Let me be clear about one thing: Merritt had a whole theory.
The theory was that London Road construction — the kind where MnDOT closes a lane and reroutes you through someone's actual neighborhood and the detour signs are spaced just far enough apart to make you doubt your own eyes — was actually good. Character-building. He had read something in a comment section, he said, and he had synthesized it into a worldview. "It forces you off the main corridor," he told me on Saturday, with the confidence of a man who has never once been lost because he does not recognize the concept. "That's how locals actually move through a city."
I want to note that Merritt has lived in Duluth for fourteen months.
Pancake Day was at the DECC. This is a known fact. It is on the waterfront. The DECC is visible from several elevated points in this city like a landmark you can literally navigate by. The Duluth Lions Club has been throwing this thing for sixty-seven years, which means sixty-seven years of people finding it without incident. I said this. Merritt said, "Yeah, but do you want to experience it or just show up?"
So we took the bike.
His bike, technically. I was on the back, which is not a seat so much as a philosophy about personal space. It was about fifty degrees when we left, which felt like sixty because the sun was doing that aggressive early-May thing where it argues with the temperature, and I made the mistake of leaving my jacket at his apartment because he said, and I am quoting, "you'll warm up."
The first shortcut was fine. Residential, a little steep, a dog barked at us but not with real commitment. The second shortcut was where things got interpretive. Merritt took a turn onto what I would describe as a path and he would describe as "definitely used regularly," and we passed a sign that may have said something seasonal. I did not fully read it. He fully did not stop.
"This is the route," he said, over his shoulder, with the tone of a man narrating his own documentary.
"The route to what," I said.
He didn't answer because he was standing up to pedal, which I choose to believe was a coincidence.
By the time we emerged back onto something paved, we were somewhere above the lake, which was beautiful, I will grant him that — the water was that specific Lake Superior color that looks cold even in photographs, the kind of blue that makes you feel like you should be wearing more layers than you are. A heron was doing something on a rock. It was genuinely pretty. I took a photo. Merritt took this as validation.
The third shortcut was actually someone's driveway. We did not speak of it.
We arrived at the DECC forty minutes after we left, which is longer than it should have taken and shorter than it felt. I was sunburned on one side of my face. Merritt's hair had done something architectural. We were both faintly lake-cold in that deep-tissue way that takes a while to register, like the cold had been patient with us.
The pancakes were incredible. That part I can't dispute. The Lions Club has been doing this for sixty-seven years and they know what they're doing, and we sat there with our orange juice and our little butter pats and the DECC's big windows full of that morning light, and Merritt looked so genuinely happy about the whole thing that I didn't say what I was going to say.
What I was going to say was: we could have taken Superior Street. It would have taken eleven minutes. There are no seasonal footpaths on Superior Street.
Instead I said the pancakes were good.
He said, "See? Worth it."
And the thing is — and I cannot stress enough how annoying this is — I kind of knew what he meant. We'd come down through neighborhoods I'd never seen, past that heron, through that questionable driveway, with the lake just sitting there being enormous the whole time. It was a terrible route. It was, in some minor and infuriating way, a good morning.
Merritt is already planning a route to the Bike Swap next Saturday. He says he knows a way along the water.
I am going to wear the jacket.