Scorchy

Back in the Aughts, the only way to meet up with the ride after it started was to just vibe it.  

You’d have to consult your inner bicycle beacon to just feel in the little two-wheeled center of your body where the group was headed.  This led to some wild-goose chase rides all by yourself to random corners of our fair city, but it also provided a few instances where you just happened to get it right, like that time you just knew that the costumed shenanigans would be taking place at the karaoke joint on Capitol Hill or that instance where you homed in on a bike pile outside of a watering hole in your neighborhood more or less.

A bit later in the century, during the early Teens, you could stop at a payphone and place a call to Joeball and he’d ring you back with coordinates to follow; that ended when payphones stopped allowing incoming calls—curse you, drug dealers!—and so, subsequently, you had to finally get a flip phone in order to stay abreast of where to head to.

Nowadays, in the bright future predicted by Dick Tracy comics and Star Trek, you’ve got an online beacon to appeal to and the little dot on your screen tells you just where to go until, as was always the case, you see the fire glowing in the dark and hear laughter and voices carrying on about bike parts, trips abroad, masculine names, and movies from the 1970s set in Seattle with car chases like the famous one from the Steve McQueen classic Bullitt.

The Seattle skyline in that film looked a fair bit different than the one we see today, but to the trees in Ravenna Park, it all appears to be just about the same.  A few more rings in the core to be sure, but no matter how one finds ones way there, it’s still best to arrive on a bike.