the geese. they will come back to where they’re comfortHe knows the geese are only living in the able. Fritz, for one, is eager to point out that if world humans created. you go to the Sandpoint beach today, you’re “We can truly blame ourselves for the situalikely to see geese with bands on their legs, the tion we’re in,” Woodruff says. “It’s not the geese; ones moved just a year ago. If Sandpoint’s permit it’s the people who are the problem.” had been approved, they might be dead. On that, Fritz can agree. n
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THE PATIO AT BRICK WEST BREWING
The Great Outdoors Patio spaces have always offered a sought-after
dining experience. When the sun is out and the temperature is right, eating outdoors can enhance our enjoyment of an already excellent meal — especially when we’re in the company of close friends and family. These days, when social distancing is the norm, patios have become more than a luxury. They’ve provided restaurants, taprooms and tasting rooms with a way to offset their reduced indoor seating capacity while still maintaining a safe and relaxing environment for their customers. After opening its doors at the start of this year, Brick West Brewing was looking forward to making use of its own large courtyard this summer. The brewery building is located next to an area known as Brick West Commons, which offers ample outdoor space for cozy two-seat arrangements as well as long picnic tables. That perk turned into a big advantage when COVID-19 hit. “As soon as it was available and the weather permitted,
people were definitely flocking out there,” says Brian Carpenter, Brick West’s general manager. “The whole plaza, plus our immediate patio gives the ability to have people sit far apart from each other. With the big space we’re able to use there, it’s definitely allowed for a safer experience.” The outdoor seating has paired well with the brewery’s expanded food menu, which has recently seen the addition of fresh wraps and a wider range of tacos to supplement the existing selection of grilled sausages. Carpenter has also been busy sourcing color-matching umbrellas to make the patio a bit shadier for customers who are enjoying Brick West’s seasonal lemon-lime lager or the upcoming Oktoberfest release. For businesses that don’t already have access to nearby courtyard areas and plazas, the Downtown Spokane Partnership has been working with the city of Spokane to take advantage of adjacent spaces and expedite patio permits, says Liz Hooker, director of marketing and programming for
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the DSP. “Having something like patio seating is a great tool in your business toolkit no matter what’s happening in the larger world, but right now it’s especially important due to some of the safety measures that have been put into place to slow the spread of COVID-19,” says Hooker. The DSP has long been an advocate of patio spaces in downtown Spokane because of the boost they bring to shopping, walkability and the visual appeal of the urban core. Now that they’ve become more vital to doing business, there’s a newfound appreciation of their value to eateries, breweries and wineries. Their staff is ready to be a resource for downtown restaurants looking to expand to a patio. “We were really grateful that not only the [mayoral] administration but also the City Council saw the importance of removing some of the steps in that process in order to make patios more achievable for small businesses,” Hooker says. “Everyone kind of had the same idea at the same time and did whatever was needed in order to make it happen as quickly as possible. So we’re starting to see more patios pop up around downtown.” As an example, she points to the recently refurbished block on Main Avenue between Washington and Stevens streets. “Tasting rooms have BRIAN CARPENTER opened up, and there’s Austin’s Live Fire BBQ and the Locust Cider Company. In previous years, we’d talked about adding patios to that area, and this has sped up that process. Now there’s a whole row of people eating outside, enjoying the sunshine and feeling connected even though we have to remain socially distant.” ◆ Brick West Brewing is located at 1318 W. First Ave. and open every day from 11 am until close. Its craft beers are available in canned six-packs in stores and direct from the brewery. Visit brickwestbrewingco.com or call 279-2982 for more info. You can reach the Downtown Spokane Partnership at 456-0580 or at downtownspokane.org.
COMMELLINI ESTATE / TAVOLA CALDA ITALIAN • NORTH SPOKANE The family-owned Commellini Estate, which operates as a popular private venue for weddings and other special events, this summer launched its new on-site restaurant Tavola Calda. Translated from Italian, the name means “hot table.” Tavola Calda’s menu features longtime favorite recipes from the estate’s founders, Albert and Leda Commellini, and their descendants. While many of these dishes, like Leda’s famous chicken cacciatore, are available through Commellini Estate’s retail food market, guests can now enjoy it and other Old World-inspired Italian recipes at a table or a picnic blanket on the grass when visiting Tavola Calda. 14715 N. Dartford Dr. • commellini.com • 4660667
DOWNRIVER GRILL MODERN • NORTH SPOKANE Since its inception in 2003, Downriver Grill has gained a loyal following. Whether you want to go comfort food, burgers, Italian, gluten-free, or vegan, there’s a little something to keep you coming back. On Wednesdays, watch for the weekly “Burgerdome” special, featuring a new take on a 100-percent Angus beef patty with decadent toppings and the option to add a beer or canned cocktail for $1 or $2 extra. Weekend brunch is also a great time to visit and sit on the secluded garden patio adjacent to the restaurant. Or stop by for Tuesday’s weekly steak night special, or Friday’s “CheeseFryday” for a discount on Downriver’s popular waffle-cut gorgonzola-smothered fries. Seasonal house-crafted cocktails are always a highlight and a perfect pairing
DRIVE-THRU FAIR FOOD
In what’s being billed as the “World’s Largest Fair Food Drive-Thru,” this year’s Spokane Interstate Fair is adapting to public health guidelines by offering two weekends (Sept. 11-13 and 18-20; Fridays and Saturdays 11 am-7 pm, Sundays 11 am- 5 pm) of fairground-style food in a safe, convenient format that’s similar to curbside pickup. Cars will be able to enter through the south gate (along Havana Street), where they’ll receive a free menu. Once they’ve selected from a list of food choices from vendors like Bibby Booth Italian Sausages, Uncle Bill’s King Corn Dog, Island Noodles and Mary Lou’s Ice Cream, volunteers will direct the cars down Food Row. There they can pick up and purchase their meals right from their vehicle. 404 N. Havana St. For details on virtual exhibits at this year’s Spokane Interstate Fair, visit thespokanefair.com
CLOVER MODERN • EAST SPOKANE After taking a brief pause earlier this spring, Clover in east Spokane’s Logan neighborhood reopened under the creative direction of new executive chef Bryan Doyle, who brings 13 years of culinary experience to the role. Lunch, dinner and brunch are now served daily (yes, brunch on weekdays!) at the “cozy little house with the large wooden gate,” with happy hour offered daily from 2-5 pm. While seating on Clover’s garden patio, as well as inside the restaurant, is available, those who wish to enjoy the restaurant’s delectable Mediterranean-inspired menu at home can also order for delivery or curbside pickup. Follow on social media for updates on daily specials. 913 E. Sharp Ave. • cloverspokane.com • 487-2937
