JOY RIDE

Grant Petersen wants to preserve the craft, and delight, of cycling.

- Anna Wiener

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.