Glory

There was a moment, at the after-party for Filmed by Bike’s opening night, when—even though I was standing outside, drinking beer, surrounded by bicycles and bicycle riders—when I thought that maybe cycling’s done, or at least that it’s gone from being all about that delightful combination of rideable art that just might save the world with stickin’ it to the man simply for the sheer joy of it and I felt a little nostalgia despite (or perhaps because of) enjoying the company of two-wheeled ghosts from the past.

But that’s when the cargo bike stereo began blasting away and slowly, but surely, the magic pedaled into gear and we were off in a long line along a river and eventually to exactly where I want to be in Portland on an April evening after midnight: under some soaring elevated roadway whose massive trestles make a concrete forest in which you mingle about for a bit before dead reckoning back to your hotel in the wee hours, filled to the brim with what still remains among the best the world has to offer: bicycles and bacchanalia, all wrapped up in cinematic glory, one more time with feeling.

I kept being unable to tell onscreen where the irony left off and sincerity began and it was sorta like that all around: things seemed like versions of themselves and then they were the thing itself all over again.

There are times when time doesn’t really exist and if you aim your headlight just right, you can find that path along the railroad tracks that leads where you’re going even if it takes a couple tries.

The awesome Ayleen Crotty deserves a century’s worth of gratitude for her decade of masterminding FBB; there've been several lifetimes of fun in my five years of playing along, which just goes to show that it isn’t the end after all but only just begun, unspooling in darkness, all eyes wide on screen.