…or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bicycle
It’s Thanksgiving morning 2020 and I’m sitting at my computer as the smells of baking food waft through the air. I just returned from a morning bike ride, something I try to do often these days, particularly days when I plan to indulge in a fair bit of food. As I rode through my quiet town of Berea, Kentucky, along creeks and past cow pastures, and out to the Indian Fort Mountain trailhead along the new walking and bike trail traversing the town, I got to thinking. Biking has a tendency to do this.
When I first started sending random thoughts out to the Internet by blogging on the now-defunct Earthineer.com (where my alter ego RedHeadedYeti was born), I wanted to write about the random things I was passionate about. While this included things like bikes, sustainability, and…the antique pipe set I inherited from Papa Zimmerman…Earthineer founder Dan Adams wisely pushed me to write more about brewing and fermentation. Still, I was mostly just writing for the fun of it, and I look back fondly on those early blogs.
This one in particular comes to mind often. For a time, I focused much more on brewing (and drinking) than I did on biking. I enjoyed hauling my kids around town in their trailer, but held off for several years on solo bike rides where I really pushed myself. and gave myself time to think Having access to so much homebrew and picking up booze to keep myself from breaking into the homebrew was taking its toll. I had also been traveling a lot to promote my mead and beer books. While there was plenty of fun involved, there was also a lot of boring downtime which I often spent enjoying local boozy beverages. I don’t regret the fun, and don’t much regret the booze intake (at least the first couple of drinks…), but having even mild hangovers most mornings just isn’t fun.
I knew I needed to make a change. I just needed the push. Thanks for helping out with that, 2020. In addition to all of the other…stuff…that has happened in 2020, I rang in the new year with a hospital stay from a recurrent blood clot. Due to medication I’m now on in order to, well, keep living, I have to severely limit my intake of alcoholic beverages. No problem. Now, I enjoy maybe a couple drinks a day and the mornings I can motivate myself, I get up early and head out for a bike ride. I’ve lost weight, feel better overall, and find that I actually enjoy savoring tasty beverages more now that I don’t convince myself that I need at least five more.
2020 has been an awful year to say the least, but it’s also been a reflective one for me. I’ve spent a lot of time dwelling on what’s important in life, and hoping all the insanity in the world will wake people up to the many changes we need to make in order to survive as a species and just, you know, be decent human beings (note: I believe it has done that, but it also hasn’t…).
I hope you enjoy looking back on this pondering from the Before Times. I would have had no way of knowing when the events I outlined in this blog were taking place that the very thought of traveling the world and enjoying good food and drink with other people would suddenly become a near-impossible feat to accomplish. And, in case you’re wondering, while this may not be a straight-up blog about beer, mead, or brewing, much beer was enjoyed during my bike travels. One thing I don’t mention in the blog is how much I enjoyed the concept of rolling into even the smallest of towns, particularly in Germany and Austria, and finding they had their own local brewery that pretty much only provided that town with beer. This was during the early days of the craft beer boom, and I was young and inexperienced with the world, so that was something that really stood out to me and set me on the path to what was at the time a vague notion that maybe someday I would become a beer writer.
Take care out there, folks, and enjoy the good things with those you’re able to safely enjoy them with.
- Yeti
During one of my early-morning road bike rides through the rolling hills of Berea, Kentucky, I found myself contemplating random thoughts, as I usually do to distract myself from the burning of my leg muscles, the cramping of my wrists and the unpleasant feelings in my posterior. Riding past a cow pasture, a common occurrence, I realized that I actually enjoyed breathing in the smell of cow manure in the cool morning air while whizzing past herds of lumbering cattle. The nostalgia of my youth on a rural Kentucky farm it elicited and the fact that it wasn’t car exhaust far outweighed its…manure-ness. It got me thinking back on the multiplicity of milieus, weather conditions, sights and smells I’ve experienced on a bike. Sure, I’ve seen a lot by car, train and bus, but the slowed-down intimacy of a bike ride allows for a far more fulfilling experience. Not to mention the myriad of additional benefits, such as exercise, gas savings, and the satisfaction of reducing my impact on the environment.