with any meal. 3315 W. Northwest Blvd. • downrivergrill.com • 325-1600
GENO’S TRADITIONAL FOOD & ALES AMERICAN • NORTHSIDE After almost 10 years in the Logan neighborhood surrounding Gonzaga, Geno’s has become an area staple. Maybe that’s because it’s got one of Spokane’s best secret patios. Inside, they’ve created barriers to keep tables better separated for social distancing. A nice mix of weekly specials — an American-meets-Mexican cheeseburger quesadilla and bourbon chicken are two recent examples — make Geno’s a regular draw, and the full menu is also available for takeout. Growler fills are just $10. If you’re dining in, you can scan QR codes with your
smartphone for touchless ordering. 1414 N. Hamilton St. • wedonthaveone.com • 368-9087
LONGHORN BARBECUE BARBECUE • AIRWAY HEIGHTS Although it’s been a Spokane staple for over six decades, Longhorn Barbecue got its start in Houston, Texas, home to classic American pit-smoked and slow-grilled cuisine. They’ve cut their in-house dining by half in response to public health mandates, but the menu remains as full as ever with items like the Longhorn Special and the deep-fried delight that is the Tower of Onion Rings. Their takeout menu offers family-style meals like the Wagon Master, which saves you from having to choose between Longhorn’s seven mouth-watering meats. Or choose Longhorn’s Spokane Valley location on Argonne, which has just reopened for business. 7611 W. Sunset Hwy. • thelonghornbbq. com • 838-8372
Fresh sheet deals • specials • updates OSAKA ROOM SUSHI AND HIBACHI STEAK HOUSE SPOKANE [NORTH] Spicy Tuna Roll $7.00 Dragon Roll $16.00 21 East Lincoln Road, Spokane www.osakaroom.com
LATAH CREEK WINE CELLARS SPOKANE VALLEY New Release: 2018 Reserve Mourvèdre Summer Special: Our latest Sangria 13030 East Indiana Avenue, Spokane Valley • latahcreek.com
MCCLAIN'S PIZZERIA SPOKANE [NORTH] $5 OFF all 18” Pizzas on Mondays 10208 North Division Street, Spokane mcclainspizzeriaspokane.com
MIFLAVOUR
ILLINOIS AVENUE BAR AND GRILL
BAKERY • EAST SPOKANE Local diners can take a virtual trip to Europe without risking anyone’s safety by popping into miFlavour, Spokane’s French-inspired bakery, where owners Ella and Max Piskun recently debuted a new line of housemade Italian-style gelato and sorbetto. The new brand is called Volonti and offers cups and pints to go, as well as by-the-scoop servings in bowls or cones. Volonti is also providing the filling for miFlavour’s existing ice cream sandwiches, which feature its popular macaron cookies, in flavors ranging from lavender to cake batter. 3403 E. Sprague Ave. • miflavour.com • 315-4516
SPOKANE [NORTH] Two for One Food Specials every Tuesday. The last Tuesday of each month the Two for One Tuesday Special is our French Dip 1403 East Illinois Avenue, Spokane www.illinoisave.com
MEXICO LINDO MEXICAN • LIBERTY LAKE Mexico Lindo in Liberty Lake is the latest from Fiesta Mexicana’s Miguel Amador, and opened late in 2019. Head here for tacos of all shapes, sizes and fillings, including lengua (tongue) and alambre (bacon, beef, cheese and pasilla pepper). Deep-fried ice cream sounds good right now and they have it, along with a kids’ menu, and the perfect marriage of savory and spice in the form of shrimp with chipotle cream sauce. 1235 N. Liberty Lake Rd. • facebook.com/mexicolindolibertylake • 340-9387
ABOUT Back to business • These weekly pages are part of a local marketing effort in support of the hospitality
sector brought to you by leading institutions and businesses to help promote the Spokane County economy, supported in part by Cares Act funding. With the goal of balancing commerce and public safety, you can follow along here in the Inlander, and via the links below, as local restaurants, shops and more share their stories and invite your support.
UNCLE RUSTY'S DINER SPOKANE [DOWNTOWN] $6.50 Daily Breakfast & Lunch Specials $5.99 Cheeseburger & Fries Every Thursday 1412 West 2nd Avenue, Spokane www.unclerustysdiner.com
MOUNTAIN LAKES BREWING CO. SPOKANE [DOWNTOWN] 3-for-1 Growlers! Every Friday we offer 2 of our 14 beers for only $7.00/Growler Fill. That’s 64 ounces of your favorite for only $7+tax! 201 West Riverside Avenue, Spokane www.mountainlakesbrewco.com
COCHINITO TAQUERIA SPOKANE [DOWNTOWN] Taco Tuesday- Happy hour all night from 3p-close. Select $2 tacos every week. 10 N Post St, SPOKANE www.cochinitotaqueria.com
more to come • Through the end of the year, watch
the Inlander for special Back To Business guides, along with special sections, sharing more recovery stories and community business features.
Safe business practice resources KindnessNotCovid.org • Financial resources for businesses InlandBizStrong.org
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 INLANDER 19
NOT JUST BABY TALK BOOKS
Emma Noyes’ Baby Speaks Salish is more than a language guide, it’s a reclamation
Author/illustrator Emma Noyes turned a family language project into a new book, Baby Speaks Salish. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
BY DAN NAILEN
E
mma Noyes grew up in Omak, Washington, as a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. But it took a trip halfway around the world as a college student to inspire her to learn a Native language. She was studying public health and socio-cultural anthropology and applied for a fellowship that would require her to travel, solo, for eight months across multiple continents. Her proposal was to explore Indigenous solidarity and Indigenous experiences in different parts of the world. When it was accepted, Noyes found herself in New Zealand, where she joined a Maori immersion-language school on a weeklong trip. “In that one week, I knew more words in Maori than I knew in our Salish language,” the 34-year-old Noyes says. “It broke down all those walls that I had about what it meant to be able to learn and speak a
20 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
Native language ... And it wasn’t just words, right? I was able to learn more about the worldview and the relationship that Maori people have to the world around them and to each other, and within their families, through those words. Language is that sort of conduit for understanding a culture.” That week in a faraway land helped light a fire to pursue learning a Native language when she got home, Noyes says, and she remembers thinking “I want to learn an Indigenous language, and I’m OK even if it’s not my own. I will do what I can to contribute to the survival of the language.” It would be a few years before she did any formal language schooling — years spent in grad school, and then working to improve health care for Native communities — and that fire remained. Her experience in New Zealand, combined with her long-held desire to
have her children grow up learning Salish (not to mention marrying a Salish-language scholar, Jake LaMere), pushed Noyes to pursue the language herself. This week, one of the tangible results of that pursuit arrives in Baby Speaks Salish, a book Noyes wrote and illustrated being published by Spokane’s ENTRÉE Scablands Books Sept. Get the scoop on local 15. The project refood news with our weekly ceived a 2019 Spokane Entrée newsletter. Sign up Arts Grant Award, and at Inlander.com/newsletter. in addition to being a beautifully rendered practical guide to words important for parent-child interactions, it’s also an interesting lens into community, a parent-child relationship, and the trauma associated with language. ...continued on page 22
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SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 INLANDER 21
CULTURE | BOOKS “NOT JUST BABY TALK,” CONTINUED...
