Zen and The Art of Bicycle Maintenance

Now. Here is the really important part of all this, more important than the fact that used bikes are now cool or that this program does good work. The important part is that fixing old bikes yourself might be good for—wait for it—your soul.

The community bike repair program is perfectly situated along the Goose Creek Greenway bike path, just west of Foothills Parkway, so that you can steer your Schwinn in easily. It’s behind Boulder Beer, and it seems okay to drink beer and then ride home. During the afternoons, the repair garage buzzes like a busy intersection. This is a joy-making place. The inside is painted like a Fisher Price toy. Its people are humble and happy, like the residents of a small town.

The people hanging out in this shop say that working on bikes is the point of bikes, as much as riding them. First, there is unexpected pleasure of becoming competent with your own hands. Before he came to Boulder, Andrew Strauss, 31, literally didn’t know which way to turn a wrench. Now, he can fix anything on a bike. He shows off his bright green Ralleigh road bike, with its 20-year-old frame, with pride. He knows it like Robinson Cano knows a baseball bat, or Slash knows a guitar.

In “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” Matthew Crawford laments the fact that young people are involved in “the most ghostly kind of work”—we push numbers and letter across computer screens. “We take leave of material reality and glide about in an information economy,” he writes. Middle-class people don’t build anything, we get our stuff built for us by middle-class machinists in middle-of-the-country industrial towns such as Chengdu and Chongqing. This is bad for our souls.

Fixing bikes lets you in a special, almost secret world. Caellagh Morrissey, for example, loves learning the strange nomenclature of the cult of the bike. “They have funny names for everything,” she says. She is learning what a “crank arm” is, what a “noodle” and a “quill stem” does, learning that barrel adjusters don’t adjust barrels. “This is a yoke,” Morrissey laughs, holding up a strange, triangle doohickey. “I don’t know where the rest of the egg went!”

Bike skills are specific, but the skills people learn here can help them elsewhere—fixing the plumbing or the bearings in their dryer.

Next, there is the pleasure of improvising. Emma Joyce, for example, is repairing an old mountain bike. She likes bikes that are a bit Frankenstein. Every time she tosses away an old part and puts on a new one, she feels like she’s performing an organ transplant.

Participants in the program skew heavily female, perhaps 80-20. Because bikes are having a bit of a big cultural moment, lets bring in some big thinkers to explain this. The Danish philosopher N.F.S. Grundtvig, a big believer in women’s equality a century before it was cool, advised women to learn a skill that would allow them to move through the world with more freedom. Several women told me that they were tired of letting their boyfriends or brothers fix their bikes for them. “Guys think they already know how to do everything,” Morrissey says. “I don’t want men to do everything for me. It’s a point of pride to say you’ve done it yourself.”