(two days effort)
In the Spring and Summer of 1988 I worked the 4 to Midnight shift at the Ramada Inn in South Burlington, Vermont.
I was 16, and washing dishes full time to make money for a mountain bike.
I am glad that I have spent five months of my young life as a dishwasher. There is nothing ignoble in most work, and I took my duties as seriously as I do with any work. It is a right of passage type job that prepares you for nothing but boredom.
This emerging activity of mountain biking was coming to Vermont, and there were beginning to be some options for bicycles. In those second generation bikes the most coveted of the affordable was the Cannondale with it’s over-sized aluminum tubing. The actual innovation of the Cannondale mountain bike was raising the bottom bracket. Giving the bike a lift in the middle turned out to be very important.
I tried a bit of this emerging sport on a friend’s bike and wished my skateboard adieu.
The bike I had my eye on was a Forest Service green Specialized Rockhopper Comp. It was a good, not great, bike for the era, and I can say that I have never ridden a bike that climbs better. Maybe I am just not experienced enough in riding suspension bikes, but I have yet to ride one that out-climbs my rigid frame Rockhopper. It could be all about geometry, or more likely, just delusion.
I still own it, 31 years later, and it rides more or less like the day I took it home from an outdoor store in Burlington, Vermont called “Pagocycle”.
Pagocycle was a funky Burlington answer to the larger, chain retailer Eastern Mountain Sports. They had the climbing and camping gear that EMS offered, but also had bikes. Chouinard, Royal Robbins, Vuarnet and Bolle glacier glasses–real ones when they were simply a style for 15 minutes in 1984. I think David Lee Roth is responsible. Mine cost $105 of hard earned paper route money. They were too big for my face but I hoped to grow into them. I hated being skinny.
I lost them skiing in an early season snow storm at Killington that Autumn. Probably wore them less than six times, three of which were at the store before I committed to buying them.
Pagocycle was where I bought a Wilderness Experience internal frame three day backpack. Hand made in Chatsworth, California. I still have it, and it has been to Europe more than once, Alaska twice, many contiguous United States and British Columbia. It has a matching little brother that I brought four years later in the same summer I bought my bike. That rucksack also has been to most of the same places, and yes I still have it. I used it as my book bag for half of high school and all of college. It has been a go-bag for more than 31 years.
This is simplicity through foresight and quality. Real value. I have new backpacks, but the old ones are fine. I have a new bike but that old Specialized still rolls just like it did when I left the blacktop parking lot of Pagocycle. All of these items were not purchased in any kind of compulsive move. I had to buy many of my desires with money I made working when I was a kid, though I think my parents may have bought the big back pack for me because they had signed me up for a hiking camp. Another story–a good one where I fell in love with wilderness (separate in my mind at the time to human love).
Pagocycle sold quality and to some extent, branding, to eager Vermonters looking to get their outside on with the best equipment. When I bought my bike I didn’t know what an important role it would play in the formative years of my young adult life. I didn’t know that I was influenced by branding. Now I celebrate all of it. I am grateful for this amazing bike and all I have done with it. For the joy it has brought other people. I have a lot of luck with that bike.
I’ve upgraded and replaced parts, but the geometry is more or less the same as the day I bought it. There have been incarnations and phases relevant to changes in my life. It has been a commuter, single-track climber and gravel grinder. It took me from Rattlesnake Lake to Vantage, Washington on the Iron Horse Trail, AKA the John Wayne Pioneeer Trail. I’ve had a lot of 25-40 mile days on that bike. It seems that it has adapted to every need that has come along.
Since Fatbike arrived it is largely neglected. I am not young anymore, so I try to stay at a fat bike level of cushy when I am riding. I need a bit more disconnect from the soil than just the saddle. Fatbike will get me up almost every intermediate trail, and if I run out of traction I really don’t have much interest in using a bike for movement. It means that I should walk or the surface is inappropriate. Fatbike works in snow and sand up to a point and really only lacks that sharp connected feeling to the trail, and the “trail” is long–meaning that it responds slowly in sharp corners among other things. https://calfeedesign.com/geometry-of-bike-handling/
A quick note about Calfee Design.
I just got lucky right now in that I was checking my definition of “trail” with Google and Calfee Design came up more or less on top. Please take some time to look at their outreach even if you are not interested in bicycles. There is a model for life here, and about a year ago I learned about this unique company. My own model for life has been deeply inspired by what Calfee is doing and has done already. I would like to apprentice there, but I am certain that I am not of that caliber in anything I do. I know just enough to appreciate what is great. Calfee is great. Specialized is good. Calfee is on another level. I would have eventually gotten around to mentioning them in a post because I have such admiration for the work they do–for the “totality” of their product and mission and vision.
About a week ago I was getting some lunchtime exercise in Moore Park when a bolt fell out of my front derailleur and ended my ride. I pushed the bike back home a mile and a half, not having thought to look for an additional piece that fell out with the bolt. It was one of those situations where I was rushing, not thinking clearly because I had to be home so I could go get my daughter from school. If I had been methodical about my thinking I would have stopped and looked for the bolt at least. I was unaware that the extra piece was a thing at the time, but I would have recognized it as part of my bike if I had seen it. It is a very specific shape, and evidently made of unobtainium.
I made it home in time, and looked for a replacement bolt after retrieving my kid. I found one but it was too long. That problem became it’s own two store trip. Metric in Klamath. When I got it back on I realized that the specific spacer I lost was missing and it wasn’t going to work without the part. On Sunday I rode Carmen on the trail where I lost the part and walked it a couple of times finding nothing.
On that same trail in Spring I accidentally left a Hydroflask near the spot where my bike broke. The next morning I went up to get it. Gone. Also gone were the beautiful flowers that I stopped to take pictures of when I forgot the Hydroflask.
