Tom Lutey

The sun seemed to bake the flies right out of the soil and on 34th Avenue on the South Hill, just inside the Spokane city limits, the heat seemed to drive the neighbors into anger. Standing at 34th and Havana Street, red from four hours in the sun, neighbors who gathered to protest a nearby development bristled over property rights and unwanted neighbors, lifestyles damaged and government run amok. They passed a gallon pickle jar around, collecting money so they could hire an attorney.

Joe Arts' 1948 English Ford is a purple flamed demon with a two-story motor that resembles aluminum conjoined twins. There's a cartoon caricature in the passenger window of Lady Luck complete with an eight-ball bikini and horseshoe tiara. His personalized Montana license plates read "UD lose." But the most telling detail about the rare hot rod parked at the Goodguys Rod and Custom Association Great Northwest Nationals on Friday was hanging from the gear shift: two sets of earplugs, one for Arts, one for whoever's riding shotgun.

Dick Doty clutched the enlarged steering wheel of his motor home. His wife, Ellen, sat beside him. The ever-changing American landscape filled the vehicle's gigantic windshield. As he had for three straight years as the Dotys traveled the United States, Dick Doty began to whistle, three stair-stepping high notes, three back down, three times, capped off with a pursed-lipped crescendo.

An out-of-control boom truck flattened a small car Tuesday on Interstate 90, just west of Liberty Lake, stalling traffic for nearly an hour. There were no fatalities. The 1 p.m. accident could have been much worse, said witnesses and state troopers who were amazed only a couple of scrapes resulted from the incident.

She has a pocket full of billboard letters and a sermon for the masses. Ann Koschalk is a Sunday driver's chance at salvation. Every other week, Koschalk, 67, lifts the Plexiglas lid on the Peace Lutheran Church message board in Otis Orchards and installs some windshield-sized pearl of wisdom for the hundreds of motorists driving Harvard Road.

In Spokane Valley, when the air you inhale is hotter than what you exhale and the Sprague Avenue asphalt swelters like a state fair midway, teenagers holler from the curbs at passing motorists like carnival barkers. "Carwash. Carwash over here. Hey mister, your car's dirty. Hey mister. Carwash ..."

Lightning struck a mother at a Spokane Valley soccer tournament Friday in Plantes Ferry Park, less than an hour after she questioned tournament officials about the safety of playing in an electrical storm. Monica Phillipy was standing beneath some power lines when the strike occurred. The lines apparently took the brunt of the bolt, but a bright flash jumped from the wires, hitting the 45-year-old Mead woman in the head.

Claude Morris wasn't supposed to drive. His lungs were filling up with cystic fibers. Doctors feared the Spokane Valley man could run out of breath and die in traffic. Morris, 78, wouldn't listen. He'd wave to his wife as she went out the front door to work in the morning, then grab his car keys and wrestle his oxygen bottle into the front seat of his Subaru Legacy. He had places to go, people to serve. On the brink of physical exhaustion, Morris thought of people who were worse off than him, children in need of role models or scholarships, animals in need of shelter. Because of his relentless drive to raise money for various charities, friends on whom he leaned gave Morris a nickname, "high-class pickpocket."

Back when television was an exhibit at the World's Fair, back when the information superhighway was a potholed road, Betty Cole's front door was the gateway to the world for Newman Lake. Cole, 98, was postmaster. Her odd stone house was the post office with two front doors, one for family and one for prize offers, unwanted solicitations, faraway news and the locals trudging in to receive it.

Joe Myers is outgrowing his mother's wallet almost as fast as the lanky 13-year-old outgrows shoes. His wants are as endless as his needs, which is why Nancy Myers led her son out to the garage three weeks ago for an introduction to the oldest cash machine known to parenting – a red 4-horsepower push lawn mower.

Victor Katarangi is the boy your mother told you about, the one on the other side of the world who went hungry while you threw most of your dinner away. He's the boy who knew how lucky you were when you didn't.

On race night at Terrace View Park pool, the shrill cacophony of screaming parents can be heard a half-block away, where they sound like gamblers at the dog track. "Come on Josh, come on Josh, keep your head down!"

