Bike Adjacent

Last year my friend Bob asked me if I wanted to work on a zine with him. The idea was to do a print piece for cyclists that wasn’t about bikes, but about all the other things that cyclists are interested in. Because it’s Bob, I said yes. Also, because it’s Bob, the zine turned out to be an elegantly laid out, nicely printed magazine, not a copy shop paste-up job.

As Whitman sort of said, “The bike contains multitudes.” Like a cultural blackhole, it draws everything around it into its gaping maw.

For example, coffee and beer. Those are beverages. You don’t (very often) drink them while riding, and yet there they are. For some years, every bike shop owner I talked to was considering adding a cafe to their shop (before they did some math and understood they didn’t want to be in TWO difficult businesses). Nonetheless. Coffee and beer.

How about wool? It’s a fabric. If you’ve been riding bikes very long, you likely own a piece of wool cycling gear, which combines a sort of performance material quality with a retro-chic appeal. And once you own some wool cycling stuff, you get more interested in other wool things, because for most cyclists, if some is good, more must be better.

Here’s a weird one. Skateboarding. If this doesn’t make sense to you, that’s just because you didn’t grow up riding skateboards. If you did, you understand that time’s arrow always points from the skateboard to the bicycle. It’s as natural a progression as base jumping and premature death.

Of course, a serious cycling habit also nurtures an interest in science. Ecology and environmentalism are naturals. Mechanic engineering and material science might be in the mix. Physics.

Europe, too. If you ride bikes, and you don’t live in Europe, you will eventually become more deeply interested in Europe. You will dream of traveling and riding there, sure, but you will also learn about places that non-cyclists never think of, like the Arenberg Forest, the Oude Kwaremont, the town of Huy, Mont Ventoux, Blockhaus, Strade Bianchi.

Also, mountains generally. Is there a road to the top? Are the trails? We want to know.

I suspect, if you’ve read this far, you’ve also started thinking of other things that orbit the bicycle, like the art of the Bauhaus school, leg shaving, messenger bags, torque accuracy as a measure of worthiness, pneumatics, rubber compounds, square flat food, trail design, the plague of abandoned dog poop, snakes, bears, bird watching and basic carpentry.

Why is the bike like this, adjacent to everything?

The thing is, when the bicycle becomes a part of your lifestyle (and I have no useful measure of when or how that happens), then it becomes a lens through which you see your whole world. Coffee and skateboards and physics and Europe aren’t really adjacent to the bicycle, until you put them there. There’s no good reason for your bike mechanic to be making you a latte. There’s no good reason to go to Huy, unless your cousin lives there. The things that’s really bike adjacent is you.