Tom Lutey

Twenty thousand times a month, something is hocked in Spokane County: a bicycle, a handsaw, a sweetheart's necklace, a handgun. As one pawnbroker's phonebook ad reads, "If it doesn't eat and it can fit through the door, we just might make you a loan for it." And Spokane as a community seems to be taking that offer seriously.

A graffiti outbreak in Spokane Valley has the city's main corridor looking like a badly tattooed sailor. The damage, covering more than two miles of Sprague Avenue, has residents worried about gang activity, though deputies say the aerosoled eyesores lack gang characteristics.

Surrounded by the deep blue glaciers of America's Last Frontier, photographer Ansel Adams opined that "Alaska was an experience best saved for life's golden years, so the world's other landmarks didn't seem so underwhelming." The land is so captivating that vacationers have been known to return home, quit their jobs, sell their houses and head north. Take Kim and Randy Cummins, for example.

Mission Avenue, where it runs by Shirley Welch's manufactured home, isn't much to look at. Crab grass chews at its shoulders; potholes are wearing through its midsection. Its asphalt surface is cracked like desert mud. It's exactly the kind of road one would expect to take to "no man's land," which is how Welch and others refer to the region surrounding the road. They live beneath crackling 240-kilowatt power lines and endure the incessant whistle of radial tires on Interstate 90. Theirs is a sliver of county property sandwiched between two cities. To the north and east, hay stubble pokes through topsoil that is more rock than loam.

After Sunday's Super Bowl debacle, fans of the Seattle Seahawks might want to offer some suggestions, or some consolation, to their fallen heroes. That might be easier than it sounds, if you believe in the theory known as "6 degrees of separation."

There are venues, some but not many, where soulful women still rake a knitting needle over the ribs of a washboard while a fiddle plays to the thudding bass of a galvanized bucket and string. Newman Lake Grange is one such place. There, on the first and third Sunday of every month, the Country Jammers eight-man band strums up a special mix of old-timey music and honky-tonk twang. This motley crew of musicians, mostly over the age of 60, covers Patsy Cline with haunting accuracy, churns out hits from Hank Williams Sr. with soulful cowboy sorrow, and even socks it to Jeannie C. Riley's "Harper Valley PTA."

As dog tales go, Kodi's looked to be short and sad. The Rottweiler-Doberman cross was clubbed and dropped in a garbage can on Spokane's North Side as a pup. She lay there in an alley between Jackson and Carlisle avenues bleeding from a gash in her skull until her rescuer, Becca Itterman, noticed blood around the garbage can and decided to take a look.

Meet Denny Bewley, Seahawks fan. He has the caps and the T-shirts, the collector's cards, the football helmet gumball machine. There is a decade's worth of score cards on his bedroom bureau – as reference material.

When Duane Markley met the mother of invention, she was standing beside a backcountry lake in the thick underbrush, scratched by stickers and reeking of bait. Her name was Necessity. She appeared just as the 65-year-old Spokane Valley man reached in his horse's saddle bag for a fishing pole, only to find it broken.

We all know the story of Noah's Ark, of how one cold raindrop landed on a goatherd's balding head, followed by another and another. Of how Noah took the raindrops as prophecy and began manically ripping boat wood from his picket fence. His wet goats huddled on the back porch and pawed frantically to be let inside. Noah's neighbors, convinced the 500-year-old geezer no longer knew his burro from a burrow, rolled through the puddles laughing until their clothes were wet with mud.

There was a shoe-t out at Spokane Arena Friday night and this time, the Bears from Central Valley High School came out on top. Not only did they regain possession of the Stinky Sneaker from their rival University High School, they defeated the Titan boys' basketball team after University High's girls' team ran away with the first game.

As Steve Hetrick watched New Orleans residents on TV struggling to nail and tarp their lives back together, he was overwhelmed by the compulsion to help. The former Air Force chaplain runs a small remodeling business out of his Spokane Valley home. At no small sacrifice, the 45-year-old father of four packed up his tools, said goodbye to his family, then boarded a plane for hurricane-ravaged Louisiana.

Sometimes, a good heart is hard to come by. No one knows this better than Cindy Scinto. Twelve months ago, Scinto was in the hospital. Her heart had stopped beating the previous spring, and a pacemaker was pounding out the rhythm of her life.

It was five days before Christmas 2005, and the rush to look beautiful under the mistletoe had scissors endlessly snipping at the Capri Hair and Nail Salon. The humid trace of ammonium thioglycollate stirred in the air, along with the sawing noises of buffing blocks sanding down thick fingernails and the endless chatter of clients disclosing their most personal secrets. Here, at 15605 E. Sprague Ave., the bottles of product were sitting half-empty at styling stations where stylists toiled to make the "real you" look real.

Kaipo Manners wasn't long for this world, and he knew it. He suffered from a disease so rare that doctors considered naming it after him. At 16, just two years ago, the Spokane Valley boy began planning his funeral. "I want my ashes mixed with cement and dropped in the ocean off the coast of Hawaii," Kaipo told his parents in a faint whisper. He whispered because tumors attacking his brain had limited his ability to speak at a normal volume. "I want an open mic at my funeral so people can tell stories, and I want the American flag flown above the speakers.

Genna Seidel hasn't made Santa's nice list in years, not because her attitude's in the coal chute, but rather because she's 28 and nominations at that age are nearly unheard of. Let's face it. It's harder to make the nice list when you're old enough to go to war, or not, drive drunk, or not, call your mom every Sunday, or not. A second-grader might make the golden list simply by not picking her nose, but the bar is set higher for someone who is 28. This year, however, Seidel made the list after she and her husband, Fred, sneaked over to her mother's house Thanksgiving weekend to decorate the front yard.

This is how traffic freezes to a standstill in front of Dave and Marzell VanVlaenderen's home: It trickles down the snow-packed street until the cold-hardened tires emit a final crunch or skid nervously to a stop. Each car is stopped by the inertia of the one in front of it until a line of panting cars with frosted windows tapers down Valleyway Avenue. They come to see the VanVlaenderens' mountain of ice, a pyramid of bonded icicles so thick its core is glacier blue.

When the Christmas Bureau opened for business Wednesday morning, the first person through the door at the Spokane County Fair and Expo Center was Need. She wore an old winter coat with a broken zipper and clutched a child in her left hand. Folded together in her purse were her driver's license, heating bill, and a medical coupon proving she mothered not just the boy at her side, but also three more children, all of whom needed toys for Christmas and a grocery voucher.

Oh, come to the hill, you brothers of gravity, to feel the wind in your faces and snow up your pant legs, to jump the bushes, the picnic tables and any unwary bystander. Come to the hill with your Flexible Flyers and garbage-can lids, your inner tubes and cafeteria trays.