Editor’s Note: Luke Baumgarten is one of the founders (and a current board member) of Terrain — and also the founder of RANGE. As most of the team was not here at Terrain’s birth (two of us were literal children and one was in college), we asked Luke to write a reflection for the 15 year anniversary.
I would love to be able to start this by saying:
From the first notes played by the first band at the first Terrain, my friends and I knew we had created something that would change Spokane.
It would be a hell of a poetic thing to say, and prophetic!
The Spokane that existed in 2008 — the Spokane that gave birth to Terrain — bears very little resemblance to the city we all live in today. The changes are mostly for the better, though there are glaring, brutal exceptions.
In that time, Terrain has changed dramatically as well, growing from a raw-space art party thrown by a handful of 20-somethings in a mostly deserted former bank to an arts organization that runs numerous programs employing about 10 people, serving hundreds of artists and creators by — among other things — connecting them to training, retail and exhibition opportunities and tens of thousands of art lovers and patrons at events like tonight’s Terrain 15.
I’d love to say we saw all of this on the horizon. We did not.
As the first band played its first notes at the first Terrain, my toes were curling around the rungs of a ladder I was attempting to climb without using my hands, which were full, carrying a hammer and nail in one and a piece of art in the other.
Four friends and I had been planning this for months, calling in every favor we had, using every little trick we could think of to get the word out, putting every expense on our personal credit cards, then working balls-to-the-wall to pull it all together. In the bank, we had built a bar in the old-timey vault. Built a stage in front of the old teller counter. Three floors above my head (floors 2 and 3 were actually occupied), art spilled out of a warren of old offices.
Then, out of nowhere: it was show time, people were there, right at 5 pm, and there was still a piece or two of art to hang, so the only thing on my mind was:
Do *not* drop that hammer, there are heads below you.
As much as anything else, Terrain was born of loneliness.
In Spring 2008, three of the five future founders (Mariah McKay, Ginger Ewing, Patrick Kendrick) were featured in the Inlander’s 2008 “20 under 30” Special issue. That issue had been a labor of love for a fourth founder — me — and my colleague, Joel Smith.
Joel had moved to Spokane for the Inlander gig. I’d lived here almost my whole life.
Despite both of us being paid to find and write about the coolest, weirdest, most interesting and ambitious people and things in Spokane, we were each struggling to find friends outside the newsroom.
Covering mostly music, food and culture, I got to meet so many talented people. Many of them talked about feeling creatively starved by a lack of peers and financially starved by a lack of patrons. I met people with incredible ambitions, almost none of whom thought those ambitions could take root in the rocky, acidic soil of Spokane’s provincialism and its post-extraction, pre-anything-else economy.
As a journalist, I felt a tremendous sense of satisfaction — like I was helping the city grow — when I told our readers about a band or a restaurant or an ambitious exhibition I thought was interesting. I felt utterly helpless after that.
I could help people find a new band. I didn’t know how to help that band find a community.
Joel, a singer-songwriter looking for inspiration and collaborators in that world, felt that helplessness from the inside. He and I were here. Almost everyone else seemed to be looking for a way out.
One day, (Joel doesn’t remember if it was his idea or mine, but this is my story and I remember it being him) he had the idea: what if we try to find people who’ve decided to stay put?
As simple as the idea was, I remember the words hitting like lightning strikes. We had to do this. It wasn’t a hard pitch for our bosses at a publication that loved Best Ofs and Gift Guides.
This would be a Gift Guide to the Best Of the *20-somethings who hadn’t fucked off somewhere else.*
We asked all our colleagues to reach out to all their sources — in government, business, food, art, sports, any aspect of city life we could think of — for nominations. We got a lot back, and whittled them down. A young doctor. A chef. A couple community organizers. Two early comedy YouTubers. An aspiring politician. A poet. Three music promoters. An 18-year-old who started a clothing boutique at the Valley Mall.
