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.
“But I’m not even a natural leader.”
Cartoon by Victoria Roberts
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.
