Sweetpea Bicycles

When I was seven years old, I had a Ramona Quimby Diary. It was the kind where you fill in the blanks on the pages, where you bare your soul and specify your favorite animal. On one of those pages, I had carefully filled in the blank “When I grow up I want to be: Just like my brother.” Other pages clarified that Nathan was good at everything and never got in trouble. Even though he should have. Trust me.

And when I think back to my earliest memories of biking, he was always there ahead of me biking though the mudflats near our house. In these memories, he is either waiting for me or telling me that WD-40 makes your bike go faster. I was seven, had a really cool banana seat bike and no reason to believe otherwise. And though I never really understood what was so intriguing about the bicycle parts catalogs that arrived in the mail, I knew that biking was an important part of who he was.

As we got older and got through all of the usual sibling pettiness (”You walk too loud!” “Yeah? Well you breathe too loud!”), we became really close friends. In college, we decided that biking everywhere would be the coolest thing ever. He got a job with Ped Ex in Santa Cruz, delivering organic pastries and sushi rolls by bike. (Does patchouli oil make your bike go faster?) He introduced me to the joys of San Francisco Critical Mass, and some of the finer points of riding in traffic. And when I graduated, I was also inspired to become a bike messenger on the mean streets of Portland.

Needless to say, I felt really honored to have been commissioned to build him a bike. This rig is for his daily San Fransisco commute, his upcoming triathlon, and weekend rides in the Marin Headlands and the Oakland Hills. There are mounts for a rear rack (for carrying his amazing vegan pies to bio-regional potlucks) and fender eyelets (to keep his lederhosen dry on the way to parties).

Do I make him out to be nothing short of super-fantastic? Well, that he is. He told me that the other day a fella in a bike shop suggested that his chainstay ought to say “Handbuilt by My Sister in Portland, Ore.” And that is the heart of it really. I am stoked to have been the builder, but even more stoked to have been the sister.

(More pictures here.)