The Non-Three Speed in My Life

 Here is my Rivendell.  I've switched out handlebars more times than I can count - OK, that's a lie - maybe five times.  Currently it has a Bosco Moose bar, which I pretty much like.  I ordered the Rivendell in a fit of I-can't-find-the-bicycle-I-want fury back in 1999.  I had been riding an old Cannondale Road touring bike for years, and the components simply wore out.  That particular model of bicycle was featured on the cover of a book on bicycle touring we carried at the independent backpacking store I worked in during the late eighties early nineties.  I imagined myself out touring the world on it, though I think I never actually went out touring at that point in my life.  Whenever I weigh bicycle touring against backpacking in the scales of my mind, backpacking usually wins.  The argument goes like this: "Do you want to be out in the hot sun on the side of the highway with cars speeding past you at seventy to ninety miles per hour, or do you want to be up in the mountains, in the silence, under the shade of the trees?"  Whatever.  I still fantasize about bicycle touring, and I have done some bicycle touring, just not much.  I like to blame the fact that I live in the desert southwest, and boy, I'm sure I would bicycle tour all the time if I were someplace green and leafy, with lots of streams, and quiet country roads.  Of course then there would be humidity, so it is all just excuse making.  I did recently buy Shawn Granton's Touring Primer, (I just tried to find the link to it, but the Urban Adventure League Big Cartel Shop says it's under construction). And I will most likely go out to do some more touring in the fall, but the big trips I imagine never seem to come together, and that's OK, because meanwhile I have hiked most of the trails and routes in the Grand Canyon, and I know the local mountains like the back of my hand.  There is only so much time in a single life.

Anyway - the Cannondale basically wore out, and I took it to the local bike shop, (pre-internet), and they told me that the parts were obsolete and irreplaceable.  Now, I know enough to know that simply wasn't true.  I wanted another touring bike for commuting and for the possible touring that is always in the back of my mind.  I had a copy of Eugene Sloane's The Complete Book of Bicycling, and that was my guide toward what I was looking for, which was, naturally, a custom Alex Singer, since that was what he went over in fine detail.  I went to the local bike shop, and at that time (1998), all there was were mountain bikes and racing bikes.  The bikes closest to what I had in mind were the hybrids, but let's be honest, those just sucked.  However, that's what I ended up with, a Cannondale hybrid.  Boy, was it a terrible bike.  The spokes on the rear wheel kept breaking.  That led me to have a very, very negative view of the local bike shop where I purchased the bike.  Since it has been so long, I'll go ahead and name it - New Mexico Bike and Sport.  Maybe they aren't so shitty now, but I have never set foot in there again.

First, I took the bike home and realized that it really, really, really was not the bike I wanted.  I tried to take it back the next day, and they cited a no return policy.  Could I leave it to sell on consignment? No. When the first spoke broke a few days later, they replaced it, grudgingly.  When the next spoke broke a few weeks after that, the owner at the time, whose name I have thankfully forgotten, blamed me for "thrashing around on it," and refused to replace it without charging me.  For the record, I was just riding my bicycle, and the spoke went "ping."  I stocked up on spokes and learned to replace them myself.  It is still a mystery to me why spokes on that bicycle broke like clockwork.  I have never had another bicycle, before or since, that ever had a single broken spoke.

At some point, the internet and I became acquainted, and through someone's blog about good commuter bicycles, I became familiar with Rivendell, and since I am a Tolkien fan, and the Rivendells were the closest I could find to an Alex Singer, I ordered a custom Rivendell.  Joe Starck built it.  I've never broken a spoke on it, though the rear rim did crack at one point, so I built my first wheel to replace it, and I laced the spokes in the wrong order so I don't have that nice little parallel open area above the valve stem.  It is not a functional problem at all, but it drives me crazy that I made that mistake, but not quite crazy enough to disassemble the wheel and redo it correctly.  I try to pan it off in my head as a good example of wabi sabi, but my mind is just not that gullible.

I have been riding the Rivendell a lot recently.  For one thing, I like the Schmidt dynohub and lights, but I think I still ride the Happy Little Three Speed more.  There are a few things about the Rivendell that result in it not being the dream bike I had thought it was when I bought it.  Those things change around, but here is what I think they are currently:

1. I am always, or at least often, conscious of how expensive it was.  I rode it yesterday to work, for example, and the head of security at the college I work for was by the office chatting, and he mentioned that the other day, someone had just sawed the bike rack itself in half near one of the dorms, bent it apart, and slid the bikes off to steal them.  "Oh," I thought, and had to resist the impulse to go see if the Rivendell was still there.  I do ride it a lot, and I park it downtown, and I generally don't worry about it.  At the time I bought it, people were mostly stealing mountain bikes.  Now, I think, they are mostly stealing electric bikes and high-end racing bikes.  For the most part, bike theft has not been a big thing in Santa Fe, but there has been a noticeable uptick in bicycle thefts over the past few years, and I worry some bike thief is going to recognize the Rivendell name - hell, they could even stand at the bike rack and look it up on their phone.

2. I have never been able to settle on how I want the bike to be outfitted.  Hence all the handlebar changes.  Visually, I like it with drop bars.  It fits the eidos of bicycle that I was pursuing under the influence of Eugene Sloane.  And for a while, I fell under the influence of Jan Heine and Bicycle Quarterly. There were a few articles by Jan in the Rivendell Reader.  That was how I found out that Alex Singer bikes were actually still being made.  For a while, I was trying to convert the Rivendell into a randonneuring bicycle - little front rack, supple tires that would go flat two or three times a ride from all the goatheads around here.  Bicycle Quarterly is certainly the reason I have a Schmidt Dynohub on the bike.  For a long time, I was caught in a strange form of consumerism.  I had, at one point, a Rivendell little front rack.  Then I bought the touring rack and got rid of the little rack.  Then I started to think about little front racks again and bought a Velo Orange rack and an Ostrich handlebar bag.  Then that wasn't good enough, Bicycle Quarterly wise.  I needed a lightweight little front rack and a Gilles Berthoud handlebar bag.  Blah, blah, blah.  I did end up with the Berthoud handlebar bag, but even with the largest one, I have to have the handlebars lower than I like for the decaleur to be low enough to rest the bag on the front rack, so I hardly ever use it.  Eventually, I swing back to the very upright bars - hence the Boscos.  Those are higher than I really want, but they won't go lower.  I like the basket, but I'm not crazy about having the expedition rack on all the time.  Eventually I realized that I've been approaching the Rivendell, over the full quarter of a century that I've owned it, as not being quite right.  It's right enough in any of its configurations, so why do I treat it as always needing some sort of rearranging? I like it as it is right now, but yesterday, I started thinking that the shifters on the downtube are a bit of a pain, and maybe I will mount them - again - on the handlebars.  When they are on the handlebars, I start thinking about what a tangle of cable and housing there is, and how clean and nice it looks when they are there on the downtube.

The Happy Little Three Speed bicycle is what it is, and it makes me very happy when I ride it, and, for the most part, I don't think about changing it around.  For a while, I had entertained the idea of doing a 650B conversion on it - the tires it will fit under the fender are really narrow - but I got over that idea, (though not without buying some long reach brakes at one point).  So, today, I am back on the Happy Little Three Speed.  There is something, for me, that makes a three speed bicycle just right, in a way that my Rivendell never has been.