I just bought a pair of blue leather clogs at a consignment shop and I dare say they are haunted. The toes look like they’ve kicked and the heels look like they’ve dug. I swear to you, they have as much verb as they do noun in them. They bear the evidence of having been cobbled, worn, and recobbled with quirky asymmetry. They have gobs of glue at the seams, a few repairs to the heels and say “Oscar Austad” on the bottom of the wooden sole.

For five dollars, I bought more than a pair of clogs. I stepped into the ghost of one particular pair of feet that have wandered elsewhere. Oscar, wherever you are, thank you for your shoes.

My bicycle obsessions tell a different story. The bikes that I own and the bikes that I covet prove me to be quite the opposite of a minimalist. I add features. My “fast bike” has the couplers and takes fenders and a rack. Even my fantasy track bike has two water bottle cages. And disc brakes. And brass fenders. And a chaingaurd. Oh! And the ability to convert it to an internally geared bike if I want. See what I mean?

My latest bike obsession has forced me to come face-to-face with my miminalist/maximalist conflict. I want an long tail. Specifically, I want to transform my Two Bite Curry city bike into the Free Ranger with the Xtracycle’s Free Radical conversion kit. If you ask me why, I will tell say:

• 15 pounds of dog food and a bale of hay
• Bike camping
• Carrying your new Sweetpea to the final fitting
• Putting my mom on the back for a picnic at Laurelhurst Park

My inner minimalist asks me if I haven’t been doing just fine with my current basket and panniers. It reminds me that I already have a trailer. My inner minimalist asks me if more “stuff” is the answer.

But here’s the catch. I don’t suppose it’s a material problem I am looking to solve. I am willing to admit that the physical things I want perhaps speak more directly to the intangible things that I want.
I want to feel that any adventure is possible.

• I want to imagine that I am one good idea away from a bike trip to the coast.
• I want to broadcast generosity of spirit at every frequency. “Let me carry that for you!” “ Can I give you a lift?”
• I want to get pulled over for reckless optimism. With my mom riding shotgun.

I don’t know yet if and when I will be getting the long tail. But I am inclined to believe that some of the best stuff you’d want to carry with you down the road doesn’t actually weigh you down at all.

It struck me while watching this video that you could replace the surfboard with a morning ride, an early trail run, a mid-winter cross country ski. I want that feeling of space, movement, and utter ease in the natural world. I want to find the pace that gives me access to profound beauty. If I get a glimmer of that from time to time, I know I’ll have gotten what I came for.

I have a favorite garden in Kyoto. It wasn’t one of those totally immaculate and famous gardens. It was part of a larger park up on a hillside. But whether Japanese gardens are formal or not, they are meant to be seen by walking through them, allowing the path shifting your perspective, revealing and obscuring views. Stone steps lead your eyes as much as your feet. Meandering about this particular garden, I came to a point where two paths converged. They met up and led me another ten feet to a dead end. I found myself stopped short at a scraggly lumpy little azalea plant.

I found this both funny and sweet. The language of the garden is subtle, full of commas and parenthesis, but here was an azalea exclamation point. “Look at me! Aren’t I fantastic?”

I’ve got paths on my mind as I plan my garden for spring. We’ve lived here not a year yet, and our yard is already marked by use and habit, and the course of everyday life. Paths have been worn into the lawn, now mud. I see the path from the side gate to the shop, well worn. I see the patio to the chicken coop, well worn. I see the turn around spot that the dog has made on her wild ricochets across the yard and back.

These paths tell a story, and it is a factual account. I can respect that. I may even lay down a stone path to formalize them. But I also find myself with an urge to lay down some shiny mosaic stepping stones on the way to my rhubarb plant, way at the back of the yard. It is growing little by little while I go about my business. Sweet, tart, and sturdy. I should travel that path often and give my rhubarb a few kind words. At some point it will be the path to pie.

When it comes to hills, cyclists generally take sides. I’m a climber. I may noodle and lag a bit on the lowlands, but hills summon my fighting spirit. This is something of a reflex, and I’ve never received much in the way of pro advice on how to approach a climb.

So when I showed up to Sorella Forte’s hill climbing clinic a couple weeks back, I was itching to get learn some climbing theory and put it into practice. We met at Glen Otto Park in Troutdale, a base camp for any number of summits. We huddled under a canopy at some picnic tables while two of the expert Sorella climbers shared their tips and techniques. Before rolling out, we were issued the mantra “I love hills.”

Our first task was to complete two ten minute intervals at an even effort – not gasping and wheezing, but a good solid exertion. The goal was for us to keep pedaling steady, changing gears as the terrain changed beneath us. We climbed, slowly at first, then steeper. I hunkered into a familiar groove. I felt strong. But then the road leveled out, dipped slightly. My ten minutes were not up. Hard just got harder. And suddenly, I had a different relationship with topography.

(The author, crushing the editor on an uphill section of road.)

Descending isn’t something I had taken very seriously until then. I figure, eh, I’m small; of course I’m not going to go downhill as fast as bigger folks. And besides, I’m a little chicken. I’ve always focused on the getting to the top. The uphill is the worthy opponent. The uphill is where heroes are made, right? Perhaps when you are riding alone or with a buddy, but not when you are in a pack hell-bent on going fast. The next uphill begins at the top of this one. And if I pause to throw myself an imaginary victory party at the crest, I will struggle all the harder to catch the wheel of powerful descending draft. There’s more to this than I had bargained for.

Hills. I love ‘em. But they have a whole other side.

