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[19]The New Yorker
[20]Annals of Design

The Art of Taking It Slow

Contemporary cycling is all about spandex and personal bests. The bicycle
designer Grant Petersen has amassed an ardent following by urging people to get
comfortable bikes, and go easy.
By [21]Anna Wiener
September 16, 2024

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A man rides a bike down a dirt path.
Petersen has written that bikes can “just about save the world, or at least
make you happy.”Photographs by Jake Stangel for The New Yorker
Save this story
Save this 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 [29]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.’ ”

[30]Woman standing in front of giant can of prebiotic soda with door.
Cartoon by Lindsey Budde
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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,” [33]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. BOBs, 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.

[34]Sperm cells travel together.
“But I’m not even a natural leader.”
Cartoon by Victoria Roberts
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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 “[37]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.”

Image may contain Clothing Hat Adult Person Photography Baseball Cap Cap Baby
Bicycle Transportation and Vehicle
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.

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 
[38]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.” ♦

Published in the print edition of the [39]September 23, 2024, issue, with the
headline “Joy Ride.”

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