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anguage for Native people, Noyes included, has been wrapped up in fear for generations, she says, and she powerfully addresses why that is in the book. Even more so in conversation. “In our communities, language was physically beaten out of children,” Noyes says. “Children were removed from their families and placed in boarding schools, or attended day schools where they were shamed. They were fed a steady diet of shame around their language and their identity as Native people. And we see those detrimental effects today in both educational outcomes and health outcomes in Native communities.” Growing up, she says, that trauma manifested itself in her community and her own family. When opportunities to learn the Salish language were presented, they’d often be met with dismissals like “the person who’s teaching it isn’t speaking it right” or “that’s not the dialect of Salish that our family would have spoken, that’s not our language.” “I think internally I had all of these self-imposed barriers to connecting with language that needed to be broken down,” Noyes says. Once Noyes did start learning Salish, she ran into the same issues any adult has trying to learn a new language. It’s hard, and it takes a certain amount of vulnerability as well as perseverance to get pronunciations and spellings wrong and stick with it. Even after years of studying and teaching her toddler daughter Maren, Noyes is the first to say fluency is still a ways off. Even so, the rewards are obvious, too. “I can’t even begin to describe how powerful, I can’t describe the feeling that I have actually being able to speak these words aloud,” Noyes says. “Being able to start to say some of these words was really remarkable.”
N
oyes’ first idea for Baby Speaks Salish was to make a podcast, maybe tackling five words in five minutes. But a combination of technical know-how (or rather, a lack thereof) and a busy household with a new baby forced Noyes to pivot to creating a publication for Spokane Zine Fest in 2017. Her zine had many of the features
22 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
in the book, including delightful illustrations alongside words and phrases like “did you pee?” and “ice cream.” The Salish she uses is the Colville-Okanagan dialect, and Noyes includes the American phonetic alphabet notes she used herself while she learned the words. After Zine Fest, Scablands managing editor and author Sharma Shields approached Noyes about expanding the idea into a book, and Noyes says her fellow author “fostered a really creative space for thinking about what a book version would look like.” The final product has sections based around subjects like colors, family members, meals, seasons and clothes. And it also has personal reflections on how Maren’s day care embraced using some Salish words in class, and how family and friends joined Noyes and LaMere in teaching Maren by learning some Salish themselves. “The part of the book that I really adore the most at this point was really being able to do an illustrated version of sort of what the meaning of language is for my family and what we’re trying to do,” Noyes says. Maren, about to turn 4, already outpaces her mom — “she’s at the age she’s going to start straight up judging me for not being able to know a word she already uses” — and that motivates Noyes to keep learning. In fact, working on Baby Speaks Salish had already tested her working knowledge of the language. “When it came to, ‘Let’s expand to a book. Let’s have more categories,’ I’m like, ‘Oh, man, we might outgrow my vocabulary!’” Noyes says. “If you quizzed me, I still need this book.” n Baby Speaks Salish is on sale Sept. 15 via scablandsbooks.org, and $2 from each sale will go to the Salish School of Spokane. There will be a virtual launch party Oct. 15 in coordination with Wishing Tree Books and the Salish School, details to come.
Samples of Noyes’ work in Baby Speaks Salish.
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CULTURE | DIGEST
Don’t solve Christopher Nolan movies — feel them GAFFIGAN EXPLAINS You probably heard about notoriously clean, middleof-the-road (and truly funny!) comedian Jim Gaffigan going off on Twitter about the Trump administration during the Republican National Convention. It actually was Big Headline News due to Gaffigan’s apolitical, easygoing reputation. Gaffigan later sat in with fellow comedian and long-time tourmate Ted Alexandro for a long conversation about what inspired him to spout off (“watching loon after loon, night after night”) and being a “moderate” scared of the “sociopath” president. It’s an interesting discussion of how the guy Alexandro calls “America’s comedian” reached his breaking point. Find it on YouTube by searching for “The Ted Alexandro Show with Ted Alexandro.” (DAN NAILEN)
D
BY DANIEL WALTERS
irector Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is another mindbender of a movie, and it’s sparked another wave of attempts to dissect and explain every detail of Nolan’s plots. That’s a mistake. Nolan movies are better watched with your brain turned off. I don’t mean like when you’re watching Furious 8. I mean that if you try to approach a Nolan movie like an elaborate riddle to be solved, you’ll strip it of its true power. Yes, at first glance many of Nolan’s movies appear to be ornate puzzle boxes, confounding you with their many knobs and levers and false bottoms, intended to be tweaked and prodded until it reveals the secret inside. Yet that way leads to exhausting CinemaSins-style nitpickery, where you tut-tut about how the Joker smuggled the bombs into the hospital or whine about how we didn’t see Batman sneak back into a Bane-held Gotham.
THE BUZZ BIN
THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST Some noteworthy new music hits online and in stores Sept. 11. To wit: FLAMING LIPS, American Head. A heaping new slab of psychedelic weirdness. ELIZABETH COOK, Aftermath. The singer/songwriter veers closer to jangly guitar rock than the rootsy country she’s known for, and it is good. STRAY CATS, Rocked This Town: From LA to London. I saw the rockabilly revivalists last year, and will gladly take 23 hot live recordings to remember it. (DAN NAILEN)
24 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
But Nolan’s movies shouldn’t be understood as puzzles. They’re something closer to operas or ballets. They’re symphonies of heightened emotion. So the Dark Knight trilogy excels at capturing the feeling of anguished helplessness when confronted by fear, terrorism or chaos. Dunkirk lets you feel the claustrophobia and incoherence of war inside your gut. Interstellar only uses its sci-fi wormhole technobabble to access the anguish of loss and grief tied to being separated from the ones we love. Hell, the message of several of Nolan’s movies centers on the danger of being obsessed with answers. The man with the 15-minute memory in Memento tries to solve his wife’s murder only to trick himself into more atrocities. The magicians in the Prestige kill themselves over and over again — literally in one case— due to their obsession with cracking each other’s signature magic trick. In Inception, Marion Cotillard’s character leaps to her death because she believes she’s decoded the truth — that she’s still in a dream. By contrast, the final shot ends with a top spinning: If it keeps spinning, Leonardo DeCaprio’s Dom Cobb taught us earlier, he’s still stuck in a dream. If it falls, it’s real life. And of course, this triggered a deluge of YouTube essays purporting to decode that final riddle, analyzing the frame-by-frame wobble of the top to declare whether it’s actually a dream. But the riddle isn’t the point. The point is that the riddle is not the point. Setting aside the mystery and embracing the things that really matter is. I haven’t seen Tenet. But if I do, I’m not going to try to solve the magic tricks. I’m just going to let the top spin. n
STORYTIME IN THE PARK Take your family’s next story time outdoors with a walk in the park via the Spokane Public Library’s new Read and Walk activity, starting with its first installation in Comstock Park. The new kids’ program features pages from the picture book Duck on a Bike on signs placed throughout the park. Each stop along the story’s path also includes activities tied to the book. The program was made possible through CARES Act funding and is set to rotate across the city at other parks; next up is Corbin and then Chief Garry. (CHEY SCOTT)
GOING MOBILE I never quite jumped on the “mobile game” bandwagon like some people. Candy Crush? Nah. Angry Birds? Please. But a new mobile game has grabbed my attention. Eve Echoes is a space exploration role-playing game that allows you to interact with other online players and it. Is. STUNNING. It’s a little confusing with the massive range of ship customizations and combat functions, and honestly playing on my phone isn’t as immersive as I want it to be. But it is the most impressive game I’ve ever seen played on a mobile device. (QUINN WELSCH)
UNSOLVED MYSTERIES With renewed interest in Michelle McNamara’s armchair detective saga I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, let me point you in the direction of a recent release that similarly fuses memoir with true crime. Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl begins with the 1980 murder of two young women who were hitchhiking to a hippie festival in rural West Virginia, and follows the twists and turns that resulted in a conviction, an appeal, an unexpected confession and even more questions. The author’s remembrances of her own adolescence in the same woods where the crimes took place may at first seem inconsequential, but it successfully illustrates the ways people relate to true crime. (NATHAN WEINBENDER)
Videodrome
BRAIN TEASERS
HEAD TRIP Christopher Nolan, Charlie Kaufman and more movies that will freak you out BY NATHAN WEINBENDER
H
ave you ever sat through a whole movie and, as soon as the credits started to roll, said out loud to yourself, “What the hell did I just watch?” Maybe it was a brain teaser from Christopher Nolan, or a self-reflexive mental exercise courtesy of Charlie Kaufman, both of whom have new movies out: Nolan’s Tenet, now playing in some theaters, has already been called “willfully obtuse” and “convoluted,” while Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things (now streaming on Netflix) has been hailed as “discombobulating.” Before you see those, however, I decided to catalog some of my favorite movies designed to disorient, confuse and freak you out. After all, one mindf--- warrants another.
