Life Partners: Shawn Wolf At SEANACCC Part 1
Life Partners is a short essay series where Kinfolk employees, friends and family share whatever’s on their mind. This week we have an extra special collection of dispatches from Kinfolk Studios’ employee and Kinfolk sponsored rider Shawn Wolf, who writes about his trip to Seattle for the 2013 North American Cycle Courier Championships.
The North American Cycle Courier Championships is an annual race held in a different city each year. It pits the best couriers from all over the US against each other to see who is the best messenger in America. This year it took place in the great city of Seattle, the homeland of a few Kinfolk founders. It was, however, my first time to the North West and Seattle being the birthplace of Nirvana, I can’t say I had the highest of hopes for this notoriously dreary and wet city.
Landing in Seattle with a late sunset I was picked up by my host for the weekend, a friend and fellow bootlegger, Jake Ricker. A messenger in Seattle for over 3 years now and a great photographer, who else better to follow around for the NACCC weeekend? He and his wife Jen welcomed four (at times six!) guys to sleep in their living room next to his beautiful collection of bikes. I retired to bed about as soon as I got there as a fellow NACCC attendee Hern Montenegro from LA was already asleep when we got home.
Day 1, Wednesday
We woke up at 8am to Jake’s dogs licking our faces and headed into town as Jake had a normal day of work to do (no vacation for him yet). We made our way to the usual standby location in Seattle, infront of Monorail Esspresso, who allowed us a much-appreciated messenger discount. (I can’t say no to $1.50 Americanos.
It was also the location of early registration/packet pickup. I collected my shwag and flipped through the event booklet for an hour, meeting some locals and talking about the weekend to come.
After the normal workday ended, everyone got together and set off to the location of the first race. It was actually an unsanctioned race called the “Bookworm Crit.” The race was 16 laps around the public library in downtown Seattle. Being unsanctioned it was an open course with normal car and pedestrian traffic. This isn’t all that bad but you also have a steep hill to go down and back up again in the one block radius. With 4 laps left of the 16 total I made my right turn down the hill. I saw traffic piling up at the light while volunteers did their best to stop traffic at the intersection. I chose my line between the outside lane of cars and as I was about to make the turn at the bottom of the hill a pedestrian made her way through the cross walk…SLOWLY. There was no way for me to make the turn: I would have gone wide and hit the curb or turned too sharp and surely clipped my pedal so I made the only logical decision I saw and stayed straight, heading down an even steeper hill toward the water. I foot jammed down the hill to a hault ending any chance of finishing the race only to hear someone yelling, “Yer spose ta turn up there!” I replied abruptly with “NO SHIT!?” After the race we all headed to the Highline, a metal bar/venue that serves a full vegan bar menu. With local metal bands and Area 51 video games to entertain us, we hung until group slowly dissipated, folks heading out into the night at their own inclination.
Stay tuned this week for several more installments from the trip!
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