Alki Memories

This morning Zoey and I went for a drive while Rona taught, as we have on Saturday morning the past few weeks. Today, instead of driving all the way around Lake Washington on I-5, I-405, and I-5 again (which takes a surprisingly long time, even in excellent traffic), we drive south on 99 through downtown, over the 1st South bridge, and up the big hill into White Center–a route I’ve followed many many times before. It turns out that White Center is having its annual Jubilee Days today and tomorrow, and there’s a farmer’s market going on as well. Luckily, the festivities don’t affect our traffic, as they don’t close down Roxbury for these events. We’re heading straight on through White Center, on our way to Alki Beach.
 
With Zoey long asleep I switch the stereo from 98.1 (Classical King FM) to 96.5 K-rock, Seattle’s latest alternative rock station. Zoey likes sleeping to Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, and I get to listen to songs I enjoy and of which I know the names and composers. It is beautiful as we drive along, with that perfect summer weather that can only be found in Seattle: not too hot and not too muggy, with just the right breeze.
 
With Foo Fighters or Jane’s Addiction or Audioslave quietly entertaining me, I crack the back wing windows and Auto-roll-down my window as we head down the steep hill toward the Fauntleroy Ferry dock. It strikes me, as we descend and the wind struggles to rustle my receeding buzzcut hair, that this is the hill I used to burn down at around 40 miles per hour on my mountain bike with nothing but cotton, spandex, and a little plastic hat between me and instant road kill. I am now driving down this very same hill at less than 30 mph in a precision-engineered safety cage with belts and airbags and traction control, anti-lock brakes, all-weather tires, and countless other gadgets and doohickies designed to keep me and everyone else in the whole county safe. And meanwhile my daughter slumbers in my rearview mirror, ensconced in her own crash harness and safety cage and infant crumple zones. Quite the change from every other time I’ve travelled down this hill, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
 
As we drive I tick off places I had flats on my bike. There, by that real estate office turned cafe turned coffee house; down there, in Lincoln Park (on the same ride!) in the rocky trail/road right by the water; drive around the corner . . . down the hill . . . onto the road where I would ride out of the park again, and then . . . there, on the tree-shaded, house-lined road between Lincoln Park and the trailing end of the Alki parks (also on the same ride!). There is nothing like three flat tires to suck the fun right out of a ride.
 
We slow down to drive behind scenery-amazed tourists from Michigan and Bellevue, and I remember that on my bike I would ride along this clean, condo-lined, cement-seawall-park strip at this same speed, 20 mph, but 20 mph looks a lot different in a van. Somehow from inside the safety cage, behind the windshield, protected by the belts and airbags and electronic safety monitoring devices twenty . . . miles . . . per . . . hour drags along, and you can take in the sights while feeling like you’re going too slow and wouldn’t those tourists like to pull over and snap some pictures of whatever island that is across the Sound there?
 
On the bike you worry that the tourists are going to pull over to take photos of whatever island that is, as you pass the dad riding the bike he used to ride to class in college, with his daughter now asleep behind him in her yellow baby trailer with her ladybug helmet crooked on her lolling head, gently bobbing as Daddy peddles. Every car parked along the curb is full of potential for a careless door-flinger to end your ride most abruptly, and every driveway is a disaster-in-waiting. On the bike at twentymilesperhour on residential/tourist trap streets you get a general sense of the beauty through which you travel as you watch for danger. You know the sky and the ocean and the islands are beautiful off to your left, but there is no time to take it all in. Your heart pounds from the exertion, but also from the adrenaline rush that comes from knowing that this could be it and that you’re doing your best to make sure it isn’t.
 
Around the point we go, past the little lighthouse and onto the beginning of the actual Alki strip. Businesses have come and gone. That wonderful looking market was never there before… I didn’t see the Starbucks–is it possible that I blinked and missed a Starbucks in Seattle? I’m sure this building wasn’t a Tully’s, but I can’t remember what it used to be. There is a new building under construction on the beach side of the road, but it is mostly sticks still, separated from the throngs of Saturday beachgoers by chainlink fencing and industrial plastic wrap. A restaurant? Community center? Police station? It’s impossible to tell as we drive along and past.
 
There is some sort of Muscle Beach type event going on in the sand, with a crowd and a big white tent and a weight bench straining under big iron discs, but the tourists have turned off or pulled over and parked, and we are free-wheelin’ coffee-powered Seattleites once more, just driving to go through, not to snag a choice parking spot, and there is no time to read the banners.
 
Soon we reach a certain spot–the only place I’ve had to hit a pedestrian on my bike. Alki features parallel sidewalks and bike lanes, and the sea air gives the pedestrians some sort of visual disease, rendering the bike lane invisible to them. They walk from their cars right through the bike lane toward the siren’s call of the sea–which behavior, while annoying, is usually easy enough to anticipate. But Crazy Walker Lady would not stand for having predictable behavior. She decided to double back right in front of me, so I had to swerve and deflect her with my shoulder. She seemed to dislike this effect to say the least, but I liked it much better than the both of us crashing. Neither she nor I were knocked down, so I peddled on through the crowds. I now drive on, without adding any new pedestrians to my tally.
 
I realize that I should soon see the little green house where Becky, my brother’s friend from high school and our housemate for a while, used to live. It was a terrible little 1-story house with a dirt-floored, reduced-height basement (where the laundry machines were), all of which sloped toward the water. It lived between two of the three- or four-story condominium behemoths that dominate the north end of Alki that faces downtown Seattle. I don’t see the house today, so either it has finally drowned under the condo waves, or I pass it by while taking in the best view of Seattle’s skyline.
 
It would always take me 1 hour to ride from my brother’s house down the lofty West Seattle Ridge to the water, along Puget Sound, through Alki Beach, back up the long haul of a hill that is Delridge Way SW, and back through White Center to Eric’s house. This is 12.5 miles, but factor in 40-mph hills, cars, randomly-walking pedestrians, and red lights, and I always averaged 12.5 miles per hour.
 
The two notable exceptions to the 1-hour rule were The Day of Three Flats and The Day of Terrible, Terrible, Blinding Rain. I think of this last ride as I drive back toward the West Seattle Bridge. The ride started out sunny but as soon as I reached the bottom of the no-turning-back, 40-mph hill the clouds were rolling in and the smell of rain was in the air. By the time I had rounded Alki it was raining like everyone who doesn’t live here thinks it rains every day in Seattle. I was one miserable, soggy peddler on the long ride back up Delridge. There’s nothing like taking something you dread as much as I always dreaded climbing that hill–that’s “mountain” to you folks who live east of the Rockies–and adding in cold, wet, clinging clothes and wet, undryable glasses. I am unspeakably grateful for today’s beautiful weather that is so much nicer than everyone who doesn’t live here thinks we ever have, as sleeping Zoey and I drive up the ramp to the West Seattle Bridge. I shake off my reverie, and we head toward northbound Highway 99 and home.
 
Now we just need to get one of those little yellow bike trailers and a ladybug helmet, for biking memories to come…