ALTERED STATES (1980)
Director Ken Russell hardly ever made a movie that you could describe as “sane,” and one of his weirdest is this horror head-trip. William Hurt stars as a scientist whose experiments with sensory deprivation and hallucinogens seem to send his brain back to the earliest evolution of
man, and its spaced-out sequences in which we hurtle right into Hurt’s mind are totally bizarre. Streaming on HBO Max; for rent on Amazon and YouTube.
ENEMY (2013)
Sometimes a movie is unsettling precisely because you don’t understand what’s going on, and that’s the case with Denis Villeneuve’s eerie story of a college professor (Jake Gyllenhaal) who spots his doppelganger in a movie and becomes obsessed. There’s also some business with giant spiders and an exclusive gentlemen’s club, and even if it doesn’t all come together, it’s a beguiling, often terrifying experience. Streaming on Kanopy.
HIGH LIFE (2019)
On a spaceship floating on the outer reaches of the galaxy, a group of ex-cons (including Robert Pattinson and Andre Benjamin) are forced into a reproduction experiment under the guidance of a mad scientist played by Juliette Binoche. Filmmaker Claire Denis tells her dystopian drama out of order, immediately disorienting you before walloping you with weird sex, sudden violence and lots of bodily fluids. Streaming on Amazon Prime and Kanopy.
HOLY MOTORS (2012)
I think it’s supposed to be about the transformative nature of storytelling, but this whatsit from enfant terrible Leos Carax is best experienced as a series of truly batshit set pieces. It contains graphic male nudity, a motioncapture CGI sex scene, an all-accordion musical number, cameos from Eva Mendes and Kylie Minogue, a man whose wife and kids are chimpanzees, and a garage full of talking cars. Brace yourself. Streaming on Tubi.
JACOB’S LADDER (1990)
Mostly ignored upon release, this harrowing plunge into disorientation has since inspired everything from The Sixth Sense to Silent Hill. It’s a descent into the fractured psyche of a Vietnam veteran (Tim Robbins), whose PTSD is merging fantasy and reality in disturbing ways, leading him to believe he and his fellow infantrymen were the subjects of shady government experiments. For rent on Amazon and YouTube.
LOST HIGHWAY (1997)
A list like this requires a selection from David Lynch, the king of WTF cinema, and I’m going with this noir nightmare of paranoia, identity and sexual intrigue. I don’t hear it spoken about nearly as often as his other work, and I’m honestly still not sure if I even like it all that much. But it contains some of the most chilling and inexplicable imagery I’ve seen in any movie: Pale-faced Robert Blake in two places at once? Shudder. For rent on Amazon and YouTube.
MOTHER! (2018)
One of the most divisive films of the last few years, Darren Aronofsky’s grisly fever dream is supposedly an allegory for climate change or religious extremism or misogyny or… something. But I’m less interested in its muddled metaphorical trappings: I love mother! because it’s an absolutely insane vanity project that was inexplicably released in thousands of theaters, and it operates on a frenetic frequency that can best be described as bonkers. For rent on Amazon and YouTube.
PAPRIKA (2006)
The final feature from anime legend Satoshi Kon centers on the creation of a device that can merge your dreams with another person’s. When it falls into nefarious hands, a jaded detective, several scientists and a mysterious woman named Paprika are all trapped in various dream states, resulting in some of the most eye-popping psychedelic imagery this side of a Laser Floyd show. It’s possible no other movie has better captured the sheer insanity of stream-of-consciousness dream logic. For rent on Amazon and YouTube.
VIDEODROME (1983)
David Cronenberg is known for shockers about bodies being invaded and brains being melted, and arguably his masterpiece is this hallucinatory tale of a craven cable CEO who disappears into the gore and depravity of his own TV station. It’s an indictment of the mindless consumerism we’ve come to associate with early ’80s excess, and a wild, prescient depiction of man and media becoming one. Streaming on Peacock; for rent on Amazon and YouTube. n
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 INLANDER 25
Kate Bush during the Hounds of Love cover shoot. JOHN CARDER BUSH PHOTO
ANNIVERSARY
This Woman’s Work Thirty-five years since its release, Hounds of Love is a testament to the sonic genius of Kate Bush BY NATHAN WEINBENDER
I
don’t know if it’s possible to be seduced by a song, but it’s how I felt the first time I heard Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.” It seems to emerge from a shroud of fog and mystery with thudding electronic percussion and elastic synths, which gradually intensify into a thunderstorm of overlapping incantations, wailing electric guitars and guttural pleas to a higher power. By the end, it actually feels like you’ve run up that hill right alongside her. It’s the opening track of the British musician’s 1985 opus Hounds of Love, released 35 years ago this week, and it remains the apex of Bush’s remarkable artistic legacy. It was a No. 1 smash in her native country, and it’s generally beloved by 21st-century critics: Pitchfork named it the fourth greatest album of the ’80s (behind only Purple Rain, Thriller and Straight Outta Compton), and “Running Up That Hill” the sixth best song of its decade. Even so, it somehow seems like it still doesn’t get the credit it deserves, especially in America. Bush has never received much mainstream radio play in the states, where her arty, eccentric sensibilities were dismissed by her contemporary critics as baroque gimmicks and rejected by audiences that had turned their attention to
26 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
post-punk and new wave. She was a musical wunderkind from a young age, mentored by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and producing dozens of self-made demos as a teenager. Bush’s first single, 1978’s ghostly “Wuthering Heights,” hit No. 1 on the U.K. charts mere months before her 20th birthday. It’s the kind of song that’s completely unmoored from the conventions of any recognizable era: It sounds unlike anything else that was being produced in the late ’70s, but you can also imagine it being dropped in the middle of 2020 and coming as a total revelation. It’s antique and futuristic at the same time. Bush became her own producer in 1982 with her fourth LP The Dreaming, much of which she programmed on a Fairlight synthesizer machine, a relatively new invention at the time. The record still sounds unusual today: Bush’s voice slithers through synthetic soundscapes on songs filled with beguiling polyrhythms and vocal samples, and with subject matter ranging from the Vietnam War to Harry Houdini to The Shining. The Dreaming was mostly regarded as a curiosity then (its critical standing has improved tenfold in the decades since), and so its follow-up Hounds of Love was embraced
in England as Bush’s return to a more approachable sound. It’s one of those records that you never forget hearing for the first time, not only because it pulls you in so effortlessly but because it boasts one of the most consistent A-sides of its era: From the unrelenting bass drum and thrumming cellos of the title track to the wideeyed majesty of “Cloudbusting,” it’s a soaring, exhilarating listen. But the back half of the record is where Bush retreats into conceptual hubris, with a mini-suite that looks to recreate the fractured psyche of a shipwreck survivor drifting alone at sea. Dubbed “The Ninth Wave,” the seven-song cycle uses eerie ambient sounds, spoken word snippets and traditional Celtic instruments, drifting between consciousness and a dream state and culminating with an eventual rescue. It’s cinematic and cerebral, a continuation of the experimentation heard on The Dreaming but honed into a more focused (though no less daring) narrative. Hounds of Love remains such a thrilling album 35 years after its release, and it’s frankly insane to revisit some of the critical shrugs that greeted it in 1985. Even mostly positive writeups (usually penned by men) managed to
