EPISODE 28
Metal Cowboy
Saddle up for an inspiring conversation with Joe Kurmaskie, the “Metal Cowboy.” Joe recounts his incredible family-cycling-adventures-turned-books, including hauling his two sons – and his dad’s ashes! – across America (Momentum is Your Friend) and a later epic journey across Canada with his wife and three sons (Mud, Sweat, and Gears). Discover the hilarious origin story of Joe’s nickname and hear about his battle with a life-threatening illness that fueled his passion to give back. Joe founded and operates Reborn Bikes, which provides thousands of refurbished bicycles to Oregon communities in need. This episode is a testament to Joe’s spirit of adventure, his resilience, and the deep influence that the bicycle has had on his life.
Episode Transcript
Joe: If there’s any form of training that I would instill into some of these guys in the pro ranks is, pull three kids across Canada or two kids across America. It beats blood doping.
Gabriel: You just heard Joe Kurmaskie, the “Metal Cowboy,” recalling two of his most daring trips, which he himself describes as “inspired insanity.” Joe went on to chronicle his trans-American family trip in his book Momentum is Your Friend and his trans-Canadian one in Mud, Sweat, and Gears. In this episode we also hear about some of Joe’s other book projects, his battle against a condition called hemochromatosis, and his efforts to give away thousands of refurbished bicycles as founder and executive director of Reborn Bikes. It’s clear that this Metal Cