Lit

Oddly enough, the first autumn visit to the very same park this year was way more summery than the last time we went, right by the season’s solstice.

But that’s weather in the Pacific Northwest, where the only thing you can count on is not being able to count on it, which is why you take every opportunity possible to squeeze the very last juice from a surprisingly mild September evening and pedal to the favored seaside location as fast as your little legs can carry you.

World-record time was made to the traditional provision stop, a destination that typically doesn’t show up until at least an hour later in the course of events. Still, at this point in the year, it was already dark by our arrival around the fire pit where even non-stop kibitzing from the peanut gallery wasn’t enough to put a damper on Joeball’s flame-coaxing skills, although before the cheery blaze sprung to life some wags were calling for the cashiering of his Single-Match Club merit badge.

It was one of those nights where that question frequently asked by folks on the street as our hobo peleton rolls by—“What’s this for?”—was simply self-evident: bike-riding, beer-drinking, standing around an outdoor conflagration bullshitting and then screaming at the top of your lungs when a train roars by and the usual suspect launches a beer bottle to doink or crash atop the freight cars.

Isn’t that all the answer anyone needs?

Themes, of course, are delightful and surely on the horizon as the costume and holiday seasons beckon, but there’s also much to be said for simply kickin’ the old skool essentials, including dark paths through the woods and that most elemental of shared human experiences around a common hearth.

It never gets old (in contrast to yours truly) but then why should it? This worked just fine for our hunter-gatherer ancestors ten thousand years ago, no surprise the it's still warming human hearts today.

Equinox

Most of us, I’ll warrant, spend a good deal of our lives engineering out the ambiguity and uncertainty, so it’s comforting, in a way, to give it over occasionally, and just—as they say—STFU and ride.

One is able, then, to take a certain delight in the unraveling of the mystery as it spools beneath two wheels: “Aha! Tonight we go south.” And then, “East! It’s been a while.” Until, “I’ll be damned. Up and up north.”

But finally, it doesn’t matter, and trees fly by as you simply follow blinkies over the serpentine ribbon burrowing through our fair city’s arboreal core.

Autumn officially arrived last night, although, as Lee Williams pointed out to me, this is a celestial, not meteorological marker, indeed attested to by the warm coverlet of humidity that lay softly upon riders all along the lake and up through the woods.

And while that wet blanket, as he put it, did seem to impart a certain mellowness to the evening’s proceedings, it wasn’t as if it really reduced the level of joviality and shenanigans, especially after Specialist Sean made it rain pitchers of beer and shots of whiskey at the watering hole.

But then again, such manna from heaven was the theme as lo and behold, upon a word, did trays of hackin’ Heather’s victuals appear at the lake: spaghetti, chicken, and bread pudding that made the eyes of shirtless men roll back in their heads as they daintily shoved softball-sized portions into open mouths on tiny plastic forks with pinkies upraised.

Beers were launched towards torsos in the water, of course, as surely as random bottle rockets set skyward in Wizard Staff Park were earlier.

Surprisingly, the authorities steered clear (at least on my watch), perhaps they too, subject to the mollifying effects of the evening’s atmosphere.

Really, I have no idea, which is just how I like it come fall.

Sometimes, all one need know is how not knowing nourishes.

Trails

There’s a delicate balance between tradition and novelty, but when it’s achieved, something remarkable occurs: a kind of timelessness ensues, in which past and future have no meaning and the present stretches out endlessly, an eternal now where all that ever was and will be merge as one.

Or maybe that’s just the space cookies talking.

In any case, last evening’s version of our annual memorial to the tragic events of 9/11/2001, “The Point 83 Never Forget How Fat You Really Are (I Forgot for a Little While) But Then I Remembered! Freedom Fry Eating Contest,” really did find that sweet spot between history and tomorrow with the perfect combination of old skool nonsense preceded by trails so new they have yet to be opened.

And the result was yet another occasion on which the very shamefulness of the event makes one proud to be an American.

Or at least kinda sick to your stomach.

But, of course, not nearly so ill as the “winner,” Shaddup Joe (who paid 8-1 on the nose) must be feeling this morning after downing 12, count ‘em 12, 16-ounce cups of deep-fried spuds, making “history,” I guess, in the process.

Because you see, forgetting is actually a kind of remembering, for in doing so, one recalls a time before the memory was formed—in our case, perhaps, an era of innocence before the terrorists attacked.

Thus, some healing takes place, incrementally, in passing.

All the balm I really needed, though, was to pedal en mass over a freshly-paved path along a former jungle with our fair city spreading out in all its industrial glory below and then relax a bit along the waterfront where locals jigged (jug?) squids from the dock.

These are the moments that connect us to what was and impel us towards what will be.

Or to paraphrase the timeless words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “We beat on, bikes against the current, born on ceaselessly into the past.”

Heaven

There’s got to be some religious sect somewhere that believes that this right here is the afterlife.

But if there isn’t, I’m starting one, because I don’t know how else to explain an evening like last night, which certainly seemed to embody many, if not most of the qualities I’d be looking for in a place to settle down for all eternity.

I mean who wouldn’t want to go through that tunnel of white light and end up on a bicycle, enveloped in a contingent of your fellow two-wheelers as you pedaled to the nicest beach in town, where you could then lie on your back in the water and gaze up at the celestial sphere with a nearly-full moon rising behind the evergreens?

That would be enough of a paradise for me, but then when you add to that an hilarious and probably unnecessary climb straight up some of the steepest of the steep to find yourself atop an Olympus you then get to bomb right down, well, what else can one conclude other than that this is some kind of divine reward for whatever has gone before or some such thing?

Besides, when we arrived at the trail we were seeking, there was a moment when we almost didn’t take it, so I’m thinking it just had to be supernatural guidance that convinced us to ride the twisty route after all—and it certainly looked like something out of God’s own home movies the way the blinkies ascended the tortuous path to the summit.

And then, the bar was filled with angels!

Of course, maybe in Elysium the car wash won’t stop even if the cyclists don’t align their wheels on the rollers just so, but then, not getting totally soaked is probably a sign from above, as well.

Not that the fire wasn’t a gift from the gods, too.

And I’ll be damned if we didn’t make last call at the final stop.

Heavenly.

Retrospect

At the bar, after a lovely hour or so cavorting in a park perched high atop West Seattle’s south end, and following that thrilling downhill during which, for me, at least, all the green lights were made, the Angry Hippy and I were talking about Aristotle, specifically, the part in the Nichomachean Ethics where he wonders whether a person can be made unhappy after he is dead.

Consider a scenario in which a man dies having provided well for his family and leaving a fine reputation as a scholar and citizen; in short, having lived what we would judge to be a happy life. Then, however, through a series of misfortunes and happenstance, his legacy is completely lost; his heirs suffer deeply and his once-proud reputation is utterly tarnished; he comes to be seen as a charlatan and a fraud; in other words, the life that earlier seemed happy turns out to be something completely false and empty.

The question is: would we still say the man lived a happy life?

Aristotle’s conjecture is that we wouldn’t.

Happiness, for him, is a state that needs to persevere over time; his famous quote in that regard is: “One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”

It is with confidence, therefore, that I can assert how happy indeed is the Thursday night bike ride; half a decade of delightful adventures have rolled for me under its ever-turning two wheels.

Last night, I got to appear, a bit late, at yet another location in our fair city to which I’d never been, and come upon several dozen cyclist-shaped bodies back-lit against the Seattle skyline. Shades of E.T. being pedaled before the harvest moon.

Such events, each one unique, add up. No brief time of happiness; rather, a multitude.

How can this not, then, be a happy life?

Indeed, one to die for.