On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 7/1/2004
The Eloquent Bike
I stopped off at a friend's house after a ride recently. I hadn't been there before, and he asked if I would like to come in and see his bikes, sort of like you might ask a lady up to see your etchings. As far as I knew, Jay only had one bike. All I'd ever seen him on was a classic, unbadged steel rig with a nice teal blue paint job and chrome drop-outs. But in his garage were a good half dozen bikes. I just peeked in and didn't take a complete inventory, but I saw a nice Lemond and some other decent looking wheels. What were they all for, if he didn't ride them? Maybe he does ride them...just not with me. I don't know.
I do know a lot of folks have multiple bikes, usually one for each subset of cycling: a road bike, a mountain bike, a tandem, a cross bike, a town bike, etc. I myself have three bikes, although two of them spend most of their time locked in a shed. They only belong to me the way iron filings belong to a magnet. At some point, they just adhered to me through quirks of circumstance, and I can't quite bring myself to make them go away.
But some people really are proactive about multiple bikes, and have them not just because the bikes followed them home like lost puppies, but because they love them and use them--all of them--all the time. Take our club president, Martin. In an interview in the club newsletter, this is what he listed for his current bikes: "a Litespeed Arenberg, a 1977 Jeff Lyon tour and brevet bike, a few folding bikes, several tandems, a Dursley Pedersen Replica." Or how about Barley, a very fast cyclist voted Rider of the Year in our club last year. In a profile on him in our newsletter, this was his bike inventory: "Road: Sycip, De Rosa, Surly (fixed gear); Mountain: Litespeed; Tandem: Calfee; Folding: Birdy; Cruiser: Electra." (Barley did an entire season's brevet series on that fixed gear this year, from 200-K to 600-K, and the courses were not flat.)
So many bikes...so little time! Clearly, these people love their bikes, and it's hard to say whether they own the bikes or the bikes own them.
Face it, for some of us--maybe for most of us--our bikes are more than tools of transit; more than pieces of sports equipment. Of course we want them to be fast and light, nimble and responsive, and we wouldn't even mind durable and comfortable too, as long as those virtues don't weigh too much. We may see them as elegant tools or as works of art, or even as political statements, but they are above all extensions of our personalities. We articulate through them some profound sense of who we think we are, or at least who we want the world to think we are.
I look around me in the little peloton of my peer group, and I see personalities peeking out of every frame, although the messages conveyed by the frames and detailing are often somewhat obscure. There is a large clutch of titanium bikes in my circle. I ride a Merlin. Craig, Wysocky, and Keith all ride Merlins. Gary rides a Basso on-road and a Merlin off. Bob rides a Clark Kent, which is a Merlin lookalike. Robert rides a Litespeed, which is a Merlin wannabe. Lou and Wes ride Sevens, which are latterday Merlins. Joyce and Bert ride a Seven tandem. Cindy and Tom ride an Arctos Machine Works tandem, which is from the smithy of Gary Hellfrich (founder of Merlin). Bill rides an Ibis, which is Merlin's west coast cousin. Greg rides a McMahon. Ti frames, one and all.
I have waged a one-man campaign to persuade my friends to remove all the decals from their ti bikes and buff out the tubes with steel wool, so we now see a pack of anonymous gray bikes cruising around. And if you think a no-decal ti bike--all dull silver tubes and no adornments--represents a lack of personal expression, you're not fully appreciating how this works.
Having your bike be an expression of your personality isn't always about being flamboyant and extrovert. The quiet, understated nullity of a no-paint, no-frills bike can simply scream who you are, or who you want the world to think you are: you're so cool, you don't need to make a splash; you're a samurai zen monk in lycra; an invisible, lethal stealth fighter, flying under the radar of conventional thinking.
At the other extreme, you have the folks who like their frames fancy and frilly...who embrace and celebrate the era of handmade frames and exquisite detailing. Rich rides an old-school Rivendell with lovely lug work, pinstriping, and pretty paint, tricked out with a classic British Brooks saddle. No carbon fiber or alloys or ti-friggin'-tanium for this guy! Rich also rides an old-school Norton Commando, with its own lavish pinstriping, paint, and chrome. You can see a trend here. His winter bike is another product of the arch-druid of retro, Grant Peterson: the classic Bridgestone RB-1. And he has a vintage blue-and-white Schwinn racing frame hanging on the wall in his house, which he keeps promising to build up into a fixed gear or cross bike or something. But for now, it serves as a piece of art on the wall over the stereo. Rich went to all the trouble of repainting his Rivendell from one shade of moss green to another about two chips away on the paint chart. I could hardly tell the difference, but to him it spoke volumes.
Gordon, our token Scotsman, rides a lovely Rambouillet, dressed up in cream and copper. As Rambouillet is a part of the Rivendell Bicycle Works family (Grant Peterson's retro-empire), it follows that it has all the elegant lug sculpting, fussy detailing, and heraldic headbadging of a Rivendell. Gordon's bike looks like something straight out of a 1950's era Paris-Brest-Paris...a timeless touring bike.
Stacey makes the ultimate in flamboyant statements in our crowd. She owns and rides not one but two Columbines. In case you don't know, Columbines are some of the prettiest, most elaborately detailed frames ever created, and are priced accordingly. No one else--except possibly Erickson--takes lug work to such sinfully baroque, shamelessly art nouveau extremes, and no one who loves bikes can pass a Columbine without stopping for a few oohs and ahhs.