My love affair with the bicycle started as a child when I was given a Huffy by my grandparents. I still remember the thrill as my “Poppy” gave me a gentle push down an embankment and set those wheels rolling. From then on, I was on my bike as often as I could—setting up ramps in the yard with my brothers, flying down gravel country roads, and one time, slamming my shoulder full force into a post next to a barn after somehow forgetting how to use my brakes. As I turned from a fun-loving yeti-ling into a surly teenager, I put my bike away for a while in exchange for cruising Main Street looking for (and not finding) trouble in my fancy Ford Tempo.
“Poppy” Kaser trying to convince my older brother Aaron not to be afraid of his bike.
While attending Berea College, I mostly walked or hitched rides. It wasn’t until my senior year, when I bought a cheap used bike and started cruising around town, that I started to remember how much I enjoyed the wind in my hair as I flew down a hill. Fast-forward to my graduation; freshly married, I headed off to Seattle to prepare for a ride that would entail more than 900 miles across Europe in a month—a wedding gift from my parents-in-law. As I had never ridden more than a couple miles, we headed to the REI flagship store in downtown Seattle, where we picked me up a Novara touring bike and began riding 20 miles a day or more on the Burke-Gilman trail (a pedestrian/bike trail spanning more than 70 miles that cuts through the breadth of Seattle), keeping a moderate pace on the mostly flat terrain. “This isn’t so bad,” I thought. “I should be able to handle riding 30-40 miles a day.” My first day riding on flat terrain straight into the sea-driven winds of Holland almost made me think otherwise, but by the end of the trip I was having a blast riding up and down the pristine mountains of Switzerland.
Fully loaded and ready to go.
Upon initially arriving in Amsterdam, I found that most of my luggage, along with my bike’s front-wheel quick-release skewer, was on a plane destined for Japan. After unpacking and reassembling our bikes (using a zip tie to keep my front wheel on), we took them to be stored at a bike shop while we waited for the rest of the group to arrive in a week—comprised of my father-in-law and a group of crazy Minnesotans none of us had yet met. I was amazed at the amount of bicycles scattered about the streets of Amsterdam. Many were rusted out hulks that looked like they hadn’t been ridden in years. I saw these rust buckets being ridden about town regularly, though—often by a woman with a baby in the front basket, a toddler straddling the back and bags of groceries strapped precariously throughout. Bicycles and pedestrians definitely had the right of way, as was often evidenced by a car screeching to a halt as a bicycle meandered into its path.
An interesting use of bikes at a street show in Amsterdam.
Fortunately my bags arrived shortly before our planned departure. Next, it was off to ride amongst the tulip fields and dikes of Holland, the steep vineyard slopes of Germany’s Rhein/Mosel region, the cornfields and gaudy city squares of France, the blink-of-an-eye that was Luxembourg, and finally, up to the mountainous region of Switzerland’s Lauterbrunnen municipality. The adventures we had on the way are too numerous to chronicle here. Our many encounters included helpful French farmers offering to give us directions by gesticulating and talking loudly despite the fact that we didn’t understand a thing they were saying, a helpful Luxembourgian waitress who sent us on a “shortcut” (complete with a closing “voila!”) into the mountains rather than along the flat river trail near the café—resulting in our day’s ride extending from the planned 40 to nearly 70 miles—and a cadre of French prostitutes who pranced around my bike as we rode wearily into Metz, France at 11pm after giving up on the Luxembourgian shortcut and finding our own way. Additional adventures included watching the streets of Haarlem explode following Holland’s defeat of Argentina in the 1998 World Cup semi-finals, biking amongst Roman ruins in Germany, and visiting Heidi’s hometown in the mountains of Switzerland.
From the world cup celebration in Haarlem.
