By Chris Maccini
Cover photo courtesy of Jess Walter
In 2006 and 2007, a newspaper-reporter-turned-novelist named Jess Walter wrote a recurring humor column for Out There called “The Urban Outdoors.” At the time, Walter had recently published his fourth novel, “The Zero,” which was named a finalist for the National Book Award. In the nearly two decades since, Walter has written five more books of fiction, including the 2012 best-seller “Beautiful Ruins.” His most recent novel, “The Cold Millions” is set in Spokane during the labor and free speech demonstrations of 1909 and 1910.
To celebrate OTO’s 20th anniversary, we sat down with Jess Walter to look back on his brief career as an outdoor magazine columnist. Here’s our conversation with him on trail poop, a risqué sledding subculture, and how he’s now involved with the urban outdoors.
Chris Maccini for OTO: How did “The Urban Outdoors” column originate? Don’t you usually have to have some outdoor credibility to write for such a magazine?
Jess Walter: The funny thing is people would ask me, “What’s it like living in Spokane?” I’d say, “Oh, it’s an amazing outdoors place.” And really, my experience in the outdoors is, when I was a kid, what we would call camping was driving as far into the woods as you could, shooting things with BB guns and drinking beer. So, yeah, I felt insecure about it. But then I thought, well, that’s kind of funny. And the things that I wanted to write about—like, why do people keep shitting all over the trail?—I’d never seen anyone write about. So, it started to seem like a funny thing to do. I’d written a humor column in high school and in college, and I love alternative papers. I loved that Spokane was supporting an outdoors paper. But I was definitely the last person I would have picked to write it.
OTO: Do you still consider yourself an urban outdoorsman or has your relationship to the outdoors changed in the past two decades?
Walter: I’m probably even more of an urban outdoorsman than I was then. I’ve committed more to riding my bike. I go for a walk every night. I still snow ski. I play golf at Downriver. I’ve given up swinging and sledding like I used to, and it’s been a couple of years since my brother and I did our annual river float. But yeah, most of the outdoor stuff I do is within the city limits.
OTO: In your first column, you wrote that your chief complaint was encountering “man scat” during your walks along the Spokane River. It’s been almost 20 years—Would you say you encounter more or less man scat on the trails these days?
Walter: When I wrote that, I think there was a mad shitter about, actually. Everywhere I went, I kept finding these big turds. And I really worried about the guy’s health. It’s like, your diet is really troubling me. Maybe I’ve stopped doing the scouting thing where I dropped to my knees and tried to determine whose it was. But yeah, I don’t think we’ve solved that problem, clearly.
OTO: In a winter edition of the column, you wrote about an encounter you had on a plastic sled with another man’s wife. This led you to ponder a potential “sledding swingers community.” Have you discovered any other urban outdoors subcultures in your time since?
Walter: The urban fishermen are the thing that I’ve seen the most of. One of my neighbors catches beautiful redband trout out of the Spokane River. There used to be a guy who would bring a bucket of golf balls and hit them into the river. I wanted to say something to him like, you’re gonna hit somebody. But he was so terrible that I was almost embarrassed for both of us. I’ve yet to find anyone as edgy as the swinging sledding community. I’m sure they’re out there, though.
OTO: One of your columns was about floating the river every summer with your brother. You predicted that the increased development nearby might actually be good for the river’s health. Now, the river is much cleaner than it used to be. The City of Spokane just finished a big stormwater project. The Spokane Riverkeeper has done so much cleanup work. The redband trout you mentioned are being conserved. Local tribes are even doing some salmon reintroduction. Does having a cleaner Spokane River make us more like those smug Montanans you wrote about with their “gin-clear” rivers? Do you long for the days of seeing “brown trout” floating down stream?
Walter: No, I mean, imagine if the salmon ever came this far again! Steelhead is my very favorite food. If I could fish for steelhead in Spokane, that might just tip me over into being a real outdoorsman because I love eating it so much. I still remember one of the most stunning things in the research for “The Cold Millions” was finding out that people used to take their garbage down to the river and just dump it. As the river fell, all this garbage would show up and it would stink so badly. So the solution was to put trap doors in the bridges. Trucks would pull up with construction debris, and they would just open that hatch and throw it in. This was like 1909, 1910. Then they had a big mound of garbage in the center of the river for a while. Even growing up here in the ‘70s and ‘80s, all the restaurants and hotels had no windows looking over the river. It really wasn’t seen that way. So the development and cleaning up the river is part of this long process that really began with Expo ’74. There’s still so far to go, but the Riverkeeper has been such an amazing development. And yeah, the more people who are swimming, kayaking, rafting, fishing, the more we’ll also demand a cleaner river.
OTO: You’ve written about Spokane in several of your books. How has your conception of the Inland Northwest as a literary setting changed in the past twenty years?
Jess: “Citizen Vince” had been probably my most “Spokane” novel before I wrote those columns for Out There Monthly. And it really captures Spokane at that moment when I became aware of it as a place, the 1980s. It was the place where you could hide guys in the witness protection program, and no one would ever find them. In “Over Tumbled Graves” or “Land of the Blind,” I wrote about how Spokane was the kind of place you had to move away from. And I think that’s how I felt. I had this long period of coming to appreciate the place that first was, “Oh, this place isn’t any worse than anywhere else.” But then the next breakthrough was thinking, “Oh no, this place is incredible.” Like for me, working on “The Cold Millions” felt like I discovered these amazing stories that people didn’t know about. Stories I can tell that are illustrative of the time we’re living in. I suppose my sense of the place has evolved to the point where, if anything, I almost have to push myself to write about other places because I know this place so well. But I still love going out and writing about Rome in “The Angel of Rome” and then coming back and writing about Gino’s Pizza and Gonzaga University.
Jess Walter’s latest book is the short story collection, “The Angel of Rome.” www.jesswalter.com
Find Jess Walter’s The Urban Outdoor Column here or, peruse all of his old columns here.
Chris Maccini is a writer and audio producer from Spokane. When he’s not hassling the local literati, you can find him on the trails and waters of the Inland Northwest
