by Maynard Hershon

Opinion

The Natural

It’s a nice day on the Starbucks patio outside the REI Flagship store in Denver. As I lean my old Lighthouse bicycle against the railing, a guy at the next table (maybe 55, not on a bike, little roll over his belt) asks me if I had the bike made. I did, I say, and go inside to get my coffee.

When I come out, he’s waiting for me. He’s like a lot of guys; they ask you something about your whatever only to go on at great length about their own whatever. He’d asked about my Lighthouse as an icebreaker, but he’s not interested in it except as it relates to his search.

He’d been custom-bike shopping and made his choice. He wants to tell me why his choice is the only possible choice; guys who do it other ways are fools. “Gotta buy a custom,” he said. “Production bikes are just junk, crap the factories figure they can get away with selling you.”

He told me he looked in bike shops all over greater Denver. He found that the shop employees (with very few exceptions) were incompetent, ignorant and unscrupulous. “They’d sell you anything you express interest in,” he said, “based strictly on stand-over height. What they care about in shops is watching another sold bike roll out the door, and watching your money find its way into the cash drawer.”

I asked him what kind of bike he has now. “A carbon Trek,” he said, “but I have back trouble and it doesn’t fit.”

He said he talked to guys in several different shops about bike fit and the guys didn’t know what they were talking about. Because of his back he has special needs, needs they’re not equipped or willing to address. He tiptoed right up to calling them thieves or scam artists but held himself back.

He thought about Serottas, Litespeeds, Merlins and Waterfords. He went to three Serotta dealers. He wanted a steel bike, he told me, because ... Why tell you what he said? You’ve heard it a thousand times. He decided on a steel fork too, because all the raving about carbon fiber is just hype. It’s junk.

Those bike shop guys, even if they are designated fitters and have attended fit clinics, can’t be trusted. He said he’d found a guy after a great deal of searching who could be trusted. That guy was going to fit him and send the results, the specs for the bike, to Waterford in Wisconsin, where they make the best bikes. Waterford will make him a steel bike that’ll really fit him, made of “True Temper tubing, the best tubing.”

He raved about the guy who is going to design his frame. That guy, he said, “is like an Edison or a Michelangelo. Doesn’t need no stinking clinics. He’s a natural.” So too, he said, “are the guys at Waterford who’ll be building his frame. Naturals. They were filing kiddie lugs in their playpens.”

Some guys are naturals, he explained to me. Maybe a guy who’s not a natural can learn to weld, for instance, and spend years perfecting his craft. Another guy, a natural, can just weld better — even if he hardly ever does it. It’s in his blood somehow. Well, the guy fitting him to his not-yet-ordered Waterford is that kind of natural, a born bike guy. He’s a genius. Knows everything about bicycles.

That guy can just look at you and imagine you sitting ideally, comfortably, efficiently on your bike. He looks at you — and he can see all that. The fitter owns lots of bikes himself and says the best bike ever made is a Bruce Gordon. He shows you his own Bruce Gordon, the best bike ever made.

I’m drinking my coffee and trying to enjoy the lovely day on the REI patio but the guy is wearing me down.

He told me he’s getting the Waterford model with just a bit more wheelbase so it could be used for light touring. He’d spec’d an external Chris King headset because he’s sure that “any frame with an integrated headset is a POS. Wouldn’t have it for free.”

He said he decided that Serottas cost more than they can possibly be worth, and that Serotta has such a huge investment with the fit clinics and all that they have to sell their bikes for big money. He said he’d met a young woman with a Serotta Ottrott and could not believe the wheels on the bike. “Cheap wheels,” he said. “And an integrated headset! What junk!”

He told me he’d chosen not to get a lugged frame, though he’d been tempted by the sexy polished stainless steel lugs that Waterford can provide. Why? “Because of all the lowlifes who lurk outside the REI store and Starbucks waiting for a chance to steal something flashy and pricey-looking. Young guys with tattoos, their hungry eyes on your Waterford.”

I didn’t know what to say to the guy, didn’t even know where to start. I guess I don’t believe in naturals or geniuses, just folks who show up at their shops and do good work. I don’t believe in guru craftsmen. I’d rather deal with guys who get the job done as promised, even if they sink when they step out onto the water.

I admire Ben Serotta; lots of smart people pay good money for his bicycles because they see the worth in them. I defended Ben and the guy asked me how I knew him. I told him I’d written the Serotta catalog for a couple of years. He never asked me how I might get to a place where someone like Ben would hire me to represent him in his catalog. He didn’t care. He had a story to tell and he told it.

I have almost been in that situation myself, telling Hewlett Packard about printers, but never eyeballs-deep in it. When I think of the one or two times I’ve been close, I am mortified. I want to disappear from the earth.

I’m sure that you and I and the guy from the REI patio could find happiness with bicycles built by dozens of people in several materials, perhaps even factory-made bikes with integrated headsets and affordable wheels.

And if you can’t trust bike shop employees, what retail employees CAN you trust? Where do you get treated better than at your bike shop? Who lavishes more time on you than bicycle fitters?

I suspect that the REI patio guy uses his bike to ride to the REI patio and back home again. Nevertheless he’s made himself an expert on buzzwords and half-truths in his search for the finest slightly-longer-wheelbase bicycle frame. I wished him luck with his new Waterford, if indeed that’s what he ends up owning and occasionally riding. Who knows how long the buying process may take, how many twists and turns....

If he’d told each bike shop employee whose time he wasted that for a dollar he’d go away, each one would have handed over that dollar. I suspect that he’d have accumulated enough money in that manner to pay for the frame. And a caramel frappuccino at Starbucks.

Maynard has been writing about cycling for the Bicycle Paper (and the Rivendell Reader) almost forever. He says he’ll keep doing it as long as he can get away with it. “I do it for the money,” the Denver-dweller says, but we think there must be something about cycling that interests him.