The Sunday Read: ‘I Had a Chance to Travel Anywhere. Why Did I Pick Spokane?’

<p>Jon Mooallem, the author of today’s Sunday Read, had a bad pandemic.</p><p>“I began having my own personal hard time,” he writes. “The details aren’t important. Let’s just say, I felt as if I were moldering in place.”</p><p>Then, The New York Times Magazine offered him the opportunity to fly somewhere for its travel issue — at that point he had spent 17 months parenting two demanding children. So, he asked: “What if I drove to Spokane?” Jon had been curious about it for years.</p><p>Spokane, Wash., is the birthplace of Father’s Day, the hometown of Bing Crosby and a city with a sequence of wide, rocky waterfalls pouring through its center like a Cubist boulevard.</p><p>“I also knew that Spokane was a city with a history of minor-league baseball that stretched back more than a hundred years,” Jon writes. “A minor-league game felt like a manageable, belated step into the mid-pandemic lifestyle that people were calling post-pandemic life.”</p><p><i><strong>This story</strong> <strong>was written and narrated by Jon Mooallem</strong>. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, </i><a href="https://www.audm.com/?utm_source=nytmag&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=take_me_out_mooallem" target="_blank"><i>download Audm for iPhone or Android</i></a><i>.</i></p>