A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT : WATERFRONT CHARMS MARK SPOKANE, WASHINGTON'S OTHER CITY.

Byline: Jeremy Bagott Daily News Staff Writer

If you were a molecule of water where the Spokane River exits Lake Coeur D'Alene in northern Idaho, you'd be pulled inexorably toward the city that bears the river's name.

You'd pass through the dam at Post Falls and then the hamlet of Greenacres, Wash. And just when you thought you'd made it to Spokane - whammo! - you're atomized and wind up as spume on someone's Ray-Bans, for one of Spokane's most spectacular shows is a loud, frothy manifestation of that river: Spokane Falls, in Riverfront Park in the middle of town.

Like any life-giving artery, the river runs through Spokane, nourishing and cleansing it; quenching and sustaining it, then going on to fill irrigation ditches in Eastern Washington's rolling wheat and lentil fields before flowing into the Columbia at Grand Coulee Dam.

Not that all city life revolves around the river. It doesn't. Spokane, Washington state's second-largest city, is no Alexandria and the river, no Nile. But it is, nonetheless, more than a mere geographic expression to this city of 177,000. It is intertwined in what the city is and has been from the days of Lewis and Clark and - if the dam-building utilities continue to mind their manners - what the city will become.

Downtown Spokane, along streets like Howard, Ash and Monroe, is an older area with restored neo-classical facades and overhead pedestrian crossings. Its restaurants, sidewalk cafes and specialty stores stay energized and relatively safe into the early hours of the morning. Anchoring downtown is Riverfront Park, which true to its name fronts the river and, with its opera house and convention center, was the site of the International Exposition of the Environment in 1974. A gondola system takes the city's denizens and a few thrill-seeking tourists across the river, right above the falls. Others content themselves with ogling the spectacle from its banks.

Spokane is a clean city. While memorable travel is seldom marked by cleanliness issues - case in point: the dung-filled streets of Pamplona, Spain, during the running of the bulls - a clean city is, to be sure, more hygienic. Spokane is cleaner than Los Angeles and probably cleaner than Seattle. And while it lacks some of the latter's glitz, it thankfully lacks most of its gloomy weather.

By the way, Spokanians go to extremes to avoid these off-the-rack comparisons to the state's other big city. Late in the last century, a group of industrialists got together and tried to break away from the western part of the state. Had they succeeded - and seceded - the new state would have been called Lincoln and Spokane would have been its industrial hub and capital.

On the riverfront

One night, I walk through Spokane's downtown Riverfront Park, past a huge, silent turn-of-the-century carousel, to the river bank. A full moon casts a bluish glow on the water and the tree tops, and throws shadows on grass-covered hills and smooth boulders that line the river banks. In the moonshine, the falls and its churning effervescence look more like the centerpiece of some yet-to-be-conceived Las Vegas theme hotel than a work of nature.

I make small talk with a couple sitting on folding chairs and watching the spectacle. We are the only humans within sight. They invite me to have a seat on their cooler. With a large workman's hand, the man uncorks a label-less bottle and pours some of its content into a Styrofoam cup.

``It's gin,'' says his wife. ``We make it from our own juniper berries.''

She shakes salt onto a hard-boiled egg and hands it to me.

The libation - overlooking the fact that it tastes nothing like gin - isn't bad.

``You have to grow both male and female junipers to get these berries,'' the man says. ``Takes two years.''

The taste of the salted egg and gin overwhelms my palate as the falls pummel my other senses.

Somewhere in the distance - possibly from Salty's or some other riverfront club - a woman's voice can be heard belting out a languid rendition of ``Mack the Knife.'' Like something out of a ``Twin Peaks'' episode, the moment seems surreal, frozen in time.

A small town

Unlike Seattle, it's trend-conscious rival to the west, Spokane is essentially a small town. It's a town of refreshingly bad haircuts, comfortable tummies and sensible footwear. It's a place where the McDonald's all accept personal checks and where Chinese restaurants must offer French fries to survive.

The women in cat's-eye glasses and Wilma Flintstone bouffants here are not making a retro-'60s fashion statement. They are making a '60s fashion statement the first time around.

That the punk-rock movement has only now reached Spokane, with flocks of young poseurs in purple Mohawks bumming cigarettes from passers-by, says much more about Spokane than it does about the frivolities of youth.

One morning we head to the river to bathe (Spokanians say ``bathing,'' but they almost invariably mean sunning) at a spot where a suspension foot bridge spans a succession of rapids at a spot known as Bowl and Pitcher.

About swimming in the Spokane River: It's allowed, but fast-moving currents, varying depths and the absence of lifeguards make it a risky proposition.

There are three unsupervised beaches along the river: Boulder Beach, off Upriver Drive near Minnehaha; People's Park, just west of Peaceful Valley; and the Bowl and Pitcher.

We lie in an alcove on a pebbled beach and dip our feet into the Spokane's cool waters and bat at the few mosquitoes that somehow have evaded our best repelling efforts - a homemade bug dope with a strong tar smell that we bought at a roadside stand. Later, we hike along a trail that parallels the river, which seems to change wildly every time it comes into view.

