Dive

photo by joeball

It’s as corny as a Celine Dion song sung by a unicorn on a rainbow, but it’s true: sometimes it’s not about where you go, but how you get there.

Greenlake is as mundane a destination as there is, but when you arrive via a spin around the Ghettodrome, a climb over Queen Anne, and a thrilling descent which takes you across the Aurora Bridge in the so-called “bus lane,” it’s as special as anyone could hope for and at least as unusual as nachos in the park, an experience that in more than half a century on the planet, I’ve never ever experienced before.

Advice is, almost by definition, trite, but I offer it to myself on these occasions and am reminded never to pass up a chance to swim when it presents itself.

Forty eight hours before, you’re floating on your back under a full moon in the Caribbean Sea, but paddling about in a city park pond is equally glorious in its own way since, among other things, it doesn’t require twelve hours of travel time in aluminum containers but rather, is reached simply by snaking through one’s hometown astride a steel two-wheeler.  It may not be a glowing turquoise paradise, but all the elements are there for a live to be lived as fully as possible, hackneyed and pedestrian as that sentiment surely is.

But, of course, it’s not all old hat: pretty soon you’re arriving by bike at a splendid old local watering hole you don’t ever recall drinking at before, and it’s even got a self-styled “deck” in the back where Soccer moms strategize about how to get their kids to school and ballet lessons before being descended upon by a dozen or so beer drinkers who laugh loudly enough to drown out their conversation and earn the friendly ire of the joke-telling bartender who runs the joint.

And then you’re riding home, one more destination whose journey is that, too.