I said Spokane, Wash., was a fine place to visit, with a downtown full of historical markers, and new corporate logos on the faces of old buildings.
So was Boise, Idaho. Boise has the best wine bar I ever visited twice, and I won the 2014 Idaho Open chess tournament there.
East of Spokane, and north of Boise, there’s Coeur d’Alene. In northern Idaho, where Confederate flags fly over Nazi enclaves.
Racists in Coeur d’Alene verbally assaulted, and revved their truck engines in earshot of, the University of Utah women’s basketball team and associates.
The Utah contingent was boarded in Idaho, 35 miles from the basketball tournament site, because there was a lack of hotel space in Washington.
There was no lack of hotel space, only nice hotel space — I stayed in a Wyndham by Ramada, a cheap hotel 1.5 miles from Gonzaga.
Maybe you don’t see this in a resort hotel (the Utah team’s lodging in Coeur d’Alene is called a resort): At the end of a narrow hotel hallway, a door opens, and a pair of pugs tears ass out the door, down the hall. Followed by a dude in his underwear and socks.
I’m at room 230 two doors down, and the pugs are past me in an instant, the underwear guy in pursuit.
I thought: They’re gone. This floor is designed like a pug racetrack.
But the pugs were distracted by people to meet at the elevators, and the fellow grabbed them. He walks past me again on the way back. “I thought they were gone”, I said.
“I’m too fast for them”, he said.
Which I don’t think is true. If not for the pugs’ friendly dispositions, they could still be running ahead of the guy.
At the downtown Spokane Wyndham by Ramada, the wi-fi was unuseable, but there were no Nazis gunning truck engines.
I think there’s an implied threat of extreme violence when racist assholes make noise with their vehicles, directed at Black people. I also think there’s a large gtheirroup of people who don’t see the implication, upon which these assholes rely.