Hometown A Hit Second Time Around

We pulled onto Interstate 90, the RV stuffed with my sweatshirts, posters and a year’s supply of junk food. My dad, stepmom and I headed west toward Bellingham, where they’d drop me off at college.

At 18, I’d spent my whole life in Spokane. I stared back at the disappearing silhouette of the only city I’d ever called home. One thought crossed my mind.

Get. Me. Out. Of. Here.

As a teenager, I couldn’t wait to leave Spokane. I was sure it was the most claustrophobic place in the state, probably the country.

I graduated from Mead High School with an excellent education. But in the early ‘90s, there was just a handful of minority classmates sprinkled through those middle-class surroundings. A friend who got a tattoo our junior year heard scandalized whispers over her shoulder all day. A girl in my newspaper class wore all black clothing and a nose ring and was labeled a lesbian.

My friends and I spent many weekends eating tacos at Senor Froggy’s and trying to think of a movie we hadn’t already rented. Why couldn’t we have been born in Seattle, with its brighter lights and we were sure of this cuter boys?

I loved Bellingham, with its liberating mix of people and points of view. It was there I lived in a co-ed dorm, tasted my first beer and met some of my closest friends. I pierced my belly button, learned Spanish, fell in love.

Despite all that, I only made it until Halloween my freshman year before I flew home for the weekend. Driving home over Maple Street Bridge, across the teeth-jolting bumps in the roads, felt something like wrapping up in an old, familiar blanket. Wait. Had I missed this place?

Nah. By Sunday, Spokane was closing in on me again. I happily kissed my parents goodbye and boarded the plane back to freedom. For the next four years, I returned mostly only for holidays and obligatory family functions. I preferred they come visit me in Bellingham.

I shocked my family and myself when I moved back to Spokane two years ago, armed with a shiny new journalism degree, an internship at The Spokesman-Review and an earnest goal to set straight my love-hate relationship with this city.

Now, as I prepare to get married and leave Spokane again, this time to move to Washington, D.C., with my new husband, I think I’ve finally accepted it. Spokane is my home.

I can tell because I love when a perfect stranger smiles and says hello when we pass on a downtown sidewalk. That happens nearly every day in Spokane. During my first trip to New York City last December, I mortified my friend Jonathan when, on my first day there, I tried to strike up a conversation with the surly man in the subway token booth.

“You don’t do that here,” Jonathan hissed, half-embarrassed, but mostly amused at my small-town bumpkin routine.

I can tell because I suddenly appreciate the fact that nearly every Spokane landmark is wrapped up with a memory. My 3-year-old brother now 21 falling into the Manito Park duck pond. Sneaking onto the Indian Canyon Golf Course on summer nights for whispered conversations with friends. Driving around the then-wide open Five Mile Prairie the day I got my driver’s license.

It’s mostly my work as a reporter covering neighborhood issues that’s let me discover and accept my hometown.

Through my job, I’ve found those people that growing up, I never knew existed in Spokane. I’ve met a teacher who spends his own money on computers so his elementary school students have access to technology.

I’ve met a boy with Down syndrome who teaches his classmates compassion without even knowing it, and courageous parents driven to change the law after their son Cooper was killed while riding his bike.

I’ve interviewed gifted artists and passionate community activists and goofy 14-year-old boys who play ball and flaunt their testosterone at the community center after school.

My fiance, a congressional aide who loves the international restaurants and bustle of the big city, has little use for Spokane.

He’ll learn.

He doesn’t know it yet, but I hope to drag him back here one day to put down some roots.

He’ll learn to love it.