Chicanery

You’ve got to love the Americans with Disabilities Act not just because of the protections it provides for people with special needs, but also for the ancillary benefit enjoyable by “able” bodies on bicycles in the form of switch-backed wheelchair ramps affording two-wheeled access up and down a couple of our fair city’s most urban parks; chicanery through concrete chicanes, so to speak.

Brotorff’s right when he says “No plan is the best plan;” instead, you can just have a notion to sort of dead reckon to the next spot, be it a never-before-visited parking garage, a Teletubby parklet overlooking sports stadiums and highways, a neighborhood pea patch beneath an awe-inspiring pink and golden late spring sunset, an unprecedented visitation of home and hearth, a hidden footbridge over that unexpected ravine, a bar, believe-or-not, and what turns out to sort of be some condominium complex’s waterfront barbecue patio; somehow, you end up at each of these for a while and that turns out to have been the unplanned plan all along. 

Sometimes, it’s not about getting somewhere, but rather, about seeing where you get to on the way; a whole evening can be spent heading towards the place you’re heading for, which means, I guess, that the whole time you’re out, you’ve already done arrived.

I admit to squirminess when the clock starts a-tickin’; it’s all too easy to take root with the familiar, so you’ve got to keep some momentum, even if the inclination is towards the unknown.

Hope springs eternal, or at least for a handful of hours, at least with a vague notion of what’s in store next.  I like being surprised by the surprising; I’m similarly amused by the amusing, and all along, what’s thrilling keeps on thrilling me.

They say cultivating gratitude helps keep a person happy; I’ll buy it.  And besides, it’s easy to be grateful for what makes a person grateful: chicanery abounds, no plan planned for at all.

Nettles

In her epic (the traditional sense of epic, as in “narrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the history of a nation,” not the “epic” of “moderately all right, average at best), novel of Seattle’s history, Great Son, Edna Ferber (best known for Giant, made into the movie with James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor), writes that our fair city is “too much of everything.”  It “suffers from giantism,” with two man-made canals, two ample bodies of water, two mountain ranges, and “seven hills higher than the classic seven hills of the Eternal City.”  The place is “fantastic,” “absurd,” “thrilling,” and “majestic.”  “We’re the city of Seattle in the state of Washington, and like the fella says, we’re all there is.  There isn’t any more.”

But, of course, you don’t have to curl up with Ferber’s novel to realize this (although doing so is highly recommended); all you really need is to ride your bike along Elliot Bay in the long lingering light of a late spring evening, portage through a surprisingly well-groomed hobo trail in the woods, and make your way among the preternaturally-tidy streets of Magnolia to end up, finally, on a bluff overlooking the Puget Sound so as to admire 360 degrees of awesome, including a couple of sundogs above the water as a visual lagniappe to top it off.

And that’s just the beginning!

Later, you get to congregate in a forest glade and enjoy a warming glow coaxed from available windfall (and a healthy dose of Girl Scout/Boy Scout water), not just one, but two, (in keeping with Ferber’s observation) doses of amazing; talk about “giantism,” indeed; this would have to be extra-giant giantism, if you ask me.

A solid effort all around, including unexpected scooters and an absolutely thrilling descent on the way home.

No doubt there are other places in the world with such bounty, but I’ll take Seattle: fantastically, absurdly, majestically thrilling, twice over, once more.

Enough

 Enough is enough is enough is enough.

Getting rousted by the cops is plenty, as well.

Let science inform our choices.

And remind us to go to bed.

Mornings after a night out on two wheels can be surprising.  If you get up early enough and do all the usuals, you can make it into the day before feeling hungover.  

Same goes for destinations the night before: the park is never quite exactly where you expect it to be, so it’s good to have local expertise to guide you towards the place you thought you wanted to get to all along.

Spruced up, or maybe just especially lovely in the crepuscular glow through the windows of the luminous squat warehouse across the way, the former gas station artifacts made first-time visitors gape in awestruck wonder and those who’d been there before think “Yep.  This is fine.”

It makes a big difference when there’s someone who cares about and for the garden; the bearded irises, in particular, put a smile on one’s face.

Nature, they say, abhors a vacuum, which is why, I believe, pedaling fools rush in to fill the void created by some sort of civic project that turned the former RV parking lot and homeless community back into just a bit of industrial wasteland by the waters of our fair city’s Superfund site river core, where cardboard and sticks could be coaxed into igniting palettes for just long enough to attract the attention of authorities who were ultimately far more interested in seeing our taillights in the distance than making a fuss.

Once again, thankfully, privilege is a privilege.

Subsequently, there was scattering towards points north and east.

Perhaps someday I’ll tire of the way the right combination of effects and causes makes the final hill home not quite so steep, but for now, and in the foreseeable future. I’ll keep being satisfied with this much of enough, enough being enough, enough of the time.