A tree city

Spokane is a city of gingerbread homes built early in the century and streets lined with drain-busting, sidewalk-raising poplars. Larch, spruce and massive ponderosas also overgrow its yards and inhabit its forests.

So aggressive and hearty are Spokane's ubiquitous poplars that a local firm has even begun raising them for paper pulp, since they can be harvested every eight years.

Due either to a dearth of natural disasters or some force hidden deep in the city's collective psyche, massive red brick mills, textile works and railroad depots from the last century still stand, many boarded up in various states of dilapidation.

Is there some unexpressed need here to hold onto the city's 19th- century past, to its heyday as a railroad and lumber boomtown? Some of the old edifices have been restored and made into restaurants or are being used once more by industry. Others stand silent and empty, like prairie shipwrecks.

Downtown Spokane

At the Mars Hotel, a downtown eatery and watering hole with an early-'60s Vegas air - indoor vines and Tiki decor - groups of twentysomethings assemble to listen to jazz in the club's split-level lounge. Whether the groups of revelers - guys in pomaded hair under porkpie hats, and their dates in elbow-length gloves and sipping zombies - realize they are part of the emerging Cocktail Nation scene, a bicoastal Peggy-Lee-and-Dave-Brubeck-over-martinis revival, or whether, again, it's just taken a few extra years for the early '60s to make it here, is anyone's guess.

In contrast to Seattle, there's no ``Spokane Sound,'' no hair-swinging, angst-driven groups like Presidents of the United States, Nirvana or Pearl Jam. In the eyes of this slightly balding baby boomer, that fact works in Spokane's favor. Anyone who has experienced the ``sound'' at too many decibels in clubs like Seattle's Romper Room, a haunt so artsy and bohemian that it borders on self-parody, can attest to this.

Nor have any of Spokane's denizens ever written a touchy-feely symphony honoring a devastating eruption of a volcano in the region. This, too, may work in Spokane's favor.

Yes, grungy packs of misunderstood youths can be seen hanging out at Dick's, a cheapo hamburger joint off Spokane's Division Street, or converging on the Moon Shadow on North Howard where they browse, beat African drums and buy Grateful Dead stuff.

But one has the feeling that the misunderstood teens of this town - unlike those of Seattle, where the crisis of youth has become a cottage industry - will negotiate the rocky shoals and swirling eddies of adolescence and one day wind up, like so much water over the falls, delivered.

Outtakes

SPOKANE, Wash. - The big river of Eastern Washington is not the Spokane but the Columbia. Both, however, cut deep, dividing landscapes and people and creating conflicts more enduring than the dams and levees that contain them.

American Indians, who crusade for salmon rights, draw the ire of farmers and barge pilots, whom they call bigots. Recreation-minded urbanites, known contemptuously as ``fish lovers'' or ``fishies,'' threaten the status quo of the utility executives, whom they mock as ``pin-striped poachers,'' and the businessmen who depend on cheap electrical power for local industry.

Paper and pulp producers have another agenda. The commercial fisherman on the lower Columbia, still another. So it seems more than just slightly ironic that Spokane's main thoroughfare, one that bisects the city and crosses the river, is in fact called Division Street.

At Auntie's Bookstore on West Main, I leaf through a book titled ``A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia,'' by Blaine Harden, a Washington Post writer who grew up in Moses Lake, Wash., about 100 miles west of Spokane. The book deals with the schism in the Pacific Northwest over its largest river.

Has the Spokane River, like the Columbia of Harden's book, also ``lived and died''?

I put in a call to Harden, now the Post's New York bureau chief, and put the question to him.

No, the river isn't exactly dead, ``but you do realize it no longer has salmon?'' says Harden.``It was denuded of its most important resource back when the Grand Coulee Dam was built. There's some trout here and there, but the rivers are being turned inside out by these dams.''

It's spring and the Great Ecological Debate is raging right now in Eastern Washington, over lumbering, hydroelectric power, dumping of industrial waste from wood pulp, American Indian rights to land and the rivers and the list goes on and on.

Since the Pacific Northwest has also become de rigueur among out-of-staters looking for open space, new, aggravating aspects have been added to the old batch of problems.

Says Harden: ``There's a great myth in these parts of the rugged individualist but at the same time, there's the attitude that government subsidies to the region are a birthright.

``The river is a corollary to that. The people who see hydro-electric power as a birthright are generally those people who are willing to take no

responsibility for the river after they get their electricity.

``You can justify anything you do if you have a sufficiently developed set of myths.''

Indeed.

On Location

For more information about Spokane, contact the Spokane Area Convention & Visitors Bureau, [phone].

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos, 2 Boxes

Photo: (1-3--Color) Like a life-giving artery, the Spokane River, top, runs through its namesake city. Above left, one of the city's many sidewalk cafes bustles with activity. Above right, downtown Spokane boats neo-classical facades and old-fashioned touches such as this timepiece.

Jeremy Bagott/Daily News

Box: (1) Outtakes (See text)

(2) On Location (See text)