Facebook X Email Print Save Story There are places in California that can make a person feel in tune with geological time, newly alert, on the brink of something cosmic. Walnut Creek, an affluent suburb east of San Francisco, is not one of them. Nestled in the foothills of stately Mt.
Diablo, the city’s quaint downtown is buffeted by chain retailers and big-box stores. On a recent summer morning, I took the train there to meet Grant Petersen, the bicycle designer, writer, and founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works. Petersen has become famous for making beautiful bikes, using materials and components that his industry has mostly abandoned, and for promoting a vision of cycling that is low-key, functional, anti-car, and anti-corporate.
He has polarizing opinions and an outsized influence. Sensing that it would be uncouth to arrive on foot, and wanting to honestly communicate my level of commitment to cycling, I brought my bike: a red nineteen-eighties Nashbar that I purchased in my mid-twenties, rode happily for a decade, and abandoned when I became pregnant and freshly terrified of death. The bike had spent the past two years hanging vertically in the garage, where, from time to time, I accidentally backed into it with the car.
The wheels were out of true, and—a separate issue—couldn’t be removed: I had installed locking anti-theft skewers, then lost the key. Petersen met me at the BART station. There were ways in which my bike was not up to Rivendell standards: it had sylphlike tires and an over-all look of abandonment.
He was polite about the situation. “It’s steel, it has lugs,” he said. Petersen is seventy and muscular, with buttony blue eyes, a gentle smile, and graying hair that gravitates toward the middle of his head, like a cresting wave.
That morning, he was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt, a red bandanna, and loose pants made by Rivendell’s clothing line, MUSA , which Petersen developed himself. (“They seem to fit like normal pants, thank god,” a description on the Web site reads.) He was riding a Rivendell Roaduno, “a single-ish speed road bike” painted banana-slug yellow, and he set off on the sidewalk, beckoning for me to follow.
In the past forty years, cycling has increasingly been branded as a form of exercise, one that emphasizes speed, optimization, and competition. On any given morning, in Central, Prospect, and Golden Gate Parks, gangs of white-collar workers—wearing curve-hugging performance apparel and tethered to the cloud by G.P.
S.—whiz in circles, cheating the wind. Indoor fitness companies, such as SoulCycle and Peloton, have reinforced the image of cycling as a high-octane cardio workout.
Most new, high-end bikes are compact, lightweight, and hyper-responsive, with carbon-fibre frames, drop handlebars, and disk brakes, some of which are hydraulic. One of the bikes recommended by Bicycling magazine last year has a matte-black colorway with “a stealthy aesthetic”: the cables and wires are tucked inside the frame. The bike is advertised as “race bred, built for speed.
” Petersen believes that the bike industry’s focus on racing—along with “competition and a pervasive addiction to technology”—has had a poisonous influence on cycling culture. He dislikes the widespread marketing to recreational riders of spandex kits, squirty energy gels, and workout apps such as Strava. He thinks that low, curved handlebars contort riders into an unnatural position; that bicycles made of carbon fibre and aluminum have safety issues; and that stretchy synthetics have nothing on seersucker and wool.
“The whole purpose of pro riding now is to create a demand at the retail level for the really expensive bicycles,” he said. He sees the glorification of speed—personal bests, constant quantification, metrics, leaderboards—as discouraging to entry-level riders who might otherwise enjoy life with a bike. “I would like to see the Tour de France only allow riders to ride one bike the entire tour,” he said.
“Do their own maintenance, change their own flats, the way that normal people have to. Racing would have a positive trickle-down effect, instead of the way it is now. Bikes would be better, they’d be safer, and they would last longer.
And the races themselves wouldn’t be less interesting at all.” Rivendell’s bicycles are marketed as “UNracing” bikes. The frames are made of lugged, brazed steel.
They have long wheelbases, luxurious chainstays, and sloping top tubes. “The rear triangle of his bikes, you could fly a plane through there,” Ashton Lambie, a record-breaking American track cyclist, said admiringly. “Nobody is doing that.
” The bikes have playful names—Roadini, Atlantis, Hunqapillar, Susie W. Longbolts—and run roughly from two thousand to five thousand dollars, depending on the build. One of Rivendell’s signatures is the country bike: a rig equally suitable for paved roads and, as the company puts it, “the kinds of fire trails a Conestoga wagon could negotiate, but not the kind that would require a jackass.
