Magnetic McEuen

You could ask, but you wouldn't get anything better.

Spotless skies. Seventy-two degrees. Heaven-sent breeze. The squeal of little laughter from pint-sized packages frolicking just beyond their happy mommies' reach.

Friday morning at the new McEuen Park in downtown Coeur d'Alene provided a snapshot for the ages. Thing is, it's a snapshot that will be repeated over and over and over again.

With a dirt patch roughly the size of Rhode Island still needing work, it's too early to anoint McEuen the second coming of Park Paradise, but dang, it's certainly on the right path. A couple months from now, fair judgment can be passed. Meantime, there's much to anticipate and to appreciate.

What struck us most was this: In an age when our kids are getting too fat and too lazy, too far removed from Mother Nature's gentle kiss, along comes a park like McEuen, right on time.

At a quarter after 11 Friday morning, we counted 73 children in the playground and splashpad area (the splashers weren't yet turned on), most of them appearing to be preschool age. There were at least two dozen adults, too, bringing the total to about 100 people in a relatively small area of the park. And this was just the very beginning; the first day the public was invited to come on down and play for awhile, and an hour or so before swarms of Sorensen kids invaded the place.

Since the controversial conversion of McEuen reached boiling point and threatened to burst the community's thermometer, we have made numerous strolls past the park in peak season. At no time in recent summers had we ever seen more than a dozen or so people using the park, and that includes late mornings, lunchtimes and afternoons. To see many times that number on a weekday morning in early May gives us great hope that generations of local youngsters will have summers full of great exercise, healthy activities and family-bonding time.

Of course, tourists can and will use McEuen too, as a letter in today's letters to the editor suggests. No problem; there's plenty of fun to go around. Our abiding regret is that this playland wasn't here when we were young.