Our last day in Canada was sunny and warm. We had breakfast with our fellow guests at the bed and breakfast. I am sorry that I never took a picture of the breakfast table. Jonathan, the English innkeeper, has furnished not only this late-Victorian era home in furnishing appropriate to the era, but he also set the table in the same way. There were at least two forks and two spoons for the various breakfast courses, and there were goblets for water and glasses for juice in addition to the tiny porcelain tea cups. I felt like I was back at my grandmother’s house for Sunday dinner.
We drove south out of Calgary along the McLeod Trail. Despite the romantic western name, it is a hideous six lane highway lined with mini-malls and big box stores. But after a few miles of this urban sprawl, the city ended as abruptly as the mountains had the day before. We were suddenly surrounded by farm with vast field of wheat, hay, and what I think was sorghum. In the distance you can see the faint gray outlines of the Rockies. John snapped this photograph of a typical scene.
The highway brought us closer and closer to those mountains, and pretty soon we were leaving the plains behind and climbing into the foothills. We began to see some oil wells as well as signs demanding “Less Ottawa, More Alberta!” The roads curved as it slowly rose to the the Crowsnest Pass. There we stopped briefly to take a look at the town of Coleman where my friend Holly was born. Coleman was apparently once a big coal mining town, and you can see remnants of this history like the partially restored United Mineworkers hall as you drive through. The prosperity that oil and tourism have brought to other parts of Alberta does not seem to have reached Coleman, and the center of town is filled with empty and decaying storefronts and an abandoned movie theater.
We did see some signs of life in town. If you live outside of Los Angeles or another major city, deer are usually considered annoyances. But for these two Angelenos the deer on the lawn in Coleman might as well have been Roosevelt Elk.
Not long after we left Coleman we found ourselves back in British Columbia. The road followed the Kootenay river for a while before climbing over a pass and down to the city of Cranbrook. We had a reasonably short wait at the border at Kingsgate, and then drove down old US 95 towards Coeur d’Alene. This part of Idaho used to be the center of a white supremacist movement some years ago though I don’t know if that is still true. But before we came into town, Daniel the GPS in his mechanical English voice ordered us to “Take slip road right to I 90 west” and we had to obey.
Neither of us had been to Spokane for twenty years or so, and it somehow seemed bigger and a bit shabbier than either of us remembered. When we were planning the trip, the options for staying in Spokane with a dog were not that inspiring, and John discovered that for only about 50 dollars or so more than the other options we could get a deal at the Davenport, the oldest and most famous hotel in town. Since we had booked early, we had a large room next to the “Governor’s Suite” on the the top floor of the old building.
The dogs were looking miserable after eight hours in the car with only a break every two or three hours to find some bit of grass to answer nature’s call. So we took them for a walk through the downtown. I found a historic walking tour of Spokane on the internet, and I struggled to use it on the tiny screen of my iPhone. I did learn a few things from it. The tower below is the last remaining part of the old Great Northern Railroad station, once one of the grandest railroad stations in the west. The park surrounding it had been rail yards and industrial buildings, but these had been torn down in the early 1970’s for EXPO 74, Spokane’s effort to restart its decaying economy through hosting a world’s fair.
Spokane, I also learned from my iPhone tour, had originally been called Spokan Falls – the final e was added later – on an island surrounded by rapids in the river. The whites who settled this area feared the Nez Perce Indians and thought that the white water would provide some protection. Once Edison had found commercial uses for electricity, those same rapids channeled to provide hydroelectric current to power flour mills. There is still a small hydroelectric facility there run by Avista, the new corporate identity of the old Washington Water Power Company.
The federal department of Energy recently renewed Avista’s lease to run several hydroelectric projects on the river, but apparently they were required to do some environmental mitigation as part of this approval. As a result, much of the riverfront is under reconstruction and walls of chain link fence are everywhere. I suppose in a few years the Spokane waterfront will be a bit more appealing than we found it today.
Tomorrow we’re off to Portland.