” Rivendell frames are generally outfitted with upright handlebars, leather saddles, manual shifters, platform pedals, and lush, chubby tires. They are designed to accommodate racks, baskets, fenders, and bags—whatever is useful for cross-country touring, local bike camping, and running errands. “Bikes are turning ugly,” Petersen recently wrote.
“I personally have more respect, tons of respect, for somebody who rides around town, to work, for shopping, and for fun, than somebody who does front-flips on handrails with a fifty-foot dropoff on one side.” He is an advocate of pleasurable, unhurried riding—alone, or with family and friends—and is obsessive about comfort. Through the years, Rivendell bicycles have amassed a devoted following.
People take portraits of their bikes in stunning natural environments and post them to social media; they “Riv up” non-Rivendell frames; they pore over Petersen’s writing, and adopt his preferences. Adam Leibow, the publisher of Calling in Sick , an “extreme alternative cycling magazine,” told me, “Some people call Rivendell a cult.” In Walnut Creek, I tailed Petersen as he pedalled at a leisurely pace back to Rivendell’s headquarters.
For the past twenty-six years, the company has occupied a six-bay industrial space in a sleepy area by the highway. One of the bays is a showroom, though it felt less like a sales floor and more like a clubhouse. A mobile of lugs, made by a local teen-ager, twirled from the ceiling.
Rows of bicycles leaned nonchalantly against their kickstands. Rivendells are distinctive: they have Kodachrome paint jobs, elegant decals, and delicate metal-inlay head badges—a sort of hood ornament for bikes. The lugs, steel sockets that connect the tubing of a bicycle frame, have patterns and shapes cut into them—a heart, a diamond, the curl of a leaf.
Even the fork crowns are pretty. In a 1996 catalogue, Petersen wrote that he likes “the idea of a fine frame being identifiable by brand, even without its paint, decals, and head badge, if it happens to wind up in a junkyard 100 years from now . .
. in 2095, a hobo art connoisseur could saunter by, see the frame, pick it up, be drawn to the joints, and say ‘ (Burp) Ha!—an old Rivendell.’ ” Link copied We were greeted in the showroom by Will Keating, Rivendell’s general manager, a tall lapsed skateboarder in his mid-thirties.
He was wearing Vans, Dickies, and a baseball cap embroidered with the Calling in Sick logo. Rivendell has twelve employees, a disproportionate number of whom are into vintage cameras; for a while, the shop had a darkroom. (“Skateboarders tend to follow a trajectory,” Keating told me.
“They skate, then they get into photography, then they get into bicycles, and then they get into birding.”) On the wall, there were monochrome photos of Petersen’s employees and their friends: well-dressed, tattooed, and helmetless, they rolled through groves of oak and eucalyptus, and pedalled along sun-dappled ridges. The photographs looked like an ad for California.
These days, some mainstream bikes incorporate electronics requiring batteries and firmware: shifters that change gears at the press of a button, or power meters that collect data on a rider’s output. “So many basic things are being teched out of existence,” Petersen said. He saw this as a function of business incentives: electronics break or need replacement; an upgrade is always around the corner.
Petersen’s objections are practical but also philosophical. As bikes become higher-tech, riders lose skills and agency. “A lot of sports have been watered down,” Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, told me.
“People are bicycling, but they have a motor. And people are climbing, but they’re climbing indoors. They’re riding big waves, but they’re being pulled in by Jet Skis.
Yet there are a few people that are bucking the trend.” In the Rivendell showroom, a table held a silver bike frame, fitted with shifters and a drivetrain: the system of cranks, chains, pedals, and gears that propels a bicycle. “It gets really sappy if I try to talk about the beauty of a mechanical movement,” Petersen said.
“I don’t want to be poetic about it at all. But I think people like to see how things work.” He turned the crank and moved the friction shifter—a small, silent paddle that shifts gears smoothly, “like a ramp rather than stairs,” as the Rivendell Web site describes it—which was the industry standard until the mid-eighties, when index shifting was introduced.
We watched the derailleur lift the chain from gear to gear. “It’s so simple and so easy,” he said. “It takes a little bit of practice, and it’s that little bit of practice that dooms it, absolutely dooms it, in the market.
