Summer Stories 2025: Snow Bowl

This was West Central in the early aughts. Long after Union Pacific abandoned the railyard overlooking the river. A neighborhood of middle-class people born and raised by the tracks, people who never dreamed of leaving.

Much has changed since then. There are luxury apartments in the old railyard that rent for $2,300 a month. An organic grocery store has replaced the rusted locomotives. It’s barely snowed three inches this month.

Outside my window, another cold rain slaps Spofford Avenue. The park across the street is empty, a slurry of dead-brown grass and shriveled leaves.

In my dreams, though, I see drifts of snow that are deep and blue enough to bury the moon. These are dreams of boyhood, the gang of neighborhood miscreants who defined it. Back then it took a couple feet of snow to get us out of school (this the era when kids learned about closures from a ticker on the local news), and when that happened, we played football every day.

Snow Bowls, as I remember them, were notoriously vicious, sloppy events. A deranged fusion of sport and warfare. Without helmets or pads, we occasionally knocked each other unconscious. We broke wrists and bit ankles. We’d scrape tiny chunks of our opponents’ flesh out from under our fingernails for days after we played. Little pieces of our best friends.

On snow days, we congregated on the big field behind Holmes Elementary – a pack of peach-fuzzed hyenas on bikes pulling sleds – where we’d pick teams, four or five a side. The captains were always the same. Matt Moore was a captain because he was faster and stronger than the rest of us and actually had experience playing organized football. Jimmy White, the argumentative pipsqueak, was the other because he brought the football, and he believed supplying the equipment somehow gave him the right.

The games were untimed and disorganized but never lopsided. There were no penalties, hardly any rules. We played like nitrous-riddled animals, punching at the ballcarrier, dragging each other down by our underpants. We played until the snow melted under our feet, or until someone got seriously hurt.

The best Snow Bowls occurred when snow was still falling. Covering our tracks, our zig routes and button hooks, silencing the world around us. Brew Coode’s dad worked for the city’s maintenance department and lent us keys to the switchbox for the field lights. In the evenings, we’d look up to catch the spiraling ball and see millions of tiny flakes vacuumed into the iron sky. It made us feel like pros, playing under the lights in freezing conditions. Like tough guys.

Hut, hut, hike!

We all wanted to play quarterback. We all wanted to lead our team downfield and score touchdowns. We wanted to be some sort of hero.

Snow Bowls were pass-heavy affairs. Air raid offenses. Lots of laterals and turnovers, like a game of hot potato. A quarterback and three or four receivers slogging through the snow. We only ran the ball if Big Eddie Watson was in the backfield. If Big Eddie was back there, everyone knew what was coming next. Big Eddie only got handed the ball if someone on the opposite team had done something dirty or had been talking too much crap and needed to be dump-trucked into oblivion. He could run the ball down anyone’s throat, even Matt Moore’s, so feeding him the rock on a regular basis was frowned upon.

The last few Snow Bowls we ever played – home on Christmas Break during college – there was gambling involved, money changing hands, even a point spread. Those were the only games where I remember fists being thrown, fights being had. D-Bagg’s jaw is still creaky because Big Eddie thought he was shaving points. And, of course, there was the game Matt Moore punched Cody Kerr out cold for calling him a slur after a tackle. We all thought it was a bit overblown at the time, slugging someone over a word. Most of us wouldn’t learn until years later, as grown men, that Matt had a secret boyfriend back then. We didn’t say much when he came out to us, just shook his hand. Told him we loved him.

This all happened last weekend at a seafood restaurant during Cody Kerr’s bachelor party in Biloxi, Mississippi, where Cody is stationed as a boom operator in the Air Force. We were shucking crab legs as Matt revealed himself, butter dribbling down our chins. At 31, he’s still faster and stronger than the rest of us. Biloxi was the first time we’d all been together since our 10-year high school reunion. Some of us had thinning hair and crow’s feet and others had beer bellies and high blood pressure, but we still looked like boys in each other’s eyes.

We drank and gambled all night, and at sunrise we regrouped in the casino’s main lobby. At the breakfast buffet, we sipped coffee and peeled oranges, waiting for our waffles to cook.

Of the former Snow Bowlers, I’m the only one who still resides in Spokane. I live in my grandparents’ old house across the street from Cannon Park. My friends ask me how I can stand it, sticking around.

I tell them it’s certainly not due to the weather.

The ones who moved away like to reach out, often at the most unexpected times, from their respective locations across the country: Scottsdale, Knoxville, Seattle, et cetera. They ask me for updates on home, as if our city is an elderly relative dying from cancer, and I’m the lone caregiver. They get sad about things like ancient diners closing and one-way streets being renamed. They ask about people they remember from school, people they assume must still be here. They make excuses for why they never visit. Some of them make comments – I’m sure you’re familiar – about the rates of crime, the homeless epidemic, the drug problem. They refer to the old neighborhood as Felony Flats. They hear things, they tell me, from their cousins out in the Valley.

But I always steer our conversations back to the weather. How the wildfires seem to creep closer and closer to the city limits each summer. The startling lack of snow this winter. How it isn’t the same as when we were kids.

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” I asked them last weekend, standing by the breakfast buffet. “Do you understand how important this is?” But none of them took me seriously when I told them there’d only been 3 inches of snow since Christmas. They teased me like old times. They called me “Three-inch Grinch.”

Suddenly, near the casino’s main entrance, there came a cry. “It’s snowing,” shouted a young woman, “in Mississippi!”

We bumbled outside, still buzzing from the night before. The flakes were big, fat, wet things. The ground was too warm for the snow to stick. These were Gulf Coast crystals, heavy with brine from the ocean. The chilly, damp air smelled like shrimp. It didn’t matter. We split into teams and lined up in shotgun formation, slinging oranges instead of a football. We played with four oranges at once, the action nonstop. Too old and brittle to tackle, so we wrapped each other in bear hugs, squeezing the breath out of one another’s lungs.

A week after Cody’s bachelor party, sometime in late January, I glare out the window at the rain beating down. I saw a local news report recently claiming that Spokane has received less snowfall than Pensacola, Florida, this month.

Mobile, Alabama.

Amarillo, Texas.

It’s shameful, really. Barbaric.

But next week’s forecast is calling for a low-pressure system to roll in. A wall of precipitation, temperatures slipping into the high teens. Jeremy LaGoo over on KREM is promising snow – lots of it.

And if the snow comes, if our powder drought ends, I will get in my truck and go for a drive. I will pass the vacant lots and schoolyards searching for signs of life, young kids tossing an oval of leather around like a holy beacon. Picking teams for a Snow Bowl. Tearing each other limb from limb. And I will think: What I wouldn’t give for just one more game. Then drive home slowly with my windows down, my tongue out, catching crystals on an empty, white road.