Christmapocalypse

It’s fun to have fun, isn’t it?

The holidays are often a chore, as we work overtime to commemorate the season in dutiful and predictable ways, so it’s a welcome relief to be able to celebrate fairly irresponsibly even if it involves more than a modicum of planning including at least ten packages of playing cards and more than four dozen people on bicycles willing to pedal through the woods and up steep hills just for the sheer nonsense of it.

A steady drizzle early in the evening did little to detour the faithful and while it may have dampened one’s outerwear, it sure failed to throw any water on the celebratory mood of things—which, also, no doubt was aided by the number of Christmas lights that adorned people’s rigs, not to mention a reasonably dirty Santa and a dancing evergreen tree.

I figured out a new strategy for my checkpoint stop; last year, racers earned their bonus by joining me in the enjoyment of my stash; this year, by contrast, I provided the opportunity for participants to return the favor to me, a successful plan that resulted in my going all giggly for many hours afterward.

The reindeer games were a rousing success and made more hilarious by the setting which afforded you the opportunity to stagger around over fallen logs as you continually forgot that there they were all around.  That no one threw up—at least on my watch—is probably a minor Christmas miracle and, as far as I can tell, there was only one significant crash, and that happened on the way home, more evidence, I believe, that the Lord surely does love fools, particularly around the immaculate birthday of His only son.

Gifts were exchanged, songs were sung, and dance floor Chelanigans abounded; it felt like the best sort of family affair, one abounding with drunken uncles and crazy aunts, real holiday spirit and not just all those in people’s glasses.

Likeable

When I pointed out to Sarah-with-an-H that there were plenty of other things a person could be doing besides peddling through a mid-December drizzle on a dark and dreary end-of-autumn evening, she said, “Yes, but I like this,” which only goes to show that you're not the only one willing to illustrate Mom’s observation about people who haven’t the sense to come in out of the rain and frankly, why would you want to when being out in the weather offers opportunities for gliding along the glistening roadway, your tires hissing while your face gets a free derm-abrasion and moisturizing treatment along the way.

I’ll never know for sure if the precipitation stopped while we stood under the overpass drinking the magically-appearing beer because, as tehSchott maintained, I never went beyond the edges of our concrete umbrella, but I’m choosing to believe that either coincidentally or because the weather gods have a particularly wry sense of humor, the drizzle ended during our roadhouse-without-a-house intermission, only to resume as soon as we set out again for our remarkably close by destination.

It was one of those nights when the club really lived up to its name or so it seemed until the ride home, which was surely longer than 83 one-hundredths of a mile but by that time, who cares about getting wet, especially given a good two hours of indoor drinking to prepare for it.

And besides, you do have to be impressed with such a solid turnout of old and new on so crummy of a night, a phenomenon that makes you wonder what else, really, could folks be doing this holiday season: watching It’s a Wonderful Life on TV while sipping an eggnog?  Stringing popcorn garlands which to adorn the Christmas tree?  Gathering around the burning Yule log to sing songs about Jesus and Santa Claus?

All of those, certainly, are worthy endeavors, but when it comes to what’s liked on a Thursday, two wheels wins once again.

Blowhard

While there were a good many instances when the wind, whipping through the corridors of buildings, made your bike veer suddenly one way or another and brought an involuntary “Wheeeee!” to your lips, it nevertheless seemed like the earlier forecasts of an all-out windpocalypse were somewhat overstated.

As we stood at Drink Quick Park in Queen Anne overlooking Our Fair City, we saw flashes of lightning in the distance and Little Stephen gleefully pointed out how the tall skinny cypress trees waggled their tops like tickling fingertips, not a single rolling blackout nor exploding transformer was in evidence anywhere.

Serendipity abounded, though, as the subsequent stop at nearby Targy’s Tavern to pursue our own version of rolling blackouts coincided remarkably well with the one drenching shower of the evening and provided an authentic opportunity to see illustrated that idiom about being busier than a one-armed bartender, although “paper-hanger” strikes me as slightly more evocative.

Eventually, there was the picturesque descent and space-age bridge crossing to meander through the blustery waterfront for an opportunity to view the fabled “Murray’s Fault,” which turned out to be no more impressive than the weather—even though, potentially, it’s likely to be far more damaging to our local infrastructure than a handful of downed trees and power lines.

And then, it was off to the Gardens of Bush where we managed to wear out our welcome as usual for what hardly seemed anything more than a little spirit of the season in the grand scheme of things.

Looking back on it all, you might say that the experience failed to live up to the hype, but that would be to misconstrue the wondrous ability of human beings to make predications about the future but still be surprised by the outcome.  The space between what we expect and what actually occurs is where life takes place and if it can do so on a day where nearly everyone sees rainbows, then that’s living.

Swamp

At the beginning of the evening, chasing a dream, I knew when I ran into Fancy Fred that all the desired connections would be made.  There he was, in the flesh, right in the middle of where it seemed like what we both were looking for.

Pretty soon right away thereafter and thanks to some words exchanged via outer space, we were all bombing through Interlachen to the standard provisioning stop and jumping off place for adventures northeast.

It seemed for a while that woods and shelter would be the first destination but here’s the most amazing bit of all: a brand-new warm and cozy gathering space in a spot that’s always been missing the one component it’s always needed.

See how the simple addition of the simplest addition turns a swamp into home?

Somewhere off towards the University, a spotlight glared its eye at us.  But my fears were assuaged when I realized, by walking a mere twenty yards or so from the assembled, that our level of external illumination was all but invisible in contrast to everything around—which also was another lesson in the healthy narcissism of the human condition.

The rain really only called for the non-existent evergreen canopy for about ten blustery minutes, just long enough to start noticing that as long as you continued rotating slowly near the hearth, you could balance the wetting with the drying, an enterprise arguably more about angles than anything else.

A two-fire night was proposed, but just in the nick of time, did Kevin WC survive his encounter with a bungie cord to reprovision; the drizzle dried up and until the beer quickly ran out, you got to experience that fine balance between the greatest feeling in the world that as homo sapiens we’ve been hard-wired by tens of thousands of years to feel great about and the concurrent observation that you’re standing outside in a muddy wetlands should anyone care enough to take notice.