A cultured friend of fine, who owns an expensive Brompton Bike, once told me before moving out of Baltimore that the thing that he was going to miss the most about this city was the Baltimore Bike Party. Now, this is someone who I imagine brushes his teeth while listening to E-minor sonatas and who knows the difference between a lawn and a garden, not the kind of person who makes recommendations frivolously. So I decided to check it out.

Every last friday of the month, bikes of all shapes and sizes gather at the St. Mary’s Park (weirdly, there is a Will Turner painting smack in the middle of the park). The entire atmosphere is ebullient and boisterous. At 6:30 pm sharp the bikers start trickling out of the narrow park entrance, a bike carrying big woofers leading the way. Most people, like me, are blissfully ignorant of the route and simply follow the chaos. Many are dressed for the occasion, many are not, many bikes have bells whose cacophonous tinklings make us sound like an orchestra of crickets. We take over the streets vexing the unsuspecting car drivers and pedestrians alike.

My favorite thing about the Bike Party is the shouting. Every once in a while someone will shout out BIKE PAAAARTYYYY, and like a Mexican wave, the message would travel across the raucous hordes. Cars stuck in the traffic because of us would honk back to express their approval or more often their displeasure, and we would shout back some more, can’t let the cars win.

I’ve been to several Bike Parties, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, and have never once been disappointed. I have seen parts of the city that I would never have seen otherwise, rows and rows of boarded houses, the dangerously bulging ones held together by planks, neighborhoods which I only knew existed because of the The Wire, neighborhoods with not a soul to be seen on the streets but for us bikers. You travel to these neighborhoods to find people sitting on stoops and peering out of windows of the typical Baltimorean row houses, waving at us and joining us in our Bike Party war cries. You feel a strong sense of community and belonging and feel bonded with these distant denizens over this uniquely childish experience.

There is an after-party which is traditionally a place to get drunk and get your bike stolen. If the crowd is the right kind I love to dance silly on the makeshift dance floor, checking every once in a while if my bike has yet been stolen. On multiple occasions I’ve gotten tipsy and biked back dangerously with friends on crowded streets, swerving and swaying across the poor cars stuck in traffic, rushing past panicked pedestrians on bumpy sidewalks and letting my arms free to feel the cool air of the night. The steady and constant adrenaline rush you get from the entire experience stays with you for hours afterward and it becomes very difficult to stop moving.

Once I was coming back from the BBP alone in the night and took a wrong turn somewhere. Before long I noticed that the streets looked very different from what I was used to biking on. People had gathered in small groups, cars were parked in alleys and were playing loud music, there was hardly any street light and no noticeable traffic. If I shat in my pants then I had every excuse to do so, this is how it ends, I thought. I saw an empty parking lot at a distance, biked in quivering, shaking and sweating profusely, called an Uber on my by now completely drenched phone which had a sliver of charge left. Fortunately, the Uber came before I fainted from fear, I loaded my bike in the trunk and collapsed in the passenger seat. Whatever does not kill you, …

The spring is here. After months of dormancy my bike is finally out, I tuned it up and took it on a ride wearing shorts and sandals. The streets are teeming with life again and the brightly colored wall murals beckon you to explore the forgotten city streets and the hidden alleyways. It’s time for another BIKE PAAAARTYYYY.