” Electronic parts, he said, were cheaper and easier to make, and lowered the bar to entry. “But the thing that’s lost in there—it’s the control that you have.” I followed him to his office, a narrow room stuffed neatly with tools, books, fly-fishing supplies, and, on a high shelf, a plastic box full of rare derailleurs.
There were two ergonomic kneeling stools; the landline telephone was wrapped in a block of ergonomic foam. By the door to the office was a small, framed color photo of two friendly-looking septuagenarians, standing next to a pair of Rivendell bicycles. “Are those your parents?” I asked.
“No,” Petersen said. “That’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.” Petersen grew up in Lafayette, California, a suburb one town over from Walnut Creek.
His father was a mechanical engineer, and his mother was a painter and a homemaker. Petersen was a well-liked, athletic, outdoorsy kid, and when he describes his childhood—baseball, paper routes, slingshots, pheasant-hunting—it can bring to mind a mid-century Boy Scout Handbook. Still, he felt apart from his peers.
“I wet the bed until I was twenty-three,” he said. “It changes your whole point of view toward life.” He never had sleepovers and was shy around girls.
The problem, a physiological one, limited his future prospects. When he graduated from high school, in 1972, dorm life seemed impossible. So he stayed home, enrolled at a local junior college, and, in 1975, began working at the newly opened R.
E.I. outpost in Berkeley, a hub of the Bay Area’s energetic outdoor-recreation scene.
(Petersen said that for a time the company instituted a rule, “No handwritten signs,” after he began taping up long, chatty shelf talkers for products he liked.) He took up mountaineering and rock climbing, and commuted to work on his bicycle, a thirty-mile round trip. In the summer of 1976, he and a girlfriend biked across the country, from Walnut Creek to northern Connecticut, and hitchhiked back.
Throughout his twenties, Petersen raced in local competitions. Chris Watson, a friend and teammate, said, “He probably doesn’t want to tout this fact, but he shaved his legs like the rest of us.” Most of his peers relied on bicycle parts made by Campagnolo, an upscale Italian company, but Petersen couldn’t afford them.
“I think I had thirteen different brands and seven different countries represented on my racing bike,” he said. “It was a hodgepodge, but it worked perfectly.” He was talented but ambivalent about competing.
“I know the racing scene extremely well, I know the culture really well, I’m comfortable with it, and I hate it,” he told me. In 1984, Petersen took an entry-level job at Bridgestone Cycle U.S.
A., an offshoot of the Japanese tire conglomerate. Bridgestone was Japan’s largest bicycle manufacturer, but the American office, which had a half-dozen employees, was not staffed by bicycle experts.
Petersen and Watson, who worked in the sales department, helped design a bike called the MB-1, which combined the sportiness and speed of a road bike with the strength of a mountain bike. “I had more influence over Bridgestone bicycles than I should have,” Petersen told me. “But nobody knew anything about bicycles except for me.
” The bike sold out immediately, and subsequent models from Bridgestone Cycle U.S.A.
bear certain hallmarks of a Petersen build. Kyle Kelley, the owner of Allez LA, a bike shop in Los Angeles, described Petersen’s Bridgestone designs as “some of the best race bikes in the history of mountain biking, period.” Petersen became the division’s head of marketing.
He formed a subscription club for Bridgestone riders and enthusiasts, the Bridgestone Owners Bunch, and began publishing a newsletter called the BOB Gazette . The newsletter had articles, product listings, Q. & A.
s, word games, tips (“next time somebody hoodwinks you into giving a therapeutic massage, do it with a rolling pin”), and a devoted readership. BOB s, as they were known, were thrifty, embraced a D.I.
Y. ethos, and valued function over prestige. “I am philosophically for putting cheap, really high-functioning stuff on a bike,” Petersen told me.
“A twenty-eight-dollar derailleur on a thirty-five-hundred-dollar bike has a kind of beauty in itself.” In 1994, Bridgestone announced that it was shuttering its U.S.
bicycle operation. Petersen told me that he had an informal standing job offer from Specialized, a major bicycle manufacturer, but that he couldn’t get excited about the changes in the mainstream market. Production was moving to China.
Mountain bikes had begun to draw influence from motocross, incorporating shocks and suspension forks. The introduction of carbon fibre and titanium brought new manufacturers, including aerospace companies, into the industry. “The proportions, designs, paint jobs, graphics were hard for me to embrace,” Petersen said.