Upon returning to Seattle, I was ready to start bicycling on a regular basis. While working in downtown Seattle, I often biked, bussed, or combined the two, depending on how far away I was from downtown at the time. There’s nothing like flying past cars stuck in traffic during rush hour. There were disadvantages, though. I often caught a whiff of exhaust, and one of my routes went past a Hostess factory. The smell of Twinkies frying in the morning is not a pleasant thing (I prefer manure). I also rode various portions of the Burke-Gilman trail on a regular basis, a pedestrian/bike trail spanning more than 70 miles that cuts through the breadth of Seattle. The Redhook brewery was accessed easily from the trail; I learned once that riding 20 miles to the brewery for a few too many is a lot more fun than riding 20 miles back.
After living in Seattle for a couple years, my wife and I decided to throw everything in storage, quit our jobs (conveniently, I was laid off just in time) and take our 1970 VW bus through the national parks of the Southwest US for a summer. I brought my touring bike along, but quickly discovered that most of the trails I wanted to ride required something more suited to mountainous terrain. While working at Snow Mountain Ranch (the YMCA of the Rockies) near Winter Park and Fraser, Colorado for a month, I decided to trade our tax refund in for a Specialized mountain bike (note that I said “I” and not “we”). To this day, I don’t regret this purchase. I was ideally situated for heading out my door and riding the multitude of trails that surrounded me. Granted, it took most of the month to become accustomed to keeping my breath at 8,000+ feet, but by the time I made it back to Seattle, the hills I had struggled with in the past felt more like a slight incline. I should note that, while much of that time was spent solo biking, most of the other YMCA staff were wandering vagrants like myself working a temporary job to fund further travels. I spent time hanging out and visiting the local pub with folks from Britain, Zambia, South Africa, New Zealand… the list goes on. I can say that it was a humbling experience the day I decided to join a mountain bike ride with a couple of experienced bikers accustomed to riding the mountains of the Czech Republic and Columbia…
The Yeti in his natural environment.
Upon returning from our trip, we decided to get our stuff out of storage and head further north to Bellingham, where I got in even more mountain biking, including participation in the Ski to Sea, an 8-part relay race that starts on skis at Mt. Baker and ends in a kayak in Bellingham Bay. A team from a local elementary school, Lost Faculties, was gracious enough to let me join when they needed an extra participant, for which I am eternally grateful. My job was to mountain bike an 8-mile stretch following receipt of the baton from the team that canoed the Nooksack River, and then run my bike half a mile across a rocky beach to pass the baton to the kayaker. The whole town practically shut down for the event, which had participants ranging from pros who finished up a couple hours after the launch of the race, to casual teams who (mostly) finished up by the close of the event at 5 pm.
Hanging out at Bellingham Bay at the end of the race.
What does all this have to do with Earthineer? My defense is that I strongly believe in this site’s focus on environmental sustainability, DIY and community. Bicycles have provided me with avenues for pursuing all of these. To minimize your environmental footprint, I recommend finding places as close as possible to your house to ride for pleasure or exercise, or simply using your bike in place of your car to run errands around town. For DIY, learn how to do some basic bicycle maintenance to avoid bike-shop fees. Stickboy (my partner in beer and bikes Steven Cole) has provided some useful blogs on basic bike maintenance, and the two of us are hoping to cook up some more. Bicycle maintenance can be addictive, though; and, based on personal experience, can lead to a basement full of bicycles and components. To help build your community, join a local bicycle-advocacy group, participate in your town’s efforts to create and maintain bicycle paths, join a local group of cyclists, or just ride around town with friends and family. The important thing is to get out and ride. One thing I love about cycling is that it can be a solo or group activity. I personally prefer to mostly ride solo for the yetilosophical experience, but lately have begun pulling my daughter Sadie (and later, my second daughter Maisie) along in her trailer and enjoying her looks of glee upon my setting her rolling gently down a hill on her own bike. I look forward to taking them on many bicycle rides.
This is Bertha the bike. She has traveled with me to many countries and states. We have ridden thousands of miles (well, at least a thousand or two) together. While I have cheated on her with other bikes, she is my one true love, my reliable standby. Her frame is solid, impenetrable steel. I have modified many of her components but at her core, she is Bertha.