The sun has only just set, dipping below the western hills toward the unseen vastness of the Pacific Ocean. Our little piece of the Pacific slowly darkens from blue-gray to a color of blue and black too dark to differentiate. Crossing the bridge now, I pass over wetlands and lily pad habitat, the land only hesitantly giving way to water. Fading light shines on smooth ripples, brightening the tops with white, and outlines bunches of sedges and rushes. It’s bedtime for most birds, but in the summer, waterfowl flock here.

A wooden trail, rife with its own series of tiny bridges and floating spans, cuts darkly through the grasses and across the water. Although I have ridden parallel to this path nearly every evening for over a year, I rarely see people walking there or using its small docks.

Once out on open water, the sky and the horizon take over. To the east, the setting sunlight gilds the newly risen towers in Bellevue, glints off windows packed into the dark Kirkland hillside, and highlights the snowy peaks of Mt. Baker and its Cascadian companions. To the south, lights on the I-90 bridge march toward the dark bulk of Mercer Island, while in the hazy distance Mt. Rainier rises in stately glory, dimly visible though the fading light.

The sky lives with the sunset, dark faded orange-pink brightening to the west into rose-gold and bronze, a halo of light silhouetting hills dotted with yellow windows of unseen homes, the hard-edged tops of skyscrapers, and the dark blue-gray bulk of mountains beyond. The water catches the sun’s last light and sends it back, a shattered reflection of orange, red, and navy blue that embraces the black hills and darkening sky above.

Upon the eastern side, another night grips the hills, the towers, the mountains. I ride on.