The timing was not ideal: he and his wife, Mary Anderson, had a five-year-old daughter and were expecting a second child. Still, in the final issue of the BOB Gazette , he announced that he would be forming his own company. “For better or worse, for richer or poorer, Rivendell will reflect my extreme personal taste,” he wrote.
Within a few months, Petersen raised eighty-nine thousand dollars from friends and family, and set up shop in his garage. Anderson became the company’s vice-president. Rivendell’s first product was beeswax, for lubricating bolt threads; Petersen processed it in his kitchen.
He began publishing another newsletter, the Rivendell Reader , and distributed it to the old BOB mailing list. “In the simplest terms, I think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world, or at least make you happy,” he told readers. “Yet so many modern bicycles are promoted as tools for self-aggrandizement, status, and hammering the competition to a pulp, and the bikes themselves look like hoodlums, thugs, and ne’er-do-wells.
” The Reader was rich with information about bike parts and accessories, and often incorporated Petersen’s non-bicycle interests, as with a short physics primer on “Why a Boomerang Boomerangs,” written by a boomerang designer. The newsletter also included a column titled “Progress Report,” a detailed journal of the company’s development. Financially, Rivendell was almost always in the red.
“We’re forging ahead with little projects that cost loot but will pay off down the road—all stuff a financial advisor would advise against, I’m sure,” Petersen wrote, in 1999, at a low point. “But the lugs are so fun, and it’s so ironic that here we are doing them in an age when almost nobody gives a hoot. It’s tragic and funny at the same time.
” A few days after I met Petersen, I went downstairs to retrieve the mail and found a cardboard box containing what can only be described as a dossier: old Bridgestone catalogues, issues of the BOB Gazette , a nearly complete archive of the Rivendell Reader . The box also included an issue of Outside magazine from 1996, in which there was a story about Petersen—a “messiah to cycling Luddites”—under the headline “Lead Us Not Into Titanium.” He’d been styled for the photograph, in baggy jeans and a dark shirt buttoned clerically to the neck.
A Post-it had been slapped over the text: “Hate it,” he’d pencilled. “They made me wear the clothes.” In an issue of the Reader from the same year, Petersen responded to the article in his “Progress Report”: “Man, I look like a turkey posing in the damn sunset holding up a frame I didn’t even make myself, and the text has me some kind of damn leader of the *$#@$!#a$#$ ‘flock,’ and that’s so insulting and misdirected and man, it makes me mad.
. . .
I don’t hate titanium! It’s good material! It’s pretty! No rusto! Bravo! Whatever! Damn!” Rivendell’s employees object to descriptions of the company’s following as cultlike. “The other stuff is the cult,” Keating told me. “Putting the suit on, and going as fast as possible, and using the bars like this”—we were sitting at a table, and he hunched over his coffee cup, as if to protect it.
“That’s the culty stuff, right? We’re just making nice bikes for regular people.” Still, people kind of get a bug. They buy in.
The RBW Owners Bunch, an online forum for fans, has more than five thousand members, and users post on a daily basis. People organize “Riv Rides” in their home towns, and name-check their bikes in their professional bios and Instagram handles. On one afternoon that I visited, employees were nibbling on a large cheesecake from Junior’s, sent by a customer.
Leah Peterson, a nurse in southwest Michigan, and the owner of three Platypuses—a curvy, elongated upright country bike—sends themed enamel pins to other Platypus-riding “Riv Sisters.” Some years ago, when she visited the shop, the crew suspended a large cardboard welcome sign from the ceiling; she and Petersen cruised around town on a HubbuHubbuH, Rivendell’s tandem. Several months later, her father died unexpectedly of a pulmonary embolism.
She was astonished to open the mail and find handwritten notes from the Rivendell staff. “What company sends you a sympathy card when your dad dies?” she asked me. Link copied An undeniable part of Rivendell’s appeal is Petersen.
The guy has an aura. He tends to ride in long-sleeved shirts, pants, and Teva sandals, on bicycles dotted with multicolor nail polish. He wraps some of his handlebars in colorful felt or tape and hemp twine, then shellacs them.
(“I like to put a broccoli rubberband amidships,” he has written; it adds grip.) From time to time, he’ll strap poems to his basket or bars, then memorize them on trail rides. A pragmatist, he is a fan of what he calls the S24O, or the sub-twenty-four-hour overnight, a sort of working cyclist’s staycation—“bicycle camping for the time challenged”—in which participants ride into nature near their homes, camp out for one night, and return in the morning.
