Friday, July 31, 2009

Best Summer Ever

Lemke the Shirt God said that this one is shaping up as the best summer ever and the claim seems hard to dispute: last night, for instance, was the third night in a row—and about tenth overall—I’ve ridden by bike to Lake Washington for a sunset swim, (although it was the first time I’ve done so in a pack of urban cyclists invading the tranquil shores of west Mercer Island) and it’s still not even August.

About thirty of us descended upon Groveland Park Beach, stripped to our farmer-tan pastiness and took to cavorting in the water and throwing ourselves off the diving platform; the place, wholesome at it is, was surprisingly unsupervised, so nobody really seemed to be bothered by our antics or our open containers, least of all the pack of Asian teens tossing each other into the air in waist-deep water.

Eventually, the dying rays of sunlight turned those assembled by the diving board to glowing silhouettes backed by a sunburst horizon right out an Eagles song, and, after finishing all the dessert wine, people were ready to start drinking, a goal accomplished with relative success at Mercer Island’s Roanoke Inn, whose impressive back lawn made me wonder about all the shady real-estate deals and adulterous liaisons which must have gone down there.

And then, completing the thematic bookending I’d once ruminated about, a big clump of us managed to find our way, by different routes, to the Roanoke Tavern, the unrelated, but somehow similar—in a little brother sort of way—drinking establishment on north Capitol Hill.

Unfortunately, I left before the big condiment fight, but I still count the night as a rousing success: a reasonable number of miles ridden, a satisfactory amount of beer consumed along with adequate cannabis to keep it confusing enough to be interesting; and a night so warm it was shirtsleeves in the moonlight all the way home.

Best summer ever?

Definitely in the running.

1 Comments:

Blogger Sam DeBord said...

DEFINITELY in the running. This is the best June and July weather that I can remember in a long time. August and September are the real summer months here in Seattle. 32.7 words.

11:24 PM  

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