The swirling waters of the Spokane River bounced Jill McComas through the Flora rapids like a pinball, sometimes on her car-tire inner tube, sometimes off. She laughed as she was repeatedly dumped into the bathtub-warm water. Her husband, Sam, warned McComas to get ready as the water was about to race through another string of boulders. "Hold on. Hold on," Sam yelled.

We all know the story. Little Red Riding Hood knocks on her grandmother's door and finds a hungry wolf with granny on his breath and the old matron's nightgown on his back. If only that granny had offered her hairy guest some hot dogs and cheese, things might have gone differently. The tale might have turned out like the story of the wolf in River Rose Village, a Greenacres trailer park where some seniors have harbored a wolf hybrid for the last three years, and neighbors are none too happy.

SANDPOINT – A white pie plate-shaped disc floats across the field of battle, over the heads of a dozen combatants in gym shorts, directly toward two women careening toward each other, one barefoot, the other shod in long, toe-tenderizing cleats. This is what atoms must feel like in a particle accelerator, what racked pool balls must experience when a cue delivers the break shot. Except, these women know glory. "Yessss!" shouts Jesse Adams from the sidelines as the woman in cleats, Shannon Gee, lands with the flying disc and JoSie Balster somersaults head down, toes skyward. Touchdown. Game point for the Missoula Booty, a tough defeat for Sandpoint 2, in the first ever Mountain to Lake Classic, an ultimate flying disc meet that drew 140 competitors Saturday to the practice fields of Sandpoint High School. Teams drove from as far west as Seattle and as far east as Bozeman, Mont., for the two-day playoff. Winners of the event get bupkis, zilch, zero, nothing, except maybe a sore back from camping in the parking lot of the nearby Bonner County Fairgrounds. "It's great," says Gee, who has given Balster a help up and a good-game handshake. "I got into it about two years ago through university intramurals and then city league." Universities. It turns out the very gateways for marijuana and existentialism are also where young adults across the country pick up on this low-budget game with a cult-like following. More often called ultimate Frisbee, but properly called only "ultimate" because of copyright infringements on the Wham-O Frisbee, the game blends the end zone scoring of football with the handling rules of soccer and basketball. Its competitors are somewhat fanatical. Among the Montana competitors is John O'Connor, who has played the game for a decade or more. He once flew from Missoula to Chicago for a regional championship. He's rarely been rewarded with even a T-shirt for his victories. "The best thing I've ever won is a cheese cow in Delafield, Wis.," O'Connor says. "Just a little cow made of cheddar cheese." Phil Coburn, of Sandpoint, actually played on the Pacific Lutheran University team. In the collegiate world, ultimate is no-nonsense sport, Coburn says. But at halftime against Missoula Booty, the Sandpoint 2 player gulps wind with teammates and joshes about their performance. A Sandpoint 2 teammate walks by with streams of dried blood caked to his left shin. One of Balster's feet requires medical attention because she stepped on some glass early in the game. There are no Nike-sponsored ultimate athletes, no Michael Jordans being paid millions for endorsing sports drinks. On this hot Saturday of competition, for which many have driven a half day to attend, none of the competitors can readily name the sport's best players. Yet, the white disc spins over the heads of 14 players, teasing them all with a chance collision with greatness.

Every flag has a story. Diania Bieber's is no different. Her porch railing is draped with a red-white-and-blue sash, and there are mini-American flag Christmas lights dangling from Bieber's roofline. Her windows are decorated in patriotic tube lighting, and when the sun sets, the yard glows with patriotism.

It's hard to catch a shadow, even one with four legs and a tail. A black lab named Shadow in the Kokomo neighborhood of Spokane Valley has been terrorizing residents, chasing motorcycles and trapping parked motorists in their cars. Living up to its name, the black Rottweiler-Labrador cross has been impossible to catch. The dog's owners have managed to elude animal control officers by giving the pooch a string of aliases.

There's a sweet flavor to the air in Diana Tesdal's shop. It tastes like the towering expectations of matrimony and little girls' dreams finally realized. At this time of year, the sweetness hangs so heavy in Tesdal's Argonne Road kitchen that it dusts lips with the taste of powdered doughnuts.