Where Was That Exit For Downtown?

Excuse me if I’m late. I’ve been stuck on Interstate 90 since about, oh, March.

Actually, I am stuck on the freeway as we speak, sending this column in by remote modem. I have joined together with a hardy band of freeway travelers, and we have set up a little homestead out here near the Medical Lake exit. We hope to make our way back into Spokane sometime in August, unless we are forced to winter over due to an unexpected striping project.

I’m making this up, but only a little. Anybody who has had the misfortune of driving I-90 in the past two months knows what I’m talking about. After observing the situation from the excellent vantage point of a motionless vehicle, I have only one question: Why didn’t they just shut the whole freeway down? It might have been easier.

Then the contractors could have been free to get their repaving done without any pesky motorists in the way, and the rest of us could have looked for a better route, possibly on an old deer trail or a set of faded wagon ruts.

As it stands, the freeway is open, all right. It’s so open you may never get off. The six exits eastbound between Medical Lake and Division Street are closed, which means that there is probably some tourist driving east through Wallace, Idaho, right now saying, “Well, Marge, I’m confused about this construction, too, but I think we’ve got to hit the Maple Street exit pretty soon.”

Actually, the opposite problem is far more likely. The signs on the freeway shriek all kinds of warnings about how you have got to get off the freeway now if you want to go to downtown Spokane, the only problem being that now is about eight miles away from downtown Spokane. I’ll bet there are entire Aerostars full of Bellevue-ites driving forlornly up and down Geiger Boulevard, still looking for the Bloomsday starting line.

Don’t think for a minute that this doesn’t happen to tourists. My family and I got hopelessly lost in a similar freeway construction mess while on vacation last year. We wandered strange roads. We got turned around. We had to consult maps. And the pathetic thing was, we were only five miles from home. That’s right, we got lost in our own town, 10 minutes into our vacation. They were repaving the other side of I-90 last year, and we somehow got shunted off to beautiful downtown Garden Springs.

This year, I vowed to pay more attention to the signs. So the first time I came into town from the west this spring, I did what the signs said. I dutifully took the Medical Lake exit and discovered the delightful ambience of Geiger Boulevard, a road which rivals the Champs d’Elysees for charm, if the Champs d’Elysees went through channeled scablands and was zoned light industrial. Geiger Boulevard got me into downtown all right, although I have no idea how.

Since then, I have figured out that you won’t actually miss downtown if you stay on the freeway. You can get off at the Division Street exit. If Division Street isn’t downtown, I don’t know what is. Plus, Division Street rivals Geiger Boulevard for charm.

The thing that makes this year’s construction project so transcendent is that it doesn’t end at Division Street. Even when you get past it, the freeway is still down to one or two lanes, which means that at rush hour, smart drivers are simply getting off the freeway and taking Third Avenue. You’ll move faster, even if you hit the red lights wrong.

And now, in a Department of Transportation coup de grace, they’re getting us coming and going. They also have been working on the westbound lanes of I-90 through east Spokane. The backups in this direction are coming as a surprise to many motorists, including the guy I saw driving a pickup who couldn’t quite get stopped and bumped his truck head-on into the concrete guardrail. How do you bump head-on into a guardrail? For starters, you have to be at a 90-degree angle to everyone else on the freeway.

It’s all worth it, of course (even though that guy in the pickup probably doesn’t think so). At least when the freeway is repaved, we won’t have to deal with those deep ruts in the pavement that make us feel as if we’re on the Wild Mouse ride at the carnival.

Those ruts, by the way, are far deeper than the ones on my alternate route, the one with the faded wagon ruts.

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