drip with condescension: The New York Times, despite praising Bush’s production skills, couldn’t help but patronize by calling her voice “girlish yet provocative,” and categorized her style as “slightly precious, calculated female art-rock.” Never mind that she was the first woman to top the British singles chart with a self-written track, and the first solo female artist to ever top the British albums chart. What’s most remarkable about Hounds of Love is Bush’s gripping production work: Even though she hired a host of session musicians to take on her complex arrangements, it nonetheless feels like an auteurist record, driven by a single vision. It’s a sonic epic, but it still manages to conjure images of Bush spending hours alone in her private home studio, tinkering with computers and discovering new sounds. You can hear so many of those innovations seeping into the late ’80s output of Prince and the Eurythmics, and artists like St. Vincent, Grimes, Solange, Adele and Big Boi of OutKast have cited Bush as a primary influence. She’s still pushing artistic boundaries, releasing decidedly noncommercial, highconcept albums and refusing to fall into the standard touring schedule of most entertainers (her 22-night London residency in 2014 was her first time headlining concerts since 1979). She’s been fiercely independent her entire career, and has never not done everything exactly her way. There’s a fleeting moment on Hounds of Love that sums all that up: About halfway through “The Big Sky,” right before it bursts into a mantra-like coda, Bush casually drops a request: “Tell ’em, sisters.” And the response is a chorus of her own voice, layered infinite times atop itself. That’s because Kate Bush is the entire cast of characters in her strange rock opera — the artist and the ingenue, the eccentric and the pragmatist, the protege and the mentor. She’s one of the preeminent pop geniuses of our time, and it’s time she got her due. n
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SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 INLANDER 27
COMMUNITY TIME FOR PRIDE
Pride festivities were canceled all around the country this summer, but you can make up for it by heading to the Pride in Perry gathering this weekend. It’s a coalition of sorts that has a number of businesses in the South Perry neighborhood offering specials throughout the day, with proceeds benefiting the Odyssey Youth Movement, a nonprofit that provides resources and social outreach for LGBTQ+ kids and teens. The Shop, Wishing Tree Books, Bee You Organics and Perry Street Brewing are all participating, and outdoor booths by OutSpokane, Spokane Doesn’t Suck and Veda Lux are selling products throughout the day. Those businesses and booths all have COVID-19 safety precautions in place, and masks and social distancing are encouraged if you attend. — NATHAN WEINBENDER Pride in Perry • Sat, Sept. 12 at 10 am • South Perry District • Free • All ages • odysseyyouth.org • 325-3637
WORDS STILL SUMMER READING
In author Daven McQueen’s latest book, The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones, the title character is a guide of sorts for one Ethan Harper, a biracial kid who’s been living and accepted as a White boy until the summer of 1955, when his dad sends him to live with some relatives in small-town Alabama. There, he is definitely seen as Black by hateful townsfolk, but Juniper Jones helps him navigate an ugly world to show Ethan spots of beauty. Auntie’s is hosting a Zoom conversation between McQueen and local Innovation High School senior Dinah Gardner on Saturday night. The Zoom link will be posted on the Auntie’s website shortly before it starts. — DAN NAILEN Daven McQueen in Conversation with Dinah Gardner • Sat, Sept. 12 at 7 pm • Free • auntiesbooks.com • 838-0206
28 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
VISUAL ARTS BACK IN BUSINESS
Thanks to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee loosening the reins for museums, we’re slowly seeing our regional spots dedicated to the arts open up. Following the MAC’s reopening in Spokane, we now have the chance to again visit the magnificent Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the WSU campus in Pullman. Hours are limited and the museum is only open three days a week for now, and all the expected safety protocols are in play, plus the university’s requirement that any visitors to campus fill out a form in advance (find it at attestation.wsu.edu). There are currently four exhibits, including the mesmerizing multigallery display of Etsuko Ichikawa: Broken Poems of Fireflies. — DAN NAILEN Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University • Open Mon, Wed, Fri from 1-4 pm • Free admission • 1535 N. Wilson Rd., Pullman • museum.wsu.edu • 335-1910
What can you give this week? Volunteer opportunities Construction Workers - HABITAT FOR HUMANITY
FOOD FAIR GAME
The Spokane County Interstate Fair may be canceled this year, but the food is definitely still on. Get your fix of treats breaded, fried and funneled at the two-weekend Fair Food Drive-Thru, a safely distanced way to enjoy some of the classic concession snacks normally hosted at the fair and other summer festivals. Fourteen participating vendors are on the menu, printable and viewable online in advance so you can strategize before arriving to make sure everyone in the car gets exactly what they crave. Of those featured for the drive-thru feasting frenzy are several familiar local names — Mary Lou’s Ice Cream, Longhorn BBQ, Pizza Rita, and Azar’s — along with stands serving up everything from sausages to edible cookie dough; hot dogs to classic funnel cakes. Admission is free; look for the main entrance off Havana Street. — CHEY SCOTT World’s Largest Fair Food Drive-Thru • Sept. 11-13 and 18-20; Fri-Sat from 11 am-7 pm, Sun from 11 am-5 pm • Free admission • Spokane County Fair & Expo Center • 404 N. Havana St. • spokanecounty.org
Don’t be intimidated by the job title -- no experience is necessary to assist Habitat in its mission to provide affordable housing and build stable communities. Wednesday-Saturday 8 am-noon or 12:30-4:30 pm. Full-day volunteer options available as well. habitat-spokane.org/volunteer-opportunities
Virtual Volunteers Disaster On-Call Dispatcher - AMERICAN RED CROSS You can help disaster victims without leaving your home. The Red Cross needs dispatch volunteers to act as the first point-of-contact to help meet the emergency needs of families impacted by disasters. Dispatchers will need access to a computer to complete casework for each response. Apply online. redcross.org/volunteer
Events & Benefits Fall Into Hope Virtual Auction - FAILSAFE FOR LIFE Shop this virtual auction Sept 10-16 and you’ll help FailSafe in its mission to end suicide through connection, education and hope. To preview items and begin bidding, visit their website. failsafeforlife.org/get-involved
ilLumenate the Night - LUMEN HIGH SCHOOL Lumen is excited to host its first virtual event Sept 12 to support its mission to empower two generations by meeting the needs of teen parents. Spokane residents can bid in advance on the dessert dash, and have a tasty treat delivered to their door just before the live event. The first 75 registrants get a Lumen party pack. Tickets $50. Register online. lumenhighschool.ejoinme.org/lumen
Wish List Items Needed PROVIDENCE SACRED HEART CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL Crayola brand* crayons, markers, colored pencils and watercolors, coloring books, 20-, 50- and 100-piece puzzles, and Legos sets. For more items, visit their Amazon wish list online.
