by Amy McGarry
There’s a meme going around Facebook that says: “You know you’re old when you drive around and say, ‘I remember when all this was forest.’” As if I needed yet another reminder that I’m old. Yes, this meme hit home especially hard. Even if it’s actually fields in Spokane Valley that I remember, not forests.
Coincidentally, my sister Mary and I recently drove to Ridgeline High School in Liberty Lake for a softball game. Poor Mary, who is even older than me and doesn’t live in the Valley, was shocked during the drive. “I used to ride my 10-speed on this road to Liberty Lake and there was nothing here!” She was astounded by all the new industry. “This used to be just a country road. Look! There’s even a Starbucks!” We’re not in the ’70s anymore, Toto.
From the time I was born until 1975, when I was seven years old, I lived in a house on the corner of Evergreen Rd. and Valleyway Ave. with Mary and a bunch of other sisters. Before 2003, when it was incorporated into Spokane Valley, this area was called Veradale. The name “Veradale” comes from Vera McDonald, the daughter of D.K. McDonald, who founded the community in 1911.
Vera also lent her name to her dad’s electric water company, established in 1908, along with A.C. Jamison and Andrew Good, all local real estate entrepreneurs. According to the current Vera and Water Power website, “From 1907 to 1908, Vera’s Number 1 Well was dug by hand providing irrigation and domestic water to small farms and mini orchards in Spokane Valley. The Number 1 Well still provides 3,000 gallons of water per minute to Vera’s system when required.”
More fascinating to me for as long as I can remember, is the Vera Pump House, or more commonly known to all the children in our 1970s neighborhood, the Witch’s Tower. During the early ’70s, us feral Gen X kids were free to roam the neighborhood by foot or by bicycle, with no supervision. But when we were between Valleyway and Broadway on Evergreen, we always stayed on the east side of the street until well past the Witch’s Tower on the west side. Just in case. In those days, Evergreen was a mere two-lane, quiet, country road. Even across the street we were too close to the Witch’s Tower for comfort.
I vaguely remember walking with younger kids and terrifying them with tales of how I’d seen the witch and how she ate children. I don’t remember the details, but I must have been creative in my storytelling to elicit the fear in them – that I do remember. One thing that never changes, kids love to scare other kids.
While nothing else is the same on the west side of Evergreen these days, the Witch’s Tower, or “pump house” as they’d like us to believe, still operates to this day. It’s comforting that some things do stay the same.
My paradise, at the corner of Evergreen and Valleyway, January 1971. You can see the church on the left with Vera Water and Power just farther back. Frieda’s house is to the right. This front yard felt huge to me. The wall of rocks is hidden by tall dead grass.
In the early ’70s, that whole neighborhood, the blocks surrounding the two Evergreen and Valleyway intersections, was my personal little paradise. At the time I didn’t know it was anything special – it was simply my home, my community, my neighborhood. We knew all the neighbors to the east of us who lived both on Valleyway and on Nixon. We knew them by name and I was free to visit all the houses on my own. The children in those houses were all my friends. My mom even babysat some of those neighborhood kids in the summer. They had working moms and needed at least some supervision when they weren’t in school.
One of the kids my mom babysat was a few years older than me and she became my best friend. We hung out and had sleepovers even when Mom wasn’t being paid to watch her. With her wisdom as a nine-year-old, she taught me things, like how to make prank phone calls. She also showed me her brother’s “dirty” magazines. Doesn’t every child need an older friend to be properly educated and socialized?
In those days, the closest store was a Circle K on the corner of Evergreen and Broadway, where the Exxon gas station and convenience store is now. My friend’s mom sometimes sent us to Circle K with some money and a handwritten note telling the clerk to sell us a pack of her brand of cigarettes. I was six years old at the time.
If we were lucky, we were given a little extra money to buy candy cigarettes, or another treat. My absolute favorite, especially on a hot day, was a grape Slush Puppie. Sorry, 7-11, but a carbonated fluffy Slurpee in any flavor will never compare to a grape Slush Puppie with its crunchy little ice pellets. I still crave one occasionally. You could also get one at K-Mart back in the day, but K-Mart has gone down in the annals of history along with candy cigarettes and Renfros store on Sprague and Evergreen.
Other than Vera Water and Power and its Witch’s Tower, very little construction lined the quiet, two-laned Evergreen Road in the mid-’70s. A few houses and lots of empty fields. There was a church just south of Vera and just up the hill from our house.
Adjacent to and south of the church was a huge, empty field. This field was directly across Evergreen from my family’s house. We rode our bikes down the hill in that field so often we created dirt trails. That field also served as a makeshift softball field for the older kids when they had enough people to make teams.
To the north of our house, across Valleyway and a field, was the large house of the elderly Frieda. My mom and I paid her visits sometimes because she was elderly and lived alone. One of my very favorite spots was the short wall of big rocks, or small boulders, that separated Valleyway from Frieda’s field. Anyone from Spokane Valley knows exactly what I’m talking about when I mention a wall of rocks separating a field from a road. Due to the glaciers that swept through the area, dropping rocks of all sizes in its wake, Spokane Valley has more than its fair share of rocks. (For all you Spokane Valley gardeners, yes, I know, that is an understatement.)
I could lose myself and all sense of time in those rocks – crawling, leaping, or just digging around. In the summer, purple and blue bachelor buttons grew prolifically among the rocks. They are still one of my favorite flowers. As a child, just as our small yard felt enormous, that rock wall felt distant from the rest of the world.
My father’s job got transferred to Marengo Railroad Junction outside of Ritzville the summer of 1975, so my parents, Mary, and I moved out of the house on Evergreen. My parents rented that house in case we wanted to move back, and we did just that. In 1982, when I was 14, my parents and I moved back into that same house.
What a difference six years make! The yard seemed much smaller. The whole house seemed smaller. Many of our neighbors had moved out of the neighborhood. We had a whole new set of neighbors across the street living in duplexes built over our old softball/biking field. Sadly, Frieda had passed away. Her home and field were razed for new development. They paved paradise and put up a dentist’s office.
I moved out when I went away to college, but my parents lived on the corner of Evergreen and Valleyway until the year 2000, when they were given a choice. They could stay in their beloved house on Evergreen with all its treasured memories but lose their front yard and driveway to an expanded Evergreen Road, or they could sell the house and move, breaking my mother’s heart. They chose to move because they paved paradise and put in three extra lanes.
It seems I was destined to be a Valley Girl, because when it came time for my husband and I to buy a home, we just happened to find our dream house just about a mile or so away from my old family home on Evergreen. It even has a rock wall separating our plot from the next-door neighbor’s. How’s that for kismet? But I’ve never seen any bachelor buttons growing there.
At about the same time I started seeing the, “You know you’re old” meme, I took up a morning walking routine in my neighborhood. One morning walk, just after dawn, on a whim I turned north down Progress from 8th Avenue. I have driven on that road a thousand times, but walking on the road was different. I came upon a wide-open field and a rock wall, just like the one that used to be on Valleyway. The dirt surrounding the rocks was full of wildflowers, including my ever-favorite purple and blue bachelor’s buttons. I looked up, and a young deer was staring at me.
The rest of my walk home felt bittersweet. I was acutely aware of any new development, but more importantly, I paid attention to any pieces of land still unpaved. Because as the song goes, “You don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
Amy McGarry grew up in Spokane Valley, Washington. After a 20 year hiatus, she moved back to Spokane Valley where she lives with her husband, daughter and two cats. She is the author of I am Farang: Adventures of a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand, available on Amazon.com, Auntie’s Bookstore, and Barnes and Noble.