In mid-April, after the issue came out, the paper hosted a small gathering at Hamilton Studio for the people we profiled and a few dignitaries. It took years to realize the meet and greet was a small, cautious step beyond what we normally did as journalists:
Not just write about a group of people who might connect with each other, but to create the conditions for that connection — to invite the idea of connection — almost like prepping kindling in hopes of lighting a fire.
It didn’t take long for that particular kindling to catch.
Within a few weeks, Mariah pitched the idea that would become Terrain to Ginger over a glass of wine. Shortly after that, they reached out to Patrick and I, along with our fifth co-founder, Sara Hornor. The Inlander issue had come out in mid-April. By July, we were all sitting on the patio at The Empyrean, having our first meeting. The only thing I really remember discussing: do we actually want to do this? Then, after we all said yes: okay, how?
The idea we landed on: 1) art show, 2) big space, 3) book bands 4) invite lots of people, 5) have beer — is similar to what we did with that 20 under 30 mingle session. Not because we actively copied it. Because there are only so many ways you can try to encourage community.
It took me years to realize that’s what building community is: doing your best to put the right pieces in place for sparks to catch fire.
The organizers are not the fire itself. They aren’t even really the most important sparks. The people you are trying to reach have to have their own spark inside already. A desire for connection and closeness. Not just a hope for something more, something better, but a drive to attain it, whether the goal is universal human flourishing or a tight bluegrass four-piece.
I could go on about the highs and lows of that first year. I could — and maybe should one day — write a book about the wild shit that has happened in the decade-and-a-half since, but I’ve been trying to write this reflection for a week, and now it’s the day of the event, and even digital journalists have to sometimes meet deadlines.
So back to me on the ladder:
Even if I hadn’t been hanging art, I wouldn’t have felt like Spokane was going to be changed in that moment.
I had been to huge, ambitious parties before. This wasn’t the first underground art show someone had hosted in Spokane. That kindling had been stacked dozens of times in dozens of different ways. We stacked ours a particular way, but I don’t think it was any better or worse than the others, because your ideas and your plans as an organizer are only a part of the equation.
As with fire, there are other variables: the moisture in the wood, the wind around you. Things not really in your control.
Even by the end of the first night, after over 1,200 people had worked their way through — enough to fill basically every venue in Spokane except the Arena — with the five of us were sitting in that sauna of a bar (pro-tip: bank vault bars look cool as hell, but rooms designed to keep robbers out also tend to trap all air, heat, moisture and most bodily odors), we couldn’t know if anything was truly different.
The first Terrain was just that initial flare, like when a spark catches igniting the fast-burning tinder. Who knew if it would ignite the bigger stuff? And if it did, would that first fuel burn fully down to white hot embers, so that when we added more wood — and other people began adding theirs — there would be enough heat for the fire to continue to grow?
The milestones were gradual. We only did a second year after it stayed on people’s minds and they kept asking for a repeat. We weren’t sure we had the energy for a third year until a group of artists said, “if you don’t, we will.” When neighborhoods started asking if we could do Terrain in their neighborhoods, we made a bundle of tinder called Mobile Terrain (a semi-trailer hung with art and driven to block parties like Elkfest, RIP). That fire burned for two years before sputtering. When artists told us they couldn’t find buyers for their work, we built Bazaar, a fire that grew into a twice-a-year art market, and which continues to burn.
All of this is to say: No one has any way of knowing if their grand idea will change anything at all until it already has.
Which means, in my experience, that building community takes two radically different impulses: the audacity to try things other people might not, and the humility to admit almost none of it is in your control.
It’s a terrifying, intoxicating dynamic that feels new every time.
Because of that, I don’t have any advice at all for how to build fires that will catch every time. The best I can offer is this: if the only thing you have the power to do is to order the structure of the fire you hope to create, before the wood and the wind and the sparks take over, you owe it to yourself to spend as much time as you can studying the wood and feeling for the wind, adjusting your plan to meet the conditions, not trying to force the conditions to accept your plan.
Which is to say: wake up every day reminding yourself you have more to learn from the world you are hoping to shape than the world has to learn from you.