OUTDOORS FREE FOR ALL
Washington State Parks are open to visitors a dozen-ish days each year without the usually required Discover Pass, which costs $30 per year or $10 per visit. A few of those free access days for 2020 were canceled earlier this spring when COVID-19 forced state parks to close in order to prevent the spread of disease. April’s canceled free access day as part of the “Girl Scouts Love State Parks Weekend” has since been moved to take place this Sunday, with another free access day coming later this month for National Public Lands Day on Sept. 26. It’s the perfect opportunity to spend a day in the great outdoors for those who don’t already have a Discover Pass, so make plans to head to one of several state-managed parks in the region, including Riverside, Mount Spokane and Palouse Falls, as well as several smaller sites such as Steptoe Butte on the Palouse and Curlew Lake west of Colville. — CHEY SCOTT State Parks Free Day • Sun, Sept. 13 • Free • Access includes Riverside, Mount Spokane and Palouse Falls State Parks • parks.state.wa.us
*Crayola brand is requested to assure all craft supplies are non-toxic. Since children staying in our hospital are sick with compromised immune systems, all items on the wish list must be new.
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SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 INLANDER 29
RE: LOOSE DOG PROBLEM This is actually a cheers to you about loose dogs ANYWHERE! I don’t see many in my area but it kills me when I do. Two days after we adopted our cockapoo she took off. I ran. I don’t run. A lady pulled over and drove me around to find her. I eventually did and she is one of the best dogs we’ve ever had. Point being, true dog lovers DO NOT let them run loose. Ever. I’ve had dogs my entire 57 years. Oh and bicyclist? Trump says paintball guns are ok to use. Perhaps shoot the curb of a person who lets their dog loose?
JEERS I SAW YOU RITE AID PHARMACY DRIVE THRU Sunday 08/30 9 am You: in a white suv waiting to pick up a prescription. Me: in a grey car — I was in front of you then I drove away once I realized the pharmacy opened at 10 am and it was only 9:05. I noticed that you didn’t realize this so I circled around and told you they weren’t open yet -— I said unless you wanted to wait 50 minutes — when you responded with “no I do not” and smiled. Omg your smile was amazing! I wasn’t brave enough to ask if you wanted to kill the time by grabbing coffee even though I really REALLY wanted to. So... coffee? mmc8765309@gmail.com YOKES SEPTEMBER 1ST 9PM We crossed paths several times in the natural foods section. You: drop dead stunner in activewear and a silver sequin mask. Me: red and white tank top and Buffalo Trace hat. I offered to buy your groceries as a way to speak to you. I pray you see this! MICHAELS ON N. DIVISION AUG 31ST You: spellbinding girl with amazing ink. Me: too spellbound to say anything. Please tell me you’re real.
CHEERS
SOUND OFF
RUINED COMMUTE As if it wasn’t fun enough dodging all the construction workers who play Frogger across Carnahan hill... and going 5 mph following an oversized load truck up Carnahan hill... it will be even MORE fun to try to get up the hill in winter!!! The Carnahan Glen apartments are the bane of my existence. I’m all for development in our neighborhood, and we need housing. But $1500/month luxury apartments on the left side of a 14% grade hill with absolutely no traffic revision... That is the dumbest decision anyone could ever make. Jeers to the developer for single handedly ruining the commute of the hundreds of people that go up and down that hill several times a day. WHO LIVES THERE? I often go past homes and wonder, who lives there? Now that you put up that “Trump” sign I know. You must be a racist, a sexual harasser, a liar and cheat, a hypocrite, a bully, a non-believer in science and logic, a supporter of lunatics and dictators, but mainly you must be very scared and not a deep thinker. Thanks for letting me know “neighbor.” DEFUND ROBERT HEROLD I am tired of this liberal spewing his hate for Trump. His rants come directly from CNN and are untruths. If this is the
leanings/beliefs of your publication, then maybe I should find some real reading to enjoy. If you want unbiased reporting, then get rid of this retired (I am sure for a reason) Pelosi/ Biden lover.
“
in the concrete thinkers. So half the people in America are “stupid” and 70% of them don’t know they are stupid, so 35 percent of Americans are too stupid to know that they are stupid. Welcome to the wonderful world the
go 20+ MPH? Instead of the city raising property taxes due to THEIR short fall (the rest of us may be unemployed but that doesn’t mean the city should sacrifice!) they should send a couple of Spokane’s finest with a radar gun
We crossed paths several times in the natural foods section. You: drop dead stunner in activewear and a silver sequin mask. Me: red and white tank top and Buffalo Trace hat.
STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES The Theory of Human Cognitive Development recognizes four main stages of the growth and evolution of the human brain. They are pre-sensory, psycho motor, concrete and formal operations. There are dozens of sub-stages in each category that describe the milestones that should be reached by certain ages. If a milestone isn’t reached by a certain age they will most likely not happen. The final stage of brain development is formal operations where the brain begins to be able to understand abstract ideas and be able to function as a fully developed adult mind. Formal operations occurs during adolescence, but half the young people in America never reach that stage of intellectual growth. Those adolescents will probably never achieve the final stage of cognitive development and will always remain in the concrete stage of thinking ability. For the sake of this argument we will call those people who never enter formal operations “stupid.” Numerous studies have shown that around 70% of “stupid” people do not recognize that they are stupid. There is no meta-cognition
1. Visit Inlander.com/isawyou by 3 pm Monday. 2. Pick a category (I Saw You, You Saw Me, Cheers or Jeers). 3. Provide basic info: your name and email (so we know you’re real). 4. To connect via I Saw You, provide a non-identifying email to be included with your submission — like “petals327@yahoo.com,” not “j.smith@comcast.net.”
Donald Trump’s supporters. CENTENNIAL SPEEDWAY Clearly the Centennial Trail was paved as a “Velodrome” for the city of Spokane bicyclists! My understanding of the bicyclists mind set is that unlike the rest of the people on the planet THEY actually CARE about the planet and wish for clean air and peace on Earth. The rest of us are carbon footprints that do not deserve to live (I cam imagine many bicyclists nodding in agreement) and that WE hope for such a levels of pollution that the world ends like an apocalyptic “Silent Spring.” So of course that gives them full permission to not just flout any kind of speed limit on the trail but to literally ride in groups weaving in and out the POS pedestrian! In the Kendall Yards area there is a “comedic” sign that states 15 MPH on the trail. Actually at this point it is faint because the wind created by the passing bicycles has worn the paint off! WOW! Bicyclists hate cars because they don’t give the “same roads same rules” courtesy but it’s more than fine for bicyclists to come on the the Centennial Trail and
NO KID GOES HUNGRY Why am I being taxed to help feed kids in school? Isn’t it the responsibility of the parent to take care of your kids not the taxpayer? I have zero kids for a reason... because I couldn’t afford one so I wore condoms!!!! n
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”
to watch the trail certainly on the weekend but I think there is REAL money mornings and evenings too to write come serious tickets! Or is public safety ONLY serious on the streets? AND BTW! What about all those God d--n new MOTORed bikes and those POS green scooters? What the hell are THEY doing on the trail?