The best part about making things by hand is that you get to carefully consider how you want to approach your materials, your tools, and your process. You can add your intelligence and your insight along the way to produce an object that simply couldn’t exist without your hand in the making. Or as Steve Jobs put it you can try “to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.”

The flip side is that you can also add your inexperience and your miscalculations and end up with a mistake. When the hand and the brain are connected in the making of things, it can be a blessing or a curse.

I picked up the fork that I had just built the day before. It was my first unicrown fork. I cleaned it up and admired it from all angles. It looked good! And then I discovered that it was shorter than I had designed it to be. I soon saw my error, and realized what I need to do differently. But there is no getting around it, the fork I was so proud of turned out to be a dud.

The generous view is that making mistakes is part of the learning process. And it is commonly said that the best craftspeople are the ones who are continually learning. These twin platitudes are a shallow consolation when I need to both learn and produce on a tight timeline. I don’t have a lot of time to be messing around building lovely but too-short forks.

The less generous, brutally pragmatic view is that I could have sourced a fork from a supplier that has nearly identical specifications, from the rake, to the span, to every last braze-on. It would have been less expensive to buy that complete fork than to pay for my materials and paint costs, let alone my time. Let alone twice. But I wanted to build it. I wanted to build it because I had the opportunity to learn something new. I also was convinced I could build a fork that was more beautiful than the one I could buy, despite having never done so.

So, I will go out into the shop early tomorrow morning and buckle down until I have my second ever unicrown fork. What will be visible in the finished product? Refinement or beauty? Maybe, maybe not. But it will be the fork that simply wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t built the first one. That will be good enough.

This is what it looks like when we plan our future.

The appeal I suppose is similar to journal writing. I love the idea of rigorously documenting mundane stuff. This takes persistence, a daily practice and the lapse of time before you have a body of work that shows you something larger.

I am not interested in my daily purchases, or perhaps just not enough, in order to commit to such a project. The parallel daily habit in my life would certainly be cycling.

Biking is a bit of an obsession and it does lend itself to all kinds of documentation. I know cyclists who track their miles each year, their altitude and their heart rates. And over time, they can tell you how many times they have circled the globe. They can tell you how many Everests they have climbed.

For me, this type of cycling data has never made the whole experience seem greater than its parts. It’s a foreign currency. I can’t exchange yearly miles for intrinsic value or real meaning. But I was reminded this evening that everyday cycling does every once in a while give me something unaccountably larger than the daily ride.

It was one of those nights when I felt stronger than I really am. It was like a surprise upgrade to first class and I was flying in a way I’m not quite used to. On rides like this the speed comes effortlessly and the ground just spins beneath me. I am on top of the pedals, on top of the world. And this doesn’t come from nowhere. There are countless miles in these here legs. Without counting a single one, I feel myself as a larger body of work.

On rides like this, you don’t frame it, count it or clock it. All you need to know is already in your legs and you just let them fly.

My shop is not without its charms, but I sometimes have to clear a path before I can really see that.

On Thursday, I had a photographer and graphic designer in the Sweetpea shop for a photo shoot.  As soon as they crossed the threshold, I was apologizing for the remaining mess.   They thought it was perfect. And seeing the shop through their eyes really energized me.   They appreciated the strange mechanical garden of tools that only make sense in the presence of a bike frame. They were drawn in by the hand tools and the torch.

Everybody loves the torch. I do.

The photographer particularly admired my chalkboard wall. It reminded him of a certain Annie Leibovitz photograph in which the subject is photographed against a large and much scribbled upon chalkboard.   I felt sheepish that I hadn’t yet put my chalkboard wall to use.   I agreed to put some stuff up “to give interesting texture to the background” of the photos.

The effect of doing so was really kind of profound for me.   In sidewalk chalk I drew key dimensions of fork crowns that I like to use, and I wrote notes about various specifications for braze-ons and thread tapping.

Stepping back, I saw a body of knowledge in my own handwriting.  Tire profiles and checklists aren’t exactly throw pillows, but they really have softened my space.  They reflected back to me the character of my work and my way of working.   It isn’t particularly tidy, but it certainly looks like fun.

Bibs.

For those of you who are well acquainted with the joys of bibs, I applaud you. Keep on rockin’. But for those of you who don’t have some bibs among your riding collection, we need to have a little talk.

Bibs are high-waisted bike shorts with built in suspenders. They come in womens and mens sizing, shorts, knickers, tights and the usual array of technical materials. And like many good products, it is what you don’t see that you are going to love. Specifically, you won’t see my lower back when I’m tucked into an otherwise dignified and racey position. You won’t see my belly button, as adorable as it is, when I am off the bike and distributing high fives (see below).

The advantages go beyond modesty. There is no waistband to tug on and no waistband to tug back at you. And have you ever had a chamois that had the tendency to head south in any season? Not with bibs to keep it all in check. Furthermore, in the winter you won’t have unpleasant gusts of air assailing the tummy region. And when the sunshine returns, you won’t have the funky lower lumbar tan line that has become my signature summer look.

Lady bib-deniers may bring up two issues, which I will now address and dismiss.

1. Bibs make it a bit trickier to go pee. Okay, maybe true. But we’re adults, we can figure it out.
2. Suspenders and boobs? Jeez, don’t ask me! But I have seen women of all shapes and sizes making it look easy.

At this point, you are almost sold on the merits of the bibs, but you may ask yourself “Aren’t these just for serious racer types?” Oh, gosh no. In fact, I find myself looking at pants and undies and thinking, those would be even more awesome as bibs.

Let me leave you with one thought. When you head into your favorite bike shop for your spring chamois fix, reach for the bibs. I dare you NOT to be as evangelical as I am.