Normative judgments about the weather are inherently subjective; there’s no more actually a “nice day” than there is a best flavor of ice cream. You may prefer a sun-drenched afternoon just as I choose strawberry Haagen Dazs in the frozen food aisle; ask someone else, though, and they’ll take a steady all-day drizzle even as you reach for the Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia.
That said, it would be hard to argue that the weather last night for the beloved bike gang’s annual ride into the water wasn’t perfect: an alleged 83 degrees Fahrenheit, not a cloud in the sky, snow-capped mountains visible to the south and the north and nary a breeze to shiver the timbers of dripping wet bodies in the gathering dusk. “Everybody,” I’ve been known to claim, “likes deviled eggs and Michael Jackson;” I think we can safely add to that list late July evenings on which meteorological summer finally arrives in the Pacific Northwest, the first really hot day of the season after our typical Juneuary and Julyctober.
In our hearts of hearts, we are all, in summertime, adolescent boys and girls, embracing those long school-free days with nothing else do to than sneak a beer from Dad’s fridge and pedal off somewhere to share it with our friends. The intoxication that ensues is not so much from alcohol as it is the heady mix of forbidden fruit and mutual mischievousness; all it takes to recreate that in adulthood is half a hundred bicyclists, many a half-rack of chilly brew, and a wooden ramp at the end of a T-shaped dock off of which one after another intrepid rider can hurl him or herself astride a BMX bike covered with pool noodles for flotation and padding.
As is my usual wont, I eschewed the jump in favor of back-floating and sky-gazing; nevertheless, my heart leapt each time a rider went airborne, every grinning splashdown made me warm all over, just like summertime.
That said, it would be hard to argue that the weather last night for the beloved bike gang’s annual ride into the water wasn’t perfect: an alleged 83 degrees Fahrenheit, not a cloud in the sky, snow-capped mountains visible to the south and the north and nary a breeze to shiver the timbers of dripping wet bodies in the gathering dusk. “Everybody,” I’ve been known to claim, “likes deviled eggs and Michael Jackson;” I think we can safely add to that list late July evenings on which meteorological summer finally arrives in the Pacific Northwest, the first really hot day of the season after our typical Juneuary and Julyctober.
In our hearts of hearts, we are all, in summertime, adolescent boys and girls, embracing those long school-free days with nothing else do to than sneak a beer from Dad’s fridge and pedal off somewhere to share it with our friends. The intoxication that ensues is not so much from alcohol as it is the heady mix of forbidden fruit and mutual mischievousness; all it takes to recreate that in adulthood is half a hundred bicyclists, many a half-rack of chilly brew, and a wooden ramp at the end of a T-shaped dock off of which one after another intrepid rider can hurl him or herself astride a BMX bike covered with pool noodles for flotation and padding.
As is my usual wont, I eschewed the jump in favor of back-floating and sky-gazing; nevertheless, my heart leapt each time a rider went airborne, every grinning splashdown made me warm all over, just like summertime.
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