Whirlwind

A couple years ago, I rode my bike from Seattle to San Francisco. I was thinking I was all gnarly until, about halfway down the Oregon coast, this Danish kid, cycling in Birkenstocks on a mountain bike with knobby tires, caught up with me and, while riding together, I learned he was on his way from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska—where he’d started in the 24-hour a day sunlight of high summer—to Tierra del Feugo—where he expected to arrive some months hence.

That’s where it became clear to me that there’s always someone harder core than you; and that’s how I felt last night when the second crew of riders showed up at our Green Mountain camp on the Kitsap Peninsula in the pitch darkness, having blindly scaled the two-mile rocky and washed-out logging road that I’d been thinking I was all bad-ass for successfully navigating earlier in the daylight.

It was a whirlwind adventure, though, just the thing to usher in today’s fireworks.

First, fourteen of us were on the ferry boat to Bremerton; then, the sweaty ride west and generally up towards Wildcat Lake; then, we bounced along and occasionally walked and pushed for two miles past clearcuts made lovely with wildflowers; space cookies were eaten and then there was fire and food and beer and lies and laughter and eventually, sheer amazement when the second wave of sixteen or so arrived out of the darkness —including Kat on an Xtracycle and wide-eyed Alex, who had showed up at Westlake Center just expecting a typical Thursday night ride but who came along, anyway.

I stayed up as late as I could to bask in their awesome before finally succumbing to those same molecules that knocked out practically all the cookie eaters like bowling pins falling down although not too early to have it already be dawn and just about time to get up, bomb downhill to the ferry and be home in time for family breakfast.

Whirlwind.