Lucky

It’s crazy to think about: 

You could be in Ft. Myers, Florida, half-drowned and digging out of your hurricane-ruined home, but instead, you’re standing atop a deserted parking garage, seven stories up, drinking beer and marveling at the crescent moon hanging over a baseball stadium where fireworks have just been set off to celebrate a home run by the home team on the verge of their first playoff appearance in more than two decades.

Or, you could be in Ukraine, without water or power amidst the rubble, defending your homeland from military aggression by one of the world’s nuclear powers, but instead, you’re hanging out at a secret gazebo in an arboretum, surrounded by native and exotic trees and shrubbery, (also drinking beer) and contemplating life, death, and everything in between including rock stars with a small but enthusiastic group of cyclists, some of whom have made the classic blunder of carrying their bikes down the steps, but that’s about the worst of it, to tell the truth.

Or, you could be in Wittenoom, Australia, a town so polluted by asbestos that it became a carcinogenic time bomb as mining waste products known as tailings were brought there, paved into roads and scattered in playgrounds to suppress dust, but instead, you’re bombing down a hill free of cars, thrilling to the speed of descent and laughing maniacally just for fun.

So many places in the world touched by so much tragedy and loss, and yet here you are, on a Thursday night in the upper left hand corner of the American map having nothing to really complain about, but rather, nearly everything to celebrate: cycling, fellowship, gentle intoxication, the unseasonably warm and dry weather, the simple, unparalleled joy of pedaling through the woods to someplace wonderful, casual banter and the occasional joke at someone else’s expense, and all of this for free (more or less).

It's enough to make a person cry.  Or laugh maniacally.  

Or with luck, both.

Enthused

I think Bertrand Russell put it best.

Take it away, Bertie: 

“Prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life.  The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence.  In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence has destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations.  The Bacchic ritual produced what was called ‘enthusiasm,’ which means, etymologically, having the god enter into the worshipper, who believes that he became one with the god.  Much of what is greatest in human achievement involves some element of intoxication, some sweeping away of prudence by passion.  Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous.”

Although William James was no slouch, either.

On you, Billy:

“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.”

Almost like they were there.

Infrastructure

Maybe not quite there, but you can see it from here: biking the entire way from Pike Market to South Park on cycling infrastructure.  

It isn't all newly-paved and striped separated bike lanes, but can you imagine how awful it would be to ride on West Marginal Way at night, with cars literally racing by, without the Duwamish Trail to take instead?  It may not be all that scenic from start to finish, but it sure beats getting creamed by some dude in his souped-up sporty car.

Old skool Thursday: First and only stop an old favorite watering hole, now with outdoor Parisian café motif rather than Airstream hotbox.  Plenty fine, though, including an impressive sandwich and ice cold tallboys.

Got a little confused on the parking garage egress at the beginning; thanks to those with a greater willingness to descend for finding the way out.

No more hot sunset rides until March; Civil Twilight and arm warmers does the trick for now.

The low bridge opened exactly on cue; aspirations to explore its bigger brother were set aside, probably for the best; no swims were passed up, at least.

What can you say that hasn’t been said?  In all likelihood, not much.  Traditional admonitions are nevertheless worth repeating: lock to locks, not bikes; don’t eat the whole cookie (eat two!); bring a sweater, and don’t consume anything bigger than your head.  Repeating does not always mean following.  Obviously.

I would offer this, however: an intoxicating evening sure makes the ride up through the International District and Jackson Street much easier.  May just be a matter of short-term memory loss, but that works.  

There’s an old philosophical thought experiment that asks whether you’d rather pay a thousand dollars for a major surgery with traditional General anesthesia or five dollars for the same surgery without anesthesia, but with a drug that makes you completely forget the experience.

If you can’t remember, it never happened.  Or did it?

Last

If it were my final Point83 ride (not in forever, but for a while, and not including, of course, signature events like the Christmas Disaster, Ben Country, and the Professor Dave race, which surely warrants a three and a half-hour drive across the entire state of Washington to commemorate the start of spring, just sayin’), I would want to ride to Carkeek Park.

After all, no spot more reliably offers—and has historically offered—the opportunity to savor so many of the peculiar delights one reliably (and historically) savors on a Thursday night out on two wheels, including a route there that’s just a little too long, with a bridge across a body of water shimmering in the late summer sunset, some unnecessary climbing but which results in a thrilling bomb downhill, a twisty, turning, dark descent into an old-growth Pacific Northwest forest, and a final destination of a classic firepit replete with freight trains passing by for rock-tossing and LOLs.

I would want, as well, to take a spin around Ye Olde Seattle Center Ghettodrome, because, really, what’s more Seattle than that, unless it’s Dick’s Hamburgers, which would show up, too, in a bag in a mouth, according to that old joke.

I’d also take the opportunity incite the good-natured ire of an old friend with an imperfectly executed practical joke resulting in some sticky residue to remember me by and ultimately, absolution all around.

Plus, I wouldn’t mind the chance to provide some care and solace to a fallen comrade, especially if they weren’t injured too badly after all, whew!

And, as long as I’m dreaming here, I’d also want there to be a visually (if not astronomically) full moon rising up so bright that it would make a subtle rainbow in the pocket of clouds it peeks through.

Finally, when the fire burnt down, I’d do the classic “Irish Goodbye”, so even though I was gone, it would always be like I’d never left.

Loop

No doubt there are equally marvelous cities in which to ride a bicycle: 

• Amsterdam, surely, where you could pedal on separated bike lanes all the way to Germany, probably
  
  
• Portland, of course, where you could gather under a freeway overpass with five hundred or so of your closest friends for some sort of post-apocalyptic cycling dance party with fire dancers and gladiators
  
  
• Perhaps even the new mecca of Spokanistan, where it seems like all your dearest friends will be living and riding bicycles within a decade
  

but it’s hard to imagine a better place to be out on two wheels than our fair city of Seattle, which affords you the opportunity to:

• Pedal over grand span at sunset with water and mountains on both sides
  
  
• Continue—on a striped bike lane—through the kind of “geography of nowhere” which characterizes so much of suburban America
  
  
• Meander along a converted rail-to-trail path alongside a cemetery for maximum peace and quiet
  
  
• End up at a spring-fed lake on a dead end near some lucky folks’ backyards for immersion into the smoothest water in town
  
  
• Then return, to more or less where you started almost twenty miles previously, via an almost continuous downhill through much leafier and less car-centric streets
  
  
• So, you can officially commemorate the end of the pandemic by enjoying what has long seemed to be the final nail in its coffin: the sharing of a common microphone among strangers for belting out favorite tunes to the amusement—and, in some cases, if truth be told, amazement of those in attendance
  
  
• Before heading out on nearly-empty city streets to home and hearth, a greeting from the dog, and a soft bed in which to repose, your head filled with glorious images of the waxiemoon late summer evening out on two wheels to color your bicycling dreams all night long.

Take that, Amsterdam! 

 In your face, Portland!  

Yo, Spokanistan, top this!

Home sweet Seattle home, always sweeter by bike.