In 2012, he published “Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike,” which offers advice on cycling technique, diet, fitness, and etiquette (“Be saintlike on the bike path”). Controversially, he is ambivalent about helmets: he believes that most are inadequately padded, sacrificing safety for style; that our cultural obsession with them unfairly places the onus on cyclists, not drivers; and that they instill unearned confidence. (“Don’t risk-compensate,” he told me, as I clipped mine on.
) His own helmet, which he wears only occasionally, is augmented with packing foam. Petersen keeps a blog, Grant’s Blahg: a freewheeling repository of business updates, how-to tips, personal reflections, bicycle information, appreciative photos of goats, and so on. He takes his interests seriously, and when something captures his attention—fly-fishing, insulin, behavioral psychology—he goes deep.
He also has strong feelings about soap (pine tar is best), the figures on American currency (“Put Pooh on a coin”), and spelling bees (“To titillate the audience, the contestants don’t all spell the same words”). He is less dogmatic about e-bikes than one might expect (“Better than a car”). He enjoys wordplay; one Rivendell publication, a twenty-page flyer, excluded the letter “E.
” “It’s not about the bike, it’s about the relationship,” Richard Sachs, a master frame builder, told me. “You’re buying Grant. You’re buying Grant’s intellectual property, and his forty or fifty years of staying true to his belief system.
” Recently, out at a bar with friends, I struck up a conversation with a man in his late thirties, a climate-impact investor named Peter, who was sitting alone at a sidewalk table, drinking a beer. Across from him was a Rivendell: an A. Homer Hilsen frame, with thick tires, side-pull brakes, saddlebags, and built-in lights, which ran on wheel-generated electricity.
Peter said that he had wanted it to be an “apocalypse bike”: good for commuting, running errands, and bike camping, but also something he could “hop on after an earthquake and get anywhere, dependent on no one.” He had been taken aback by how often strangers initiated conversations with him about Rivendell; I was the third person to approach him that evening. “Would I have bought this bike if I knew people would talk to me about it multiple times a week?” he asked.
Still, a few minutes later, he said he was thinking about buying a second. In July, Petersen enlisted his friend Dan Leto to drive us out to Fernandez Ranch, in Martinez, for a trail ride. Petersen is a licensed driver but hates to do it—“It scares me, the thought of hurting somebody”—and estimates that he has spent ninety minutes behind the wheel of a car in the past four years.
When Leto arrived at the shop, driving a white nineties Ford Explorer (Eddie Bauer edition), the temperature was ticking toward triple digits. Petersen disappeared into the workroom, and returned with a blue bandanna soaked in cold water, which he tied around my neck, like a tiny cape. That morning, he had taken a sunscreen stick to his face, and his cheeks and forehead were covered in thick white streaks; an equally sopped bandanna hung around his own neck.
He looked a little crazy. “Sit behind the airbag,” Petersen instructed, pointing to the front seat; he and Keating, who came along, folded themselves into the back. The ranch, a seven-thousand-acre nature reserve, is just off the highway, a few miles from a Chevron refinery.
For much of the year, it is grassy and lush, with rolling meadows and riots of wildflowers. But this was midsummer, and the earth was golden, crunchy, and pocked with ground-squirrel holes. In the parking lot, Petersen eyeballed the bicycle he had brought for me, a moss-green Clem Smith Jr.
, with thick tires and upright bars. The seat was higher than I was used to: I had ridden almost exclusively on pavement, with traffic, and was used to dropping a foot to the ground at short notice. The previous week, trying a Platypus at Rivendell HQ, I had slung a leg over the frame, pushed myself up onto the saddle, and fallen over.
Petersen looked at me. “This saddle height is ergonomically fine but psychologically terrifying,” he said, and lowered the seat. The ride that Petersen had chosen was short: a series of switchbacks, climbing to an overlook, and then a long, voluptuous descent.
In the days leading up to it, he had nervously e-mailed me advice and instructions—on friction-shifting, pedalling uphill, and coasting down steep descents—appended with apologies for being “helicopter-y.” His two daughters are about my age, and I had the feeling that if I hurt myself, consoling him would be the worst part. We started up the narrow trail, moving from an open field to a shaded grove.
