Spokane: where the roads are lined with flowers

The ride to and from work along the Centennial Trail has become the best work commute I have ever had in my life.

Unlike most of my fellow interns, I work in the evenings and I usually start riding home on my rusty, old bike around midnight. At that time, typically no one is out on the trail.

I got off work a little later than usual last night, and when I started riding through River Front Park, I discovered flowers were scattered all over the path.

At first I thought the flowers were bouquets in tribute to someone who died — maybe Jimmy Marks or one of the recent river drownings.

But actually, they were new flower plants from the concrete planter boxes. Likely for no reason at all, a person had uprooted almost all of the planter-box flowers and discarded them across the ground. I counted about 40 Petunia plants that had been freshly ripped out.

I wish I had a camera at the time to photograph this senseless destruction. I talked with a teenage couple sitting nearby and they said they had heard a group of people making a lot of noise earlier.

I rode along the trail, but I didn't see anymore people or flowers on the path.

But when I got home, I was still angry thinking about how some people could be so reckless. I told my housemate about it, and I liked his response:

“The best thing about a public park is it's public,” he said. “And the worst thing about a public park is it's public.”