Spokane River

Yeah.

And the cool thing is, um, the Spokane Tribe has been integral in reintroducing salmon to the Spokane River and the Columbia River.

All the upper Columbia tribes have all been working together to fix the salmon situation.

Mm-hmm.

Wow.

And so that was the first book of Christian apologetics I had read, and that's what precipitated my conversion to Christianity, and I got baptized Labor Day weekend 2020 from them in the Spokane River.

It is crazy that seed was planted, right? Yeah.

Definitely.

Mm.

Um, a- and of course that's, I'm sure, spoke to many different things.

And I remember I went up to visit my friends, uh, from Spirit Dream, the ones I had met at Burning Man five years earlier, almost five years to the day, and, uh, they baptized me, uh, Labor Day weekend on Sunday after church in the Spokane River.

And I remember getting baptized being like, it wasn't, like, just something that we're gonna do.

But be prepared for anything because it probably won't be easy.

Brent and his crew still have to make it roughly two miles through town and then cross a bridge over the Spokane River that was hopefully still standing before making it to a sparsely populated stretch of highway that should be free from red ice.

He was actually more worried about the military stopping them between Coeur d'Alene and Whitebird than he was about the infected.

Hopefully the military hadn't blown up any bridges or destroyed portions of the road in some desperate attempt to slow down the spread of these monsters.

What comes next? They all drive the following 30 or so seconds in contemplative silence.

Their luck holds and no one comes for them.

And then they find themselves approaching the bridge over the Spokane River on the edge of town.

Miraculously, it's wide open.

My parents had moved there, um, from Montana and Oregon in the '50s, and that's where I spent my time.

And, uh, I really didn't know much about the work that I'm doing today, advocating for the hydropower system, at the time, despite the fact that when we were Washington Water Power customers that's now Avista, they have hydropower facilities right there on the Spokane River.

Yeah.

And so I'm very proud of my Eastern Washington roots.

there, right?

It's at a building on 31- at 314 West Riverside.

Okay.

Uh, right across from the High Nooner there, you know, like in that area.

I'll be on my way there soon.

Where the idea would be students have got to do some research and find inspiration that they will draw from the history of the Spokane River.

So they're doing research.

They're looking for some aspect of inspiration that they could thematically design the concept for a game around.

Students would be asked, pick three moments in that process where you're going to use the assistance of AI and two, where you will not use the assistance of AI.

And part of this task will be rationalizing that choice, explaining, was that the right choice or not? The website has a whole variety of scaffolds and resources.

And obviously, if you are not in the beautiful state of Washington, Probably you're going to pick a different topic than the Spokane River to revolve this around.

It can be about anything that you need your students to research.

So we got into that and we pioneered it with our incoming senior class.

basically got some industry money and took students to a class at essentially a camp on the Spokane River outside of Lake Coeur d'Alene for five days.

And you can imagine there was a lot of pushback because nobody had ever worked for a veterinarian who went to camp.

But once we got over the fear of the unknown, it was a really positive thing.

... to get this far, yeah.

So we had, you know, the, you know, Chinook up here that approached 100 pounds, the Salmo River in Canada and the Pend Oreille and, uh, and the, the Spokane River.

Of course, none of those fish-

Oh, right, 'cause they made the Pend Oreille.