Happy Trails, Glacier Lanes

You’re only young once.

You can meet up with buddies in the parking lot of Glacier Lanes and smoke Swisher Sweets while you talk about philosophy. You can buy a pitcher of soda pop for a few bucks and a large pizza (oh, the metabolism of youth!) and for a few bucks you can get an evening of kicks out of throwing a ball down a lacquered lane. Laugh to the background noise of classic rock. Smell that shoe disinfectant. Watch the serious bowlers in leagues with mullets drinking pitchers of domestic lagers.

These are the people of our city.

Or, later, when you’re married in college and nearly broke you can buy your girl a couple of frames on a Sunday and a dish of ice cream. Take her photo cradling a bowling ball, her head tilted, a comically wide grin pasted across her lipstick mouth. She’s holding the bowling ball like a kid, get it?

You can print this photo off at the local Bartells, frame it, and keep it by your desk for half a decade, even after you and she have true flesh-and-blood daughters. A reminder of the joys and spontaneity of young married life in a mill town.

Yep. This is my story of Glacier Lanes, my memories of a shuttered place.

A bowling alley, in a sense, is a series of transactions. It’s dinners cooked, change made, arcade games won, strikes struck, pull tabs pulled, and gutterballs lamented.

But Glacier Lanes was more than that.

You’re only young once. Or maybe you can be young twice. Maybe more than that.

When we had kids I started to see things through their eyes -- their enthusiasm for new activities and competition is palpable.

Last winter, eager to get out of the house on blah winter days, our family began to explore local bowling alleys. We bowled at Rocket Alley in Arlington and Strawberry Lanes in Marysville. My young kids with their stick arms, hefting 5 pound balls to the ramps and pushing them down over and over. They loved it. I loved it. We all loved it. Classic American recreation.

I hoped that my family could keep up our winter bowling streak, that it would be our regular ongoing Sunday afternoon thing, the way we do picnics in summer. Glacier Lanes likely would have been a major part of this ritual.

But then, in spring 2020, Coronavirus happened. And you know how that story goes. You know what happened to communal event spaces.

Coronavirus closures in the abstract hurt. Practically, though, it takes time to grieve specific casualties like Glacier Lanes. It feels personal.

There are some who will make the closure of Glacier Lanes a political thing. I understand. But also it’s worth acknowledging that there have been innocent victims of the Coronavirus.

There have been small businesses that have gone under without recourse. It’s a tragedy with no one really to blame besides... what? An impersonal virus.

Sitting with that fact is difficult, but I think acceptance of the unchangeable goes a long way to making us more compassionate in the face of tragedy.

Happy trails, Glacier Lanes.

Good times will come again. Many of the best things of Everett will someday return -- the summer music, the festivals, parades, the live art. In the meantime we have to be strong.

Hang in there. Take a photo of a loved one smiling. Treat yourself to a Swisher Sweet, a soda, a dish of ice cream. Have a good conversation with friends about philosophy.

That’s the stuff.