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Two Wheels Good: Midnight Ridazz 2nd Anniversary
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5308 Reads
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What a messy, noisy, glorious, stupid thing to do. What an utter gas.
The 2nd-anniversary Midnight Ridazz cruise gathered under an ugly sky tonight in Echo Park. We were probably 300 strong, by my inexpert guess - as we rolled out through downtown, Chinatown, Boyle Heights and home again in weather that spat, howled, poured and occasionally cleared to a cold sliver of moon.
I'm soaked as I write this, waiting for the pictures to download from my camera while my fingers and toes tingle their way back from numbness ...
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Massing at Pioneer Chicken between a brief hailstorm(!) and the rain.
ENLARGE |
. I'm flashing on bits of humanity from what seemed at the time like a raw, organic mosh pit of a journey, a gnarly 15-or-so-mile (?) blend of soggy pants, smooth riding and tunnel whoops. Wouldn't have missed it for the world.
- Chatting with the delivery-bike rider whose shaggy mutt rode in his cargo basket half the time and ran alongside on a leash the other half, like she was having the time of her life.
- Spotting the girl in sodden hoodie and smeared mascara weaving back and forth on a BMX with the seat too low, a glowstick jammed down her barely-jeaned butt crack, her face in a giddy smile.
- Stumbling across good ol' Greg halfway through the ride, helmetless and grinning on his fixie, churning up out of Chinatown toward home and promising to buy a damn helmet.
Entering 2nd Street Tunnel. The homeless people camped there who bothered to wake up at all the noise, looked pissed they were missing sleep for this. ENLARGE |
- Worrying about the high-end digital video camera one rida had strapped to his luggage rack for what's said to be a short film on the 2nd-anniversary ride (in the works).
- Cruising the whole ride with Will Campbell - he astride the formidable Phoenix and loaded for bear with triple headlights, Camelback, goggles and diehard good cheer even in the heaviest downpour and rudest, honking back-traffic.
The accursed rain proved to be a great leveler - none of the nasty crashes or rank rudeness reported from the last ride. The few who drank did it (mostly) moderately, and the ones who partied hardest rode gently, taking care to keep the round things on the black stuff because it was so very, very wet and slippery.
Will Campbell represents, despite rain foiling my autofocus. ENLARGE |
I ran over one empty beer bottle, but it squirted from under my front wheel and into the gutter without breaking, a good omen.
Little police action that I saw, beyond a cruiser that passed near Echo Park Lake and drawled from its PA, almost bored, "Make sure you stop at the red light ahead."
Which most folks did not because - for better or worse - Ridazz just doesn't tend to trouble itself with that.
As the ride entered an orange light, one rider would pull over abreast the cross-traffic lanes, "cork" it for the duration of our red light, and then roll on when our light went green again. From the looks of it, there weren't ridazz enough to keep most cars longer than two or three cycles before the whole sloppy, strobing peloton had passed through and the Friday-night motor crowd could carry on with their partying or clubbing or whatever sensible indoor thing they had in mind.
Wet blur of lights, windbreakers and helmets. ENLARGE |
Somewhere in deep downtown, a thunderstorm passed over - lightning stabbed the neighborhood a couple times less than half a mile away with a BOOOMMMMMCRACK and everyone whooped for more. One bolt hitting the right point in the pack probably would have arced across the bikes and fried 20 or 30 ridazz, but the weather gods smirked and shuffled their angry act on to another part of town more likely to tremble in fear - and the rain began to let up on us.
Someone up at the head of the pack ignored the directions at one point. Before we knew it we were hugging the Gold Line out around Avenue 35 somewhere. But we quickly found Figueroa and the way back on track, and just as the nasty cold front bit in to our wet flesh, we hit the climb up Cesar Chavez and welcomed the chance to stand up and hammer some heat back into our limbs.
One more human snapshot: the sheeting rain has tapered off somewhere near Boyle Heights and we're riding past a nightclub.
Partiers huddle in the open door, sheltered from the rain, drinks and smokes in their hands - and one yells incredulously, "What are you DOING?"
Unable to come back with anything wittier or even come up with a reasonable answer, I hollaback, "What are YOU doing?" and then they're gone in our wake, like so many other oases of warmth and light we passed in the heavy weather.
Now basking in the illusory glow of a computer monitor, maybe I have an answer: Adding another crazy ride to the list of memorable times I've spent on two wheels that remind me life on this earth is borrowed time, and that rides that hurt are time well-spent: The time I rode five miles down a foot-deep creek off Mulholland and came home with pruned, peeling toes. The time I cruised Slickrock without biffing once, but lay head-to-toe sore for a day and a half. The time I commuted across Philadelphia's cobbled streets on my balloon-tired Schwinn in a blizzard - and then home again in even colder weather.
And the time I joined a pack of comrades screaming and whistling their way through the glistening 2nd Street tunnel and straight into the teeth of an Alaskan thunderstorm simply because we could.
Four wheels bad, two wheels good. Are we not men?
Break time at the Bi-Rite. The shot's fuzzy and funky, a lot like the ride at this point.
ENLARGE - then SCROLL RIGHT
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More rides:
- Two Wheels Good: Biking the L.A. River at Dawn
- Feeding Mosquitos at Griffith Observatory
- Full Moon Ride: Griffith Park & L.A. River by Bike
- Full Moon Ride: Ballona to Hermosa w/ Mystery Lights
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Saturday, March 11, 2006 - 01:52 AM
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