STRAINS
Don’t Strain Yourself Inside the world of cannabis strains BY WILL MAUPIN
T Finding your strain involves a lot more than sativa vs. indica.
o the uninitiated, the nomenclature of cannabis can be completely confusing. That’s because it makes no sense. Which makes finding the right strain difficult. You don’t need to blindly guess between Blue Dream or Grandaddy Purple when making your purchase, though. There are some rules of the road, even if the most widely known might be completely untrue. “Sativas and indicas have nothing to do with effects whatsoever,” says Justin Hutcherson, general manager at Cinder North. There’s a pervasive urban legend that sativas are energizing and indicas are relaxing — commonly ...continued on page 36
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 INLANDER 31
GREEN ZONE
BE AWARE: Marijuana is legal for adults 21 and older under Washington State law (e.g., RCW 69.50, RCW 69.51A, HB0001 Initiative 502 and Senate Bill 5052). State law does not preempt federal law; possessing, using, distributing and selling marijuana remains illegal under federal law. In Washington state, consuming marijuana in public, driving while under the influence of marijuana and transporting marijuana across state lines are all illegal. Marijuana has intoxicating effects; there may be health risks associated with its consumption, and it may be habit-forming. It can also impair concentration, coordination and judgment. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. Keep out of reach of children. For more information, consult the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board at www.liq.wa.gov.
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GREEN ZONE
NOTE TO READERS Be aware of the differences in the law between Idaho and Washington. It is illegal to possess, sell or transport cannabis in the State of Idaho. Possessing up to an ounce is a misdemeanor and can get you a year in jail and up to a $1,000 fine; more than three ounces is a felony that can carry a five-year sentence and fine of up to $10,000. Transporting marijuana across state lines, like from Washington into Idaho, is a felony under federal law.
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STRAINS “DON’T STRAIN YOURSELF,” CONTINUED... remembered as “in da couch” for indica. Really, though, sativa and indica describe the physical appearance of the plant rather than the effects they produce. The main things that do impact the effect of specific strains are the terpene and cannabinoid profiles of the plant. THC and CBD, the two most widely known chemicals in cannabis, are both cannabinoids. THC is the one that gets you high, while CBD is the one you can buy in the alternative medicine section of your local grocery store. There are over 100 other known cannabinoids in the plant, though, and they’re all in play. “Certain strains will have a couple microcannabinoids that are higher than others,” Hutcherson says. The concentration of cannabinol (CBN) in one strain will be different than it is in another. Same goes for cannabigerol (CBG), cannabicyclol (CBL) and, yes, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) as well. These subtle differences impact the high you’ll feel. Terpenes are the other category of chemicals in cannabis that affect your experience. Unlike cannabinoids, terpenes aren’t exclusive to cannabis. They’re major components of essential oils extracted from plants. Lavender essential oil, for example, is widely used for its calming properties, which come from the presence of the terpene linalool. Linalool isn’t one of the more prevalent terpenes across strains, but you’ll notice strains that have a higher concentration of linalool often produce more relaxing effects. Take Scooby
Snacks, a strain high in linalool. It’s a hybrid, which means it’s not pure indica or pure sativa, but is overwhelmingly on the “calming” side of the website Leafly’s calming-to-energizing spectrum, based on nearly 200 user reviews. In Scooby Snacks, linalool is the terpene with the third-highest concentration. Same thing in Tropicana Cookies, a sativa that falls even further on the energizing side of the spectrum than Scooby Snacks does on the calming side. As is the case with cannabinoids, there are over 100 known terpenes in cannabis. One alone doesn’t dictate how a strain will make you feel. It’s a lot and it’s confusing. Thankfully, there are people whose job is to know and understand all this stuff. They’re called budtenders and you can find them at every dispensary around. They can guide you to the right strain even if you don’t know what you’re looking for. You can also find great resources online to help guide you before a final consultation with a budtender. Leafly’s website has a massive database of lab test results and user survey reports for hundreds of strains. Their visualization system, using shapes and colors, allows readers to easily identify which cannabinoids and terpenes are most prevalent in each specific strain. Even armed with all this information and a trusty budtender at your side, everyone and every high is different. Finding the right strain is an adventure that is ultimately up to you. n A version of this article first appeared in the Inlander’s glossy Green Zone Guide.
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RELATIONSHIPS
Advice Goddess KICK THE HOBBIT
My 23-year-old nephew is a nice guy, a college grad with a good job who’s a loving pet owner. The women in the family love his ironic mustache, his tattoos, and his way of making people laugh, but the men, including my husband, tend to see him in a negative light. I struggle to understand why they think so little of him. But maybe that’s it: My nephew’s not a big guy. He’s maybe 5-foot-6, and while that’s not terribly short, my family skews tall, with all the other men 6-foot-3 AMY ALKON and over. From reading evolutionary theory in your books and columns, I’m wondering, might these men subconsciously dislike him because he’s small? If so, is there any way to get them to see him in a better light? —Concerned Aunt Your nephew sounds like a good guy who’ll eventually be some lucky woman’s three-fourths and only. You’re on to something about height affecting our evaluation of other people. Evolutionary researchers Gert Stulp and Abraham “Bram” Buunk observe that, across cultures, “taller stature” is linked with higher social status, and historically, “The term ‘big man’ has been used to denote an individual of both high social status and physical stature.” In fact, the researchers explain, because physical dominance was the primary path to power for much of human evolutionary history, “it seems likely that ‘big men’ experienced increased social status” because of their “physical superiority in competition with others.” In other words, though taller doesn’t always equal stronger, in general, the bigger the bro, the bigger the beatdown he could dispense. Today, physical dominance is still the currency of power in really scary neighborhoods (including scary cellblocks). However, a garden gnome-sized man can make up in stacks of thousand-dollar bills the leverage he’d have from physical stature. And recall that would-be duel from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” with some huge creep brandishing a giant scimitar at Harrison Ford — who simply draws his gun and shoots the guy. Likewise, the local Goliath might be no match for a well-armed Mr. Stubby. However, though we’re living in modern times, the psychology currently driving our behavior is seriously antique, calibrated for the hunter-gatherer way back when. In our modern world, it often leads us to behave in unnecessary and even counterproductive ways. Our psychological response is typically subconscious, so, for example, we might sometimes think less of somebody less-thantowering without understanding why. This could explain some of the findings Stulp and Buunk cited. Even