The highway and refinery fell out of sight. I was slow, and not at peace. On the ascent, I had to walk the Clem a bit, guiding it up the trail like a donkey, and, despite everyone being relentlessly reassuring and kind, I engaged in a little therapeutic self-talk to quell my shame at dragging the pace down.
About halfway through the ride, I came to a fork in the road. I didn’t know which path the others had taken, and I stood for a while, appreciating the shade of the oak trees, the quiet, the bandanna crisping around my neck. I tried to channel an essay of Petersen’s, written in 2002, on what he calls “underbiking”: taking a bike somewhere it isn’t obviously built to go.
“Riding an UB changes how you look at any terrain,” he wrote. “You ride where it lets you ride, walk when it wants you to, and rely more on your growing skills than on the latest technology.” This struck me as a harmonic way of moving through the world—not my way, but whatever.
I pushed off, found the group, and followed them down a steep, exhilarating slide. Dry earth sputtered against my calves. I loosened my hold on the brakes.
Even in the heat, with friction shifters I didn’t understand how to use, I felt a flicker of my favorite feeling: competence. The wide tires were emboldening; the saddle height was psychologically fine. It was by far the longest, heaviest bicycle I had ever been on, and it moved with a surprising grace.
We dismounted in the parking lot. The sun returned to being unforgiving. I had no idea what time it was or how long we’d been out.
I wanted to do the whole thing again. I looked at my phone: texts from the babysitter, calendar alerts, a moldering heap of e-mails. “Don’t you just feel like a kid again?” Leto asked, as he and Petersen began disassembling the bikes and loading them into the car.
I knew what he meant. But I felt, instead, a very adult sense of longing—as if I had just glimpsed, at a deeply inconvenient time, a new and appealing way to live. Petersen often cites, as inspiration for Rivendell, a 1972 catalogue for Chouinard Equipment, the precursor to Patagonia.
In the catalogue, Yvon Chouinard took his industry to task for the environmental damage of rock climbing and copped to his own culpability, as a purveyor of steel pitons. “I can relate to what he’s trying to do, because I’ve tried to do the same thing,” Chouinard told me, of Petersen. Like Chouinard, who has expressed concern about Patagonia’s size continuing to increase, Petersen is wary of growth.
There are only a small number of factories that do things the Rivendell way. Its lugs, which are made using lost-wax casting, are incredibly strong but take a long time to make. The vast majority of the frames are painted by a single person.
“I don’t want to dilute anything,” Petersen said. “I don’t want to be like Filson, trying to sell ranch wear to urbanites.” Last year, Rivendell brought in four million dollars in revenue.
The company sells about fifteen hundred bicycles a year, alongside parts, pants, and other things that Petersen appreciates, including merino-wool socks and sweaters, copies of “The Wind in the Willows,” brass bike bells (“Noisy but friendly”), bandannas (“They come to you stiff”), and Olbas aromatherapy inhalers (“My often congested son-in-law tried it, and within two seconds asked, ‘Is it addicting?’ ”). Rivendell works with a small number of dealers, but sells most of its bicycles directly to customers. The company does not have a large storage facility, and inventory is limited.
“I am no businessman, but it does seem like perhaps they are leaving some amount of money on the table if their frames sell out in 4 minutes?!” a friend recently texted me, after failing to secure a Joe Appaloosa during a presale. “I don’t think growth is necessarily good,” Petersen told me. “When you’re making a whole lot of something, with the goal being profits, there are usually compromises.
” Since 1999, Rivendell has produced Silver, its own line of components, which include friction shifters, cranks, and hubs. Some are “virtual but ethically produced knockoffs” of products that have been discontinued by larger companies such as Shimano and SunTour. “We’re trying to become independent of the big bicycle-parts makers,” Petersen said.
“Ten years ago, we could still get stuff that we liked. Twenty years ago, it was easy. Now it’s really hard.
” The obsolescence of mechanical parts has been a fixation of his for more than thirty years: at Bridgestone, he kept an “Endangered Species Calendar,” a monthly listing of bicycle parts that appeared to be going out of style. Eben Weiss, the author of the blog Bike Snob NYC, told me, of friction shifters, “If it wasn’t for someone like Grant, you could only get them on eBay. He keeps them alive.
” For five years, Rivendell has been working on manufacturing its own derailleur. “He doesn’t make business decisions,” Weiss said. “He makes decisions for the love of cycling.