One of Stacey's Columbines is a soft shade of metallic lavendar, with all the lug work and embellishment picked out in silver, like a box of jewelry. Stacey owns a dog-grooming business, and her bike is adorned with silver plated dog bones and a miniature head badge of her late, lamented toy schnauser. The other bike has a subtle fade paint job, from light green to dark green, front to back. Fewer custom touches, but still extremely elegant, with columbine flowers twining around the tubes. She likes the frame geometry a little better on this one. Says it climbs better. Gee...function does follow form sometimes. Stacey also has--from a previous epoch in her evolving personality--a Kestrel painted like a Holstein cow. A Kowstrel, she calls it. She tried to sell that one recently, but I believe there were no takers.
Emilio, our token Italian, certainly expresses himself through his bikes, but his message is tricky. His daily trainer is an ancient Vilier, an honored frame from the old country. Emilio points out that Marco Pantani rode a Vilier, and we see now that the Gerolsteiner team rides them, including this year's spring classics darling, Davide Rebellin. I enjoyed pointing out to him that the Gerolsteiner team bikes were all equipped with Dura-Ace gruppos...not a Campy part in sight. But then, what can you expect? It's a German team.
Anyway, Emilio's Vilier is a far cry from those fancy pro bikes. It's about as tatty looking as one of those beaters you rode in college...ugly on purpose, so no one would steal it. It looks as if it were painted with a can of red Krylon. No runs! No drips! No errors! It has several yards of black electrician's tape wrapped around assorted tubes for no apparent reason. It looks like something off the Red Green Show. He also has a single-speed that is, if anything, even more disreputable looking...definitely painted with a can of flat black primer. So how is this pig's breakfast an expression of Emilio's peronality? The way I see it, it's a variation on the anonymous, stealth ti bike theme. The statement it makes is the non-statement; the anti-expression...a form of subtle brinksmanship. See, Emilio can ride the legs off most of us. He knows it and we know it, and his bike says he doesn't have to prove a thing to anybody.
But wait...there's another page in Emilio's portfolio. Lurking behind the shabby, everyday beater bikes, there is his secret weapon: his money bike, his prime time ride, which he only trots out for special occasions, like Superman emerging from a phone booth. This is a state-of-the-art Colnago carbon fiber frame, and through assiduous shopping on E-Bay, Emilio has managed to trim out every bit of this wonder bike in carbon fiber: seat, seat tube, crank arms, handlebars, levers, forks. You name it...if it can be fabricated from carbon fiber, it's on there. And in the process, he has whittled the weight down to about 16 pounds, which is really unfair, considering how fast he is already.
Speaking of Colnagos, my buddy Robin, our token Canadian, had a nice Colnago, which he dearly loved. But the frame broke. He got it fixed once, but when it broke again, he went back to his former bike, which I always liked better anyway: a pearl-white Della Santa with a red Canadian maple leaf on the head tube. To me, that bike has much more personality--or rather, expresses Robin's personality more aptly--than the Italian bike. I kow he grieves for the Colnago--especially when he recalls how much it cost--but I really do think he belongs on the Della Santa, with its proud maple leaf head badge. This is another bike that has been lovingly and painstakingly repainted for no other reason than the sheer joy of it.
Steve rides a black Kestrel and Joseph rides a white one. These two guys have very different personalities, but underneath their superficial differences, both have a simmering racer mentality, of which the light, tight Kestrel is an obvious expression. They both have good bike posture and look good sitting on their bikes. Theoretically, their bikes are interchangeable. And yet I could never see Steve on the white bike or Joseph on the black one. It wouldn't fit. The black goes with Steve's dark, droll sense of humor. The white goes with Joseph's sense of a bright, clear aura. They are perfect as they are.
Sometimes all it takes is a color to project your persona. One guy I see on club rides has a yellow Look with every single thing on it in yellow...even the tires. And another guy has a bike with a red, yellow, and blue paint scheme, and all of his components,including rims and tires, are in those colors as well. Even his clothes match. Robert had a purple Vitus before he swapped it for a Litespeed, and the purple theme ran through chainring bolts, hubs, jockey pulley wheels...very slick, and very much an expression of his personality.
In my pre-Merlin days, I rode a nice, lugged, steel bike that was painted red and white. I liked it a lot, and I made sure to accessorize it in red and white: white seat; red and white bar tape. I'm sure if they had been available at the time, I would have run red tires and red rims. And for awhile there, I even tried to wear only red and/or white jerseys, which tended to cramp my sartorial style a bit. Titanium is better in this respect: like the basic black dress, it goes with anything. Nothing you wear will ever clash with a ti bike.
I will grant you that some people buy and accessorize their bikes with little but pragmatic function in mind. The bike was on sale. It was a good deal on a good bike. Never mind the frame color. Forget about the special touches. But even they are making a statement with their humdrum, generic bikes...even if the statement is simply that they are too practical and stolid to be bothered with self-expression.
If you hang out with serious bikeaholics though, I'm certain you'll be able to see in the personalized bikes of your friends a complex vocabulary of messages and portents. It has been said that dog owners over time begin to look like their dogs, and that wives begin to look like their husbands. Look around you on your next club ride, and see how many of your friends are starting to look like their bikes. I once met a guy who claimed to be able to "read" Hawaiian sport shirts, and make predictions about their wearers, based on auguries hidden in the palm tree and hula girl motifs, much as one might read tea leaves or entrails or the other kind of palms. Perhaps it is possible to "read" our bikes in the same way and learn a great deal about the folks astride them.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net