Riding Free

The peak moment for me on the .83 ride last night was near the end of the evening when the remaining cyclists were enjoying a final nightcap in a pirate skateboard park off of Alaskan Way. I was lying down with my head resting on the gently curving side of one of the homemade half-pipe ramps gazing up at the stars, but the image was one I couldn’t resolve. The celestial sphere seemed to be quilted somehow, with thin lines like metal cables partitioning it off into sections. “What the fuck is with the sky or am I just really stoned?” I mused aloud.

The two guys within earshot of me burst out laughing and so did I as I realized my question was answered by my asking: it wasn’t the sky I was looking at at all; it was the black painted underside of the viaduct!

Ooops.

Safe to say, I’d achieved the level of disengagement from the ordinary I’d been reaching for all evening.

Which is roundabout way of saying it’s probably good I rode the Quickbeam on the freewheel side of the rear cog after all; doing so allowed me to concentrate a little less on the mechanics of riding and more on experiencing transcendent weirdness in last night’s route.

We took the Longfellow Creek trail from near the West Seattle Bridge to White Center, a charming off-road meander highlighted by Aaron’s carrying on the front of his Baksfeits a Lazy-Boy recliner chair he’d picked up off the street.

After the designated southwest-end taco truck stop and requisite pitchers at the Pacific Rim Brewery, we piled into another forest-trail adventure, an wooded overlook somewhere above Delridge which afforded a dynamite view of the Duwamish industrial zone as long as you didn’t fall off the edge of the eroded cliff, which remarkably, no one did.

One final safety stop during a mechanical on the route back downtown and my night—and night sky—was made.