Perhaps someone needed a $30 vessel to steal the flowers from the rest of us.
It was a busy week. I did my research and found nothing. My friends at the bike shop tried to find something and came up empty handed. It is bleak. Maybe I have to contact a U.K. bike shop directly. Certainly I can’t be the only person who has ever needed a replacement part for this derailleur. There aren’t many of this brand in the U.S. but they are popular throughout the Commonwealth.
By Thursday I was getting itchy to ride. The weather is perfect. Truly, and not just for this time of year. We are high and dry. With Fatbike out of order I dusted off Carmen. I usually only ride it when I need extra bikes for visitors, but today I needed my fix of cadence. I checked it out for loose and went up on one of my common lunchtime loops in the park. Certainly the ride is a more responsive and “direct” feeling. It climbed as well as I remember, but the current handlebars aren’t working well for me.
In 2002 friend who is an avid biker asked to take my bike and tune it up. He worked at a bike shop so I said yes. When he gave it back to me it had the current handlebars, which are too wide for the geometry of Andy. I had cut down the original bars by almost four inches in width for tighter control.
No matter, It still rides. I’ve put thousands of miles on it since 2002. It’s next incarnation will be some higher-rise handlebars and a front basket for gravel-grinding bike-packing. Because of the lower bottom bracket it is actually a good bike for this type of conversion. It will still be a pariah bike among the spandex crowd, but if I can keep up with everyone I ride with on my current equipment then I will gladly spend my money on other things than bicycles. I’ve never been to any continent besides North America and Europe. A bicycle is half a trip to Europe. A great bike is a family trip to Europe.
The ride went well. Riding is riding. All I really want is to breathe enough to get high and healthy. Beyond that the rest of riding pleasure is gravy. Almost decadent.
On Friday it occurred to me that if I broke the chain on Fatbike I could bypass the derailleur and it would function in whatever front chain ring I manually put it in. This I did, and rode it at sunset last night, entirely in the larger chain ring. This was almost like a normal ride for me because I only use the small ring when life gets really steep. I’d still like to have it, but for 80% of what I ride, it is fine like it is now.
Winter is coming and with luck some snows will soon chase me and my bikes out of Moore Park for a few months. I’ll sneak in on skis every chance I get, but for the most part winter is all happening in traffic when it comes to bikes. Avoiding ice and frosty corners. Trying not to become a statistic.
This gives me hope that I have some time to find the part while riding the trail, buy a replacement part, or make my own using a 3-d printer. At this point any of those options seem equally likely. The printer looks most interesting, even if it cost me a hundred dollars to do to make the first one. I’d make a bunch and sell them on this site. I know I am not alone here. Someone else has surely encountered this problem. Maybe not.
I think I will select a few rides this week just for Carmen. The last few heady days of Autumn are here now. Soon it gets a bit more serious. Less room for error in life until the light comes back. I am not planning any rides where I could freeze to death if I was stranded late in the day. It has been a long time since Carmen got me to the top of Spence Mountain. Maybe our weather will hold long enough to get that in.
The bikes in my life have had a lot to do with who I am. I couldn’t really tell you by what attraction we have coallesced, but they have stuck with me fairly well. I admire many beautiful bikes in my existence, and I dream of a few I don’t have, but one thing I have found in almost every bike is an essential freedom that my spirit needs. It is a unique relationship for a spirit to form with a tool.
In night after night of humid summer dish washing I earned a bike of a color that I didn’t know like I do now after 29 years in the Western U.S.
Night after night trying to find conversation with career derelicts and something to do at midnight when I got off work. When I got my bike I swear the colors got richer in every day life. A Forest Service green hue on everything I did.
For a month I rode 20 miles a day and then I had to go. Immediately. I don’t remember having any notice, but I put my bike in the garage, packed my two Wilderness Experience packs and found myself in Frankfurt, Germany when I woke from the jet lag. Then it was a bit hazy but something about Heidleberg and Ulm and then I was back in London after six years and early adolescence.
Bikeless and truly uncertain of what I was going to do in London for a year I was pretty much feeling like I had in a dream I had in the Cave Of The Winds on Mt. Mansfield a year earlier.
It wasn’t scary, but in my mind I was on a pedestal of immeasurable height looking over an immeasurable vast landscape of unknown. Insignificant with agency.
Take that for how you can decipher it. It is a feeling. Perhaps there isn’t language to really relate.
In my absence my friends rode the heck out of that bike and I returned to a pretty thrashed machine. One broken chain ring and heavily pitted spindle from a slogged up bottom bracket. The first thing I did when I got back and had a job to pay for repairs was take that bike down to what Pagocycle became in my time overseas.
It was now Climb High, and still is. It was now relocated to South Burlington, putting it out of easy reach for a downtown Burlington kid who likes to dream in gear shops.
It has since moved back downtown. That makes me happy. I am grateful to Burlington for it’s spirit and celebration of quality. All of Vermont is a lot of local.
In the bike shop part of Climb High the tech took a look at the drive train and broken chain ring saying:
“Your friend must have legs like an Ox.”
He did, he was the goalie for our soccer team and one of the strongest skiers I have ever known.
I am glad that my friends got to experience that bike. When I got back from England almost everyone I hung with had a new bike and some of us still are fanatics. That is a connection created in soap suds.
Carmen spread the joy of biking
Carmen dances in the curves
Carmen climbs unrelenting
until my own cadence breaks
Thank you for reading this. For bonus points, without looking, try to recall five brands mentioned in this story.
Just kidding.
Maybe I will make a version where I include a logo every time I mention a company and then ask the same question. My hypothesis is that adding the visual will aid recall.