A Bike Worth Riding

A Bike Worth Riding

 

By Eric Richter

 

They pass by me every day. Bikes dating back to before I started riding "mountain bikes". Bikes with mismatched Suntour shifters, and imitation TA cranks, bikes with 40 hole rims and bullmoose handlebars, bikes with only 12 speeds, bikes of steel.

 

I’m sure that you've seen them too, these mixed-breed bikes and mongrel riders. Together, these bikes and their owners have racked up some serious milage, and over the course of those miles and miles of roads and trails evolved to some kind of higher order via the random friction of time's trials. And though the people who continue to ride the same old shit day in and day out continually fascinate me, it's the bikes they ride that grab at my imagination. These beautiful machines, whose chipped paint and tattered edges speak volumes about their lives at the hands of skilled pilots, are what I call rode bikes- 'cause they get ridden. They are without a doubt one of the greatest things you could ever own - if you have one you already know this; if you don't have one, well. I hope one day you'll be swept away by their pleasures, maybe never to return to the land where every new thing adorns your old bike in and attempt to improve it, or your perception of it.

My rode bikes are the ones with the wheels that are never perfectly true, though by the worn rims, glazed brakepads, and balding tires I can tell they haven't exactly been lyin'. These bikes have been customized in ways that no bike shop markets, but that many other riders know intimately; one bike has a bug's remains pushed indelibly deep into the paint from a relentless Chico headwind that caught me like a termite in amber; another bike somehow developed a slow leak in the front tire which marked the progress of my days as accurately as any Timex that ever took a lickin' and kept on tickin'. Like I said, bikes of steel.

Surely, you yourself can imagine the feeling of being on one of the rode bikes. It's a momentum born of trust and comfort, the bond of experience - the all-too-rare feeling of intimacy with a machine.

And speaking of trust and comfort, a rode bike is the only kind I'd trust to ride over the endless string of false summits that rise like pimples on 13 year-old skin, haunting me every time I ride in January. Rode bikes know the blazing lines down every backside and 'round every corner, and a rode bike always seems to know the shortcut to get you home when you need it most. Maybe most inportantly, the crankarm, chainrings, and the water bottle cage will never all become loose on the same ride if you're riding a rode bike. No way in hell, which coincidentally, is where any kind of bike other than a rode bike will eventually take you - and leave you.

 

The fact that rode bikes are a bit spartan is not simple coincidence; as I said they reflect the general lifestyle of their riders. Yet, while these folks may be minimalist - even archaic - in the sense of their equipment, their lifestyle is anything but. Rode bikers and their machines are cultural wonders which can happily handle hillclimbs. ditches, curbgrinds, an elbow to the gut. two-wheeled drifts across rain-slickened crosswalks, their beer, and more - maybe all in the same ride. They ride elbow-to-elbow in apeloton or all by themselves; they ride on the road and off the beaten path; they ride equipped with 'ghetto-roll' bars, 'mustache' bars, and 'apehangers' with streamers danglin' in the breeze on one-speed bikes, or wobbly old three-speeds and so on.

The one constant is that they ride because riding satifies a sometimes difficult-to-describe craving established within them by good times and stimulating experiences on bicycles. The subconcious experience of moving through time and space on a bicycle is their daily life. And every time they ride on one of those old machines they're going somewhere new; and life then, for a few shining moments anyway, is improved.