in “contemporary, industrialized society,” tall people rule, achieving “greater levels of upward social mobility.” This is seen even when a taller person and a shorter one are siblings with a shared environment (researcher-speak for growing up in the same home). Additionally, from childhood on, “Height may also affect how people perceive themselves, and so influence behavior” (in turn influencing how other people perceive and treat them). Though prior research finds perceptions of a person’s dominance and high status are related to height, Stulp and Buunk’s team explored the influence of height on people’s behavior. For example, in a narrow pedestrian passageway, they observed that both taller men and taller women were more likely to storm forward unyieldingly, forcing shorter pedestrians to give way and let them pass. Likewise, on a crowded shopping street, when a shortie was coming from the opposite direction, people were less likely to step aside, which resulted in the shorties having more collisions. After I had you do “homework,” asking your male relatives whether they dislike your nephew, and if so, why, you came back on a positive note. They told you they don’t dislike him; in fact, they say they like him. They just seem to talk trash about him over his attitudes about money. For example, your husband goes “on and on” about how the nephew’s paying too big a monthly nut for his new truck. Maybe this triggers fears in your husband that he’ll be asked for money if the guy loses his job, and he’s just venting. And going back to the evolutionary well, gossip is sometimes used as a form of signaling. Perhaps your husband and other men in the family OMG-ing about the big bucks for the truck are ultimately promoting themselves as fiscally wiser. You do say the older dudes in the family don’t have such a harsh attitude about other (taller) young nephews who are less responsible and together than the travel-sized one. So, maybe there is diminished respect for him because of his shorter stature. It’s really impossible to do more than loosely speculate. All in all, you probably don’t need to worry about your nephew, because he sounds happy and well-adjusted. Over time, I suspect the men in your family will come to realize that some stories just aren’t complete without the little guys. (Consider: “Snow White and the Seven Los Angeles Lakers.”) n
©2020, Amy Alkon, all rights reserved. • Got a problem? Write Amy Alkon, 171 Pier Ave, #280, Santa Monica, CA 90405 or email AdviceAmy@aol.com (www.advicegoddess.com)
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1. Bell, e.g. 2. Change over time 3. Half a workout mantra 4. “Gosh, will you look at that!” 5. “That’s my cue!” 6. Da ____, Vietnam 7. In vogue 8. ____ yoga 9. Supreme Court aides 10. Out of control 11. “Enjoy this spectacular view!” 12. State capital near Princeton
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a child 33. One of the Hawaiian Islands 35. Things equestrians have on hand? 36. Frank 39. Cook’s garment 41. They make tracks 42. Hannah who coined the phrase “the banality of evil” 44. Nutritional fig. 45. Long-billed wading bird 49. 100° or more, say 50. Drop-____ (unexpected visitors) 52. That’s an order 53. “Yes, duly noted” 58. They’re raised on farms 59. NBA legend Thomas 60. Tyrant Amin 61. Madison Sq. Garden player 62. “Taxi” character Elaine
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“INK”
37. Horror star Chaney 38. Singer/songwriter Rita 39. “What a relief!” 40. C3H8, familiarly 43. Explosive stuff 45. ____ B. Wells who received a 2020 Pulitzer citation for her pioneering work in journalism 46. String ____ 47. Trapped at a ski lodge, maybe 48. Xmas VIP 51. Some big band music 52. Community spirit
54. With: Abbr. 55. Jacob’s biblical twin 56. Retired Italian money 57. Young fellows 58. Barnes & Noble’s NYSE symbol, aptly
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 INLANDER 37
COEUR D ’ ALENE
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SEPT. 12TH & 13TH
Come to Coeur d’Alene for a few hours, a day or a whole weekend with these fall events
T
hey’re your favorite small businesses in downtown Coeur d’Alene and this fall you’re invited to join them in a series of appropriately small, more focused gatherings. Throughout September and well into December, make downtown Coeur d’Alene your getaway for great events the whole family can enjoy.
Check out THE COEUR D’ALENE RESORT’s separate Oktoberfest-inspired event, Sept. 19: a Bavarian-style outdoor dinner and craft beer pairing ($75 each). Or make a weekend of it with one of their luxurious overnight stay packages. Visit cdaresort.com.
R E S E R V E YO U R T I C K E T S O N L I N E
C O E U R
D ’A L E N E
Upcoming Events
COEUR D’ALENE
Grandparents’ Weekend SEPTEMBER 12-13
What better way to celebrate Grandparents’ Day than at Silverwood Theme Park! Silverwood shows their appreciation for Grandmas and Grandpas by admitting them to the park for free when accompanied by a grandchild. For each grandchild who purchases a ticket, they will be given one FREE ticket for Grandpa OR Grandma.
things to do & places to stay.
Eventfully Yours
On Sept. 18-20, OKTOBERFEST has you strolling from one downtown business to another, sipping craft beer and artisan cider. Sponsored by the Coeur d’Alene Downtown Association, the $25 ticketed event includes a commemorative glass, eight 4-ounce tastings and German food. Visit facebook. com/DowntownCoeurdAlene.
Just North of Coeur d’Alene in Beautiful North Idaho
cda4.fun for more events,
Sept. 19 is also the date of the annual COEUR D’FONDO BIKE event (cdagranfondo.com). Spots are still open to participate at any of four levels: the 15-mile family ride ($35), or the 40-, 50- or 90-mile rides ($100 each), all of which include entry to the Downtown Association’s Oktoberfest. Supporters are welcome, too, and can ride the cruise boat from Coeur d’Alene to Harrison to meet the
Community Appreciation Weekends SEPTEMBER 19-OCTOBER 25
Save money and help our local food banks! For each general admission ticket sold, $4 will be donated to help local food banks and for each youth/ senior ticket sold, $1 will be donated. Admission is only $40 (ages 8-64) and $23 (ages 3-7 and 65+) at the front gate. Save more when you purchase your
tickets at silverwoodthemepark.com.
riders ($30/ticket).
Inspired by all the healthy bicyclists? Get a little health tune-up yourself at one of the resort’s LIVE WELL SPA RETREATS like the Lakeside Bike & Hike overnight package, September 20-21. In addition to a 50-minute spa service, you’ll experience a guided hike at nearby Tubbs Hill, continental breakfast and bike ride on the Centennial Trail. Visit cdaresort.com/play/spa. Just because September is here doesn’t mean summer is over. Consider one of the resort’s DAY ON THE LAKE events or ENDLESS SUMMER overnight package, just two of the new seasonal specials they’ve created available through the end of September. Visit cdaresort.com/accommodations/ packages. Mark your October calendar for the Downtown Association’s HARVEST FEST and the resort’s WHISKEY BARREL WEEKEND, both starting Oct. 2. And stay tuned for details on Apple Palooza (Oct. 31), and several fun shopping events through the month of November.
At all Downtown Association micro-events, the safety of all participants is paramount. In order to maintain appropriate breathing room, ticket sales are limited. Organizers will be wearing masks and will require guests to do the same.
Native American Sip n Paint SEPTEMBER 12
Create with the talented Native American Jeremy Salazar of the Navajo Nation. Jeremy has dedicated his life to the contemporary emergence of Native art. Sip and create your own brilliance with Jeremy. Admission price ($50) includes two drink tickets, art supplies and instruction at Coeur d’ Alene Casino Resort’s Circling Raven Stensgar Pavilion; 1-3 pm or 6-8 pm.
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