The River Crossing: Why Our Youth Choose Pasco

At the water's edge, over on the Pasco side, some polished boards are laid on a rickety old dock with a canvas stretched overhead. By day it is a most unattractive and uninviting spot. There is not a tree within a mile, no grass, nothing but just a weathered old shack, some unsightly piling, with the river in front and the hot desert behind. But at night there is music, fights, river breezes, color, laughter, song, and dancing. Youth is there because those things which answer the challenge of youth's playful spirit are there. Down by the water's edge on the Kennewick side there is a grove. By day there is leafy shade overhead, cool moist earth, and green grass. It is an attractive spot, but at night it is lost to the world in shadows. It no longer exists in its own right—it is just part of the faded landscape. No music is there, no lights, no laughter, no song, no anything but darkness, hop-toads and an occasional hobo. Youth knows it not because those things by which youth's vigorous life is sustained are not there. This is but one example of what Kennewick is offering its youth. We are offering them plenty of peaches to pick—plenty of work but no play. We are operating our community too much on the centrifugal plan, instead of the centripetal. We are impelling our youth away from our community life instead of drawing them toward it. We are sending them abroad for recreation, for amusements, for pleasures. They will not come back to us as bread cast upon the waters, but as derelicts lost to the course which we might have marked for them. So long as Kennewick fails to provide a playground for its youth, just so long will Kennewick youth find a playground in Pasco.