Equal

from skyatnight magazine

Tradition, such as it is, often finds the Thursday night bicycle ride heading to that favored bluff above the railroad tracks alongside Puget Sound north of Elliot Bay on dates closest to the astronomical change of seasons.  

On the longest, shortest, and most equal days of the year, it’s not unusual for the usual group of miscreants to risk collarbones and front teeth on a path through the woods in order to congregate around what’s undoubtedly among the best of officially-sanctioned firepits in our fair city, so as to drink from aluminum cans, man- (and sometimes woman)-splain each other on topics of shared interest, and, sooner or later, pass judgment on the inevitable fire-fucking that inevitably fucks with the fire, no matter what.

Never before, though, has this relatively common occurrence included an impromptu concert by  couple of amateur musicians on what are officially known as melodicas, but which all agreed are better known by the more generic term “mouth organs” (although there was that time our old friend set up a computerized karaoke machine with Bluetooth speakers so the assembled could croon along to Livin’ on a Prayer in the moonlight), which just goes to show that the appropriate balance of the new with the old emerges pretty naturally when night and day are almost perfectly equivalent at this time of year.

For the next three months or so, every nighttime grows longer; ain’t nothing we can do about that, so it seems appropriate to find that ideal fulcrum on which to teeter-totter one more time before descent into the darkness.

Another new parking lot, an unprecedented (and markedly superior—albeit superfluously vertical) route to the bridge combined with the tried-and-true provisioning stop and those hamburgers that go way back: the new and the old meeting in the middle just as light and darkness embrace as equals twice a year.

And an early departure, balancing innovation and familiarity, too much and not enough, ideally once more.

Simple

The Big Dark is coming: Seasonally, of course, as the days get shorter, the nights get longer, and our fair city’s annual gloomy half-year approaches (that is, arrives), but also probably from a global climate standpoint, as our planetary environment continues to degrade and the effects of anthropogenic climate change manifest themselves with extreme weather events, forest fires, and millions of human beings displaced from their homes as a result.

What this means—apart from the likelihood of increased spending on consciousness-altering substances—is that every day we’re alive has a pretty good chance of being among the best days we’re going to experience before we die.  As everything careens downhill, today probably has more potential for good things happening than tomorrow, next week, or, almost certainly, three decades from now.

So may as well make hay while the sun shines, as they say, where “hay” means riding your bike across town, down steep hills, and over gravel with a  couple dozen other cyclists, and “sun shines” means having a fire in an officially-sanctioned public fire pit in a park at the top of a hill among a grove of American Chestnut trees, while standing around quaffing quaffables and chatting about the British Imperial Raj, the relative merits of various bike parts, and reminiscences of the humorous errors in judgment of people’s previous selves and how little has changed in their current incarnations.

The doo-wop group The Drifters famously sang about the fun they’d be having under the boardwalk in 1964; it’s nice to know that 57 years later, a different assemblage of drifters can enjoy the amusement which follows from being atop the wooden slats; those oldies crooners noted that they’d be falling in love from below; and while that amorous result is no certainty in the present day overhead, one’s heart can’t help but swell to the beat of bike tires on wood.

Simple truth: yesterday may often surpass tomorrow, but today’s pretty good, too.

Bonus

from space.com

Honestly, when the evening begins with a corkscrew spiral to the top of a previously-untopped parking garage commanding a spectacular view of the sun setting over the Puget Sound (and a peek inside the kitchens of several urban condo dwellers), everything subsequent is playing with house money, so to speak.

It’s all bonus time after that, whether it be:

1) a quick spin around the traditional mini-velodrome, 

2) a relaxed refreshment stop on the roof of another parking structure, this one festooned with multiple vegetable plots and not one, but three, tiny backyard lawns, perfect for reclining with a cold one while marveling at the crepuscular conjunction of the waxing crescent moon and an extra-bright Hesperus, 

3) a short, but suitably terrible hike-a-bike on the way to the “easy” route towards Seattle’s largest city park, 

4) a thrilling descent of a hill that is way steeper going up than down, or 

5) a congregation and conflagration waterside under the starry heavens with ample space and time for everyone talking at once, often in violent agreement about topics of shared interest and eventually communal exasperation.

Once again, nature’s bounty proves ever bountiful, especially when enhanced by the pleasures associated with experiencing them via bicycle.

Naturally, as the traditional structures of civil society continue to fray, it becomes more incumbent upon each of us as individuals and as members of the groups of which we’re part, to create our own shared rules and norms.  When primary among such rules is that there are no rules, things get more complicated.  

That’s when it’s okay for sticks to come out to enforce some modicum of common sense, but also the time to be reminded—typically by the common sense challengers themselves—that it’s been proven time and again that more than enough turns out to be just the right amount in the end.

The bonus, in other words, isn’t really a bonus, after all.  

Too much, once more, is just enough.

Fresh

Lake Washington, 1957

A newborn infant will be my age in the year 2085.  What will our fair city be like by then?

Will people still be able to ride their bicycles past homeless encampments set up alongside the International District or will the whole area just be tents and tarps and stolen bikes?

Will they be able to congregate on the rocky shores of Lake Washington on the north end of Seward Park and enjoy the holy grail of both fire-lighting and water-immersing on a perfectly clear late summer night or will the pebbles have disintegrated and the water turned to goo?  Will there even be stars visible overhead with forests scorched all across the West?

Maybe things will be better, who knows?  I’m pretty sure, for instance, that the water quality in Lake Washington is superior to how it was in 1957; there’s surely less sewage in it, as attested by the information gleaned from a highly-reliable source that not a single swimming beach from Kenmore to Renton was closed yesterday for excess fecal coliform.

Will there even be geese in six and a half decades from now?  And if so, maybe they’ll all be fitted with aerial porta-potties that process their poop before it finds the ground or water, why not?

I’ve heard that the bicycle was developed, at least in part, due to the die-off of horses following devastating feed-crop failures in the wake of the volcanic explosion of Mt. Tambor in 1815; so maybe human ingenuity will save us.  

Maybe today’s newborns will ride their solar-powered flying two-wheelers to the shores of a pristine Lake Washington through a city that provides housing and sustenance to all people everywhere.  Maybe they will ignite a non-fossil fuel burning conflagration alongside the water with a  wave of their hands, whose leftover coals will cool automatically and immediately with a snap of the fingers.

I hope the best for them; if they’ve got it as good as us, that’s great.