It’S A Civic Crescendo
A few minutes after 4 a.m. Sunday, there were no lines at any of the portable toilets, parking places were plentiful downtown and it was so quiet that, from out on the street, you could hear a guy running a vacuum cleaner in the Satellite Diner.
Besides scaffolding on a few corners, there wasn’t much evidence that something big was coming.
Other than cabbies talking and a pedestrian singing off-key as he zigzagged down Sprague, Phil Snowdon was about the only person making a sound.
The Cheney school administrator, a Bloomsday volunteer for 18 years, was dropping off wooden posts. They would be used to help erect those orange plastic-mesh fences that magically appear on race day.
Pulling the posts from the back of a pickup, he deposited them at designated points. As each one thunked against the sidewalk, the noise echoed through the slumbering downtown.
It was still dark, but it hadn’t begun to rain.
“You get to see the metamorphosis,” Snowdon said of starting his Bloomsday experience so early. “It’s really something.”
It happens slowly at first, with crews from the TV stations setting up camera platforms and event volunteers arriving like worker bees returning to the hive.
At about 5:15, as the morning light was coming up, city employees Mike James and Jerry Eber started stringing the big, somewhat battered “Bloomsday Start” banner high above Riverside Avenue at Washington. James was up in the bucket at the end of a boom and Eber worked down at street level.
A nippy breeze flapped the banner as James attached it to a cable. But Sunday wasn’t as windy as some years, Eber said as he watched his partner aloft.
At 5:48, Rich Ryan, an electrical engineer running his ninth Bloomsday, was the first to stake out a position at the starting line at Riverside and Washington. He brought with him a folding lawn chair and a relaxed air.
A few moments later, Paul Clary arrived carrying the Sunday paper. “Shoot,” he said playfully to his 11-year-old son, Cody. “I told you we should have gotten here earlier.”
Clary, a warehouse manager running his 12th Bloomsday, said he has been first to arrive in years past. But he didn’t seem to begrudge Ryan that honor this time.
Building contractor Mike Momb pulled up on a motorcycle, deposited a folding chair to save his spot and then cruised off to park his bike.
Motorcycle cops and tow trucks moved through downtown like creatures deserving to be accompanied by the “Jaws” theme.
William Blanchard, a large man, emerged from a nearby apartment building, smoking a cigarette and wearing a T-shirt that said “Whoever Said Bigger Isn’t Better Lied.”
He was asked if he planned to do Bloomsday.
“Oh, hell no,” he said.
A guy with a jacket adorned with the logo of one of the TV stations walked around asking, “Having fun yet?”
At 6:30, loudspeakers set up across Riverside from the TV platforms started pumping out an old Huey Lewis song, “Heart of Rock and Roll.”
In seemingly no time at all, a man wearing a white T-shirt with pajama bottoms and slippers strode purposefully out of the Fairmont Apartments down the street. He wanted a few words with a guy who seemed to be operating the sound system.
The man in the slippers explained that he was all for Bloomsday, but added that he worked the late shift at a hospital and deserved to be able to sleep. While he was repeating this to a newspaper reporter a moment later, a young man attempted to give him a religious tract.
The music was turned down.
At 7 a.m., a yawning Marianne Mishima was spotted on Riverside by two women wearing trash bags to stay warm and dry.
One commented on how tiny the Channel 4 newscaster seemed in person. Still cute, but tiny. The other said something about how much makeup she had on.
Not long after that, people started arriving in big numbers. And the slow-building change that transforms downtown on the first Sunday in May began to proceed at a clip that seemed like time-lapse photography.
Traffic lights continued to cycle at intersections now closed to cars.
The weather was West Side bad, but that didn’t change the fact that it was a great day to look at legs.
It was a great day to pointlessly eavesdrop on conversations in many different languages.
And when else can you see hundreds of people walking unafraid in downtown alleys that are all but ignored the other 364 days?
Compress carbon and you get a diamond. Compress the population of the Spokane area and you get Bloomsday.
“I just like watching all the goofballs,” said Diana Langford, a Bloomsday regular since 1992. “Only, if you use my name, don’t say I said goofballs.”
At 7:20, the drizzle had come. Thousands competed for space beneath dozens of awnings.
Over on Sprague, Debbie Schissler and her daughter, Amy Storer, were cheerfully girding themselves for the prospect of pushing two strollers the length of the route. It’s not an assignment for wimps, they cautioned.
Schissler said that last time she did it, she figured she covered about 13 miles on account of all the side-to-side veering she had to do.
Over on Riverside, 14-year-old Matthew Hubbell dismissed the rain as all but irrelevant. “You’ve just got to keep running,” he said.
Some Bloomies weren’t smiling, however. More than once, beach balls being batted about bounced off the head of someone in the throng who didn’t even change his or her expression. (It tended to be an expression that said “I’m cold, I’m wet and I’ve still got to stand here for another hour.”)
But by the time someone on a loudspeaker announced “three minutes,” a lot of people were ready to cheer.
The wet streets seemed to muffle the zillion-sneakers sound this year. But the sight of the human stampede was no less amazing.
An elderly woman in a wheelchair sat at the window of a closed restaurant on Riverside and stared at the passing legions.
“I’m not sure how much of what she’s seeing she actually comprehends,” said a younger woman with her.
Hey, on Bloomsday, you could say that about any of us.