Went walking along the Rimrock the other day. The snow is gradually melting in the 40 degree weather. The sky is clear but the air is stagnant. We are in an inversion.
Vachel Lindsey, the poet, when he lived here talked about and expressed his love for the Rimrock. Spokane spreads out below. In places, the path comes right up to the edge. The forest below, 60 feet below and more, is still deep in snow.
The town takes on an unreal or maybe more real quality from the Rimrock. It is always beautiful and welcoming. From a distance one cannot see the pain, the poverty, the people in distress going in and out of the courthouse, caught up in problems which bleed them and test them. A man on trial for negligently killing five children when he was driving his car one night and possibly having become distracted because he tried to call his wife on his cell phone. The mentally ill teenager who killed his parents and is now in jail for the rest of his life with thousands of other mentally ill wrongdoers, (sentanced by a judge who was once a social worker and as she laments that prisons are no place of mentally ill people)the hundreds of drivers who broke a law or two and are now going to pay a hundred bucks or so to the state and perhaps hundreds more in increased insurance premiums, the couple going through a divorce and bent on dividing the kids and the debts. Most have little or no real assets or any expectation of any sort of satisfying income to pay for help they need for the troubles they are in.
Everyone is preying on everyone. The view from the Rimrock does not show this. One has to remember what he has seen over the years a couple of miles to the east with the town lit up by the afternoon winter sun.
In the end, all one can do is pray.
