The George Is Neutral Ground For Everyone

Yes, The Gorge is an amphitheater. I can tell because it is a theater, and it’s amphi-shaped. But it is more, much more. It’s the Yalta of Washington, the Reykjavik of the Evergreen State, the Geneva Summit Conference of the Northwest.

What I mean is: It’s the only place in the state where so many people from Seattle and Spokane meet on neutral ground, i.e., in the middle of nowhere.

As the great poet Kipling once said: East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet except when there is a Gorge concert. (However, Kipling was wrong about one thing. Most people go by car. Very few get there by twain.)

So The Gorge serves as the center of East-West detente in the Northwest, and when I say center, I mean center. The Gorge is almost exactly 140 miles from Seattle. It is also almost exactly 140 miles from Spokane. It couldn’t have been more perfectly situated if a commission had been convened to find a spot equally inconvenient to both sides. Which is precisely why it is so unifying.

I was thinking about this on Sunday, as I spent the evening sprawled on the grass at The Gorge listening to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. We were surrounded by college students from the University of Washington, hipsters from the Denny Regrade, hippies from the U-District and yuppies from Bellevue. If the concert had been in Seattle, those of us from Eastern Washington might have felt just the slightest bit like hayseeds who had just stumbled in from the boondocks. Here, we didn’t feel like that at all, because we were still in the boondocks.

At The Gorge, everybody is an outsider, even the people from Moses Lake (pop. 12,190). Heck, it’s a 60-mile round-trip for them. Only the residents of George, Wash. (pop. 365) can consider it truly convenient, and even then it’s a stiff little commute for those in George’s eastern suburbs. Virtually everybody else at The Gorge has to drive to helland-gone to get there, or, in the metric system, “l’enfer et parti.”

Which is why we all mingle as equals during the three hours of mingling that precedes any Gorge concert. I was at The Gorge with three 15-year-old boys from Spokane: Mike, Karl and Taylor. Where else but The Gorge can a trio of Lewis and Clark High School boys schmooze on an equal footing with a trio of Seattle girls? The girls were mainly interested in borrowing the boys’ binoculars, but the fact remains: We were all one big Gorge family, regardless of geographic origin.

This is particularly important for Spokane, I think, because of our own cultural inferiority complex. We are always complaining that nothing happens in Spokane, that the biggest concert acts pass us by.

Well, you can’t get much bigger than Tom Petty, R.E.M., and Page & Plant, and, for those who like their sounds a bit mellower, Yanni and Kenny G.

We in Spokane might as well claim these concerts as our own, since nobody else can. Actually, the people in the greater George-Quincy area can, which must make for some startling conversations when they go on vacation to, for instance, California.

California resident: I see Michael Bolton is playing the Hollywood Bowl this week. Do you want to go? George resident: No. He plays our town all the time.

The point is, The Gorge belongs to the entire state. In fact, I would like to think that this amphitheater was built where it was as part of a noble effort to unite the state in music.

More likely, it was built there because that’s where the drizzle stops. You can’t have a reliable outdoor venue on the wet side of the Cascades.

But let me cling to my illusions. I need to feel as if Washington has at least one cultural center, one place where the entire state comes together as one.

Maybe we should move the state capitol there.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review