” Through the years, some of Petersen’s ideas have filtered into the cycling mainstream. People go on S24Os, and refer to them as such. They take road bikes into the mountains and document their adventures on Instagram, using the hashtag #underbiking.
In some corners of the industry, baskets, racks, and thicker tires are popular; Petersen is widely credited with bringing an unfashionable wheel size—the plump, gravel-friendly 650b—back into circulation. Newer brands such as Surly, Crust, and Velo Orange now make similar frames. But some cyclists find Petersen overbearing.
They are comfortable in spandex and motivated by a little competition. They don’t mind if their bikes won’t last forever. They have their own joy.
Armin Landgraf, the C.E.O.
of Specialized, said that his customers like buying professional-tier bikes seen at the Tour de France for a sense of connection with the sport. “It’s a passion,” he said. The main critique that Petersen faces is that his preferences are needlessly nostalgic.
In 1990, a columnist for Bicycling dubbed Petersen a “retro-grouch,” and joked that he must be a descendant of nineteenth-century penny-farthing riders. (An ardent cyclist of my acquaintance, who underwent his own Rivendell “journey,” told me that he had once worn Petersen’s recommended brand of wool underwear on a multi-week tour: “It didn’t work out well,” he said. “For my butt.
”) But the same qualities that provoke this critique are part of Rivendell’s appeal—as is true of other niche, low-tech products that attract dedicated enthusiasts, such as film cameras and vintage watches. “Bikes look very digital these days,” Kelley, of Allez LA, said. “Rivendells look very analog.
” He joked that the typical Rivendell customer is someone who “maybe still has a flip phone” and listens to vinyl: “They get a feeling when they see something that doesn’t look new.” Georgena Terry, a famed bicycle designer who specializes in bikes for women, told me that electronic shifting was valuable for some of her older customers, such as those with arthritis. Still, she described Petersen as an “icon” in the industry.
“Even people who would never ride one of Grant’s bikes, because they just think they’re too simple, or whatever, still have a great deal of respect for him,” she said. In 2018, Petersen posted angrily on the Blahg about the Trump Administration’s family-separation policies, and was surprised when some of his readers pushed back. Later that year, Rivendell began offering discounts to interested Black customers who came into the shop: an effort at anti-racist action, if an imperfect one.
In 2020, Petersen formalized the program, calling it Black Reparations Pricing, and started the Black Reparations Fund, a donation pool. Days later, right-wing lawyers accused Rivendell of illegally discriminating against customers based on race. Petersen’s lawyers advised him to shut the program down.
The company renamed its charitable fund “Bikes R Fun,” to maintain the same initials; last year, it gave sixty-two thousand dollars to charities. Petersen also fund-raises for individuals, including “Grocery Guy,” a Black checkout worker he met at a local supermarket, and Isabel Galán, a single mother of three living in the South Bronx, whom Petersen read about in a Times article about undocumented women. He is interested in making cycling more inclusive and accessible, although he is aware that the revolution won’t be riding four-thousand-dollar Rivendells.
He is currently working on a multivolume book project, “An Illustrated History of the American Bicycle: Riding through Racism, Sexism, Pollution, Politics, and Pop Culture.” It begins with the Big Bang. Rivendell’s future isn’t obvious, or even inevitable.
“For the first ten years, we were one bad month away from not being able to pay the bills,” Petersen said. Twice, in 2008 and 2018, the company could barely make rent and payroll. Both times, Petersen appealed to customers, who purchased gift cards and other items to reinvigorate cash flow; the second time around, customers bought more than two hundred thousand dollars in store credit.
Rivendell could double its prices, Petersen said, but he didn’t want people to get precious. “They wouldn’t use them as everyday bikes,” he said. It was only in 2020 that Rivendell’s finances started to stabilize, after the pandemic-era bicycle boom and a newfound popularity in the Japanese market.
(Keating, the general manager, credits Blue Lug, a chain of bike shops in Japan, with much of the company’s current health.) These days, Petersen’s primary concern is getting Rivendell to a place where his employees, if they want to, can stay for the rest of their careers. “I know, and they know, and it’s absolutely clear: if we quit doing what we’re doing, nobody is going to pick it up,” he said.
“Nobody’s going to do it.” In August, I joined Leibow, from Calling in Sick , for a weekend ride. At about nine in the morning, six of his friends, including Keating, gathered at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, wearing sweatshirts, plaid button-downs, and Vans slip-ons.
A thick fog hung over the bay, cloaking the arches. Seagulls drifted in the wind; cars on the bridge passed into nothing. We were headed into Marin, a popular destination for San Francisco cyclists: on weekends, the roads are inundated with riders in sleek-looking pelotons, who roll up to small-town main drags and, rocking lightly in clipless bike shoes, click-clack into bakeries for halftime refreshments.
A few yards away from us, two people with spandex outfits, matching white helmets, and lithe physiques clasped each other against the cold. I thought about something Petersen had written on the Blahg: “A beautiful bicycle in a beautiful biome makes sense.” There was something romantic about the Rivendells.
They made the other bikes on the road look mean. Petersen had loaned me an A. Homer Hilsen the color of celestine, with upright bars and a metal basket.
Leibow and two others were on green Rivendell Clem Ls, a step-through model with an ultra-low top tube, to which Calling in Sick once dedicated an entire issue. One of the Clem owners said that, on a recent ride, a stranger on the trail had heckled him, hollering, “Nice that your sister let you borrow her bike!” Though Rivendell’s customer base has historically skewed middle-aged—the target audience for comfort—during the past decade the company has become popular among younger riders, many of them skateboarders, who have found that the bicycles are fun, and hardy enough, to take off-road. “The brand ethos is about being O.
K. with going slow,” Leibow told me. “But the reality is, people who want to go fast go fast, even if it’s on a Rivendell.
” At a not especially swift pace, we crossed into the hills and started up a paved, curving road, toward the trail. The ground was littered with sardines, presumably dropped by birds. Wild fennel grew along the shoulder; Leibow harvested some fronds to chew on.
He and Keating, who have both spent years riding around the Marin Headlands at night, to take advantage of the empty roads, seemed familiar with the area at a near-molecular level. At the trailhead, Keating suggested that we take a little air out of my tires. “Personal preference,” he said.
Then we turned onto a rutted, rocky hiking path. We rode to a retired battery, which hung over the Pacific Ocean. A gun pit, filled with water, had been overtaken by newts.
Three different brands of gummy bears materialized. The riders leaned over the pool, eyeballing the salamanders, shooting the breeze. The strength and fearlessness of the others filled me with an almost indescribable envy.
What was it like to leave for a long ride at dusk—or cycle off into the woods with a sleeping bag, a patch kit, and some groceries—and be reasonably assured you’d have a great night? The world seemed divided between two types of people: those with a command of the physical world, and everyone else. The former had confidence, skill, and know-how; the rest of us had YouTube tutorials on removing anti-theft skewers. Back in the city, I parted ways with Leibow and company.
For the first time in a long time, I had no particular place to be. It was pleasant to be purposeless. As I passed other riders in Golden Gate Park, I was aware that the Homer was signalling like crazy to an in-group, and I felt like a poseur: if someone had a question about, say, the drivetrain, I wouldn’t have an answer.
But I wanted to—not for cachet, but because it felt right. I thought about all the ways relentless optimization could contort a good time. I felt a not unfamiliar anxiety about Stuff, its overabundance and baseline cheapness.
I tried not to get clipped by an e-bike. A few weeks later, I went out to Walnut Creek to return the loaner. Since our last meeting, Petersen and I had exchanged dozens of e-mails: about Virginia peanuts, rubber bands, and a ride he’d taken with his nearly two-year-old granddaughter on a Rosco Bebe—a Rivendell designed to hold a baby carrier—during which he’d fed her berries and figs foraged from the saddle.
“Bicycles!” he wrote, at one point. “Eventually get a really good one that works for your life and is beautiful and you love. It’s just basic.
” When I got to the showroom, my red Nashbar was leaning against a wall. Amid the Rivendells, it looked a little wan, and much smaller than I remembered. I was happy to see it.
Still, before I left, Petersen sent me around the block on a grape-purple Platypus. I cruised past the auto-body shops and a restaurant puffing anise-scented air. The Platypus was agile, and sturdy as a parade float.
“You could have that bike for the rest of your life,” Petersen said. “Imagine that frame, fifty years old, how beautiful that would be.” ♦ New Yorker Favorites In the weeks before John Wayne Gacy’s scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate .
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