Tom Lutey

The yellow ribbons knotted to Mike and Dotty Sheahan's chain-link fence are bleaching white and the plastic tape spelling out their son's first name has seen better days. As with many of the other war decorations scattered throughout Spokane Valley, the newness of the shrine to 20-year-old Travis Benefiel is wearing off, becoming part of the suburban landscape even as the story behind it unfolds.

Not all boys who aspire to be Eagle Scouts get the job done. Fewer than 4 percent of all Scouts make the cut. Fewer still attain Scouting's highest achievement if they have mental or physical disabilities because Eagle Scout is about more than knots and campouts. Eagle Scout wannabes must explain the differences between national and international law, explain the six functions of government spelled out in the preamble to the Constitution, build an ecosystem in a bottle. The list of requirements ranging from citizenship to physical fitness goes on for 20 pages, and there isn't an easy one in the bunch. Still, Troop 427 Scoutmaster Barry Larson believed Chris Naccarato, 17, had a chance, despite having Down syndrome, despite an age cutoff of 18 that meant Naccarato would really have to put his nose to the grindstone in order to get the job done.

Even at 62, Ross Taylor is a tough guy. The wedge-shaped silhouette of his youth has flattened out a little, but even now he has shoulders like an overstuffed recliner. Even now, to understand what he means when he says he came "this close" to beating the tar out of some tailgating punk on the interstate, you have to measure the distance by pressing your thumb and index finger together until your nails turn white.

The day Frank Hamilton's church divided, three-fourths of the congregation walked out. They took all of church's elders and its pastor with them, leaving only the building and a leaderless minority behind. It was one of the worst evangelical splits Spokane had ever seen. Fourth Memorial Church regularly packed 1,200 members into its cavernous building at 2000 N. Standard St., but after a bitter fight in 1992 over how much power the elders should have over the church and how certain passages of the Bible should be interpreted, only 300 people, including Hamilton, remained.

It was Mark Hall's 20th wedding anniversary, and he was pulling out all the stops. The diamond earrings he'd bought his wife, Lori, at a local pawnshop a year earlier were coming home. He'd planned to fly his bride over the Grand Canyon and get down on his knees all over again. "In a helicopter," Mark said. "My plan was to fly over the Grand Canyon in a helicopter. I wanted to renew our vows."

Bowling alleys are the places that time forgot, places without hip-hop or double piercings, Tom Cruise or performance enhancing drugs. Windowless and air-conditioned, they don't even acknowledge the weather outside. Yet at Valley Bowl, 8005 E. Sprague, where Terri Brown hands out the shoes and turns on the lanes, somehow a bad case of modern-day social self-consciousness has set in. They've taken the alley out of bowling.

In Spokane Valley, when golfers hit a midsummer funk and look for something to turn their game around, there are two routes to take. They can take the long drive down Sprague Avenue, stopping at discount stores and specialty shops, to sample the latest winning clubs from the PGA Tour, clubs signed by Tiger and Vijay and Sergio, clubs that almost quiver with the promise of finding the hole like a dowser finds water.

Barry Moore has been on the front lines of the Newman Lake's battle with toxic algae and aquatic weeds for 20 years now. The Washington State University biologist has seen the fish habitat on the lake bottom waste away, and he's seen it return. He has seen the water drawn from kitchen sinks around the lake smell too bad for consumption because algae fouled the source. "It's a hundred times better than it used to be," Moore said.

Clifford Rurey was a young father in a valley full of young fathers desperate for full-time work in the late 1930s. The men took whatever was offered, three days of work when they needed five, a dollar an hour when they needed two. But Rurey had an advantage the others didn't have. He played baseball at a time when baseball was king, and even local company leagues were serious business. Being able to change the outcome of a game made him a more attractive hire.

There are stud fees in the world of Hubbard squash, or at least there is when the sire belongs to Tony Danelo and the soil is Ron Ramm's. The two men farm beside each other on a borrowed plot in Spokane Valley. Ramm is new to the business this year. Danelo is the godfather of squash. There's more than a 50 percent chance that if you've bought cut squash in the local grocery stores, it's Tony's.

In the checkout line of Kiev Market, a bicep is flexed, and the Eastern European women lean over their grocery carts and laugh like lunch-bucket matrons who have tasted the salt of their own sweat. Olga Filenko, the store's owner, was a crane operator in the Black Sea shipyards of Kerch, Ukraine, an enamelware plant worker in her younger years.

Behind the massive mounds of lava enclosing Myrtle Beach Lagoon, beneath the beating sun and surrounded by a half-dozen locals slathering themselves with lotion, Shelley Conley slipped one bare foot into the Spokane River current and stirred the drink that makes her summers special. "I love the river. I grew up on the river. I'm a Valley girl," Conley said before launching into a story about the river's glittering sand and how her boyfriend, seeing it for the first time, mistook it for gold. It is gold, Conley told her beau – gold mica. The value of the sand is based more on the recreation it provides on hot summer days than what it might fetch on the precious metals market. Spokane River beaches from the Idaho state line to Riverside State Park are the respite of the masses in the summer months. Local energy provider Avista Corp. tightens the valve on its lake dam in Post Falls in the late spring, and the sand surrounding the Spokane River widens for a stretch more than 30 miles long.

This is how rodeo cowboys honor their dead, by leading a riderless horse into the arena with a hat on its saddle horn and a pair of boots threaded backward through the stirrups. No one knows how long this tradition has gone on, though it's rumored that even Genghis Khan's boots were holstered backward for a final ride in 1227, indicating the warrior wasn't returning.

In the lottery of life, 16 and 21 were the numbers Pat Michielli couldn't wait to play. "Sixteen," the Spokane Valley lifer recently explained, "because then I could drive. Twenty-one, because then I could sign my own mortgages."

Alice Hunt and the "We're Easy" team of women of My Place Tavern are pool fanatics bound for Sin City. No, they're not the kind of pool fanatics who lounge like torpid cats for hours around bowls of chlorine. These pool women prefer green felt to aquamarine. They appreciate dark, air-conditioned bars, brown long-necked bottles and the challenge of eight-ball from morning to night.

Sister Loretta Giampietri was late in becoming a nun. At a time when girls worked to join the sisterhood even before graduating from high school, Giampietri made her commitment at age 25. For reasons other than her age, she was different. It was 1955 when she entered the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration at St. Rose Convent in La Crosse, Wis. The daughter of Spokane Italian immigrants had already done some traveling on her own, something women of the day didn't do. She not only drove, but she had her own car. And she smoked – previously, anyway.

In University Village, where Mason Theis lives with his girlfriend, anything that isn't nailed down gets stolen: bikes, toys, barbecues. The Tenth Commandment of multifamily housing, that all things lighter than 50 pounds should be locked up at all times, is strictly observed because the Fourth Commandment, about not coveting your neighbor's stuff, isn't.