Elemental

You get to ride bikes through the woods at night to a secluded beach near the northwest corner of the continent where the waves, though just squirrel-sized, are actually crashing on the shore, stand around or apart from a cozy fire drinking beer and telling lies; the stars are out and rotating gently around or so it seems from your vantage point on planet Earth; you’re there long enough that the tide comes in, the flames die down, and eventually, you’re treated to a long solitary uphill that’s just familiar enough to be sufficiently confusing to turn into a nice little adventure on the way out of the park and eventually to the bar where friendly faces abound.

And you might have passed that all up for what?  Sports, television, or the internet?

I suppose I could understand the first option, at least if the Steelers were playing, a fun fact about my character that the Angry Hippy duly appreciated when we chatted about the bleeding of Black and Gold at the Boxcar, but even a hometown victory pales in comparison to the Big Dipper overhead and sand beneath your feet, arrived at via two wheels, under the cover of a chilly, but remarkably dry, November evening.

Plus, there was the futuristic thrill of pedaling over the luminous space-age magic carpet not just once, but twice, including what may be the new go-to route home from Magnolia, especially after dark.

For tens of thousands of years, our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the region probably gathered at the very same spot we did; you could feel their ancient spirits among us (or maybe that was just me, celebrating the passage of Initiative 502, albeit a month or so early).

Suffice it to say that homo sapiens’ evolutionary connection to the experience of flames on that windswept corner of land by the  Sound go way deeper than even the bond one might feel with a Steel Curtain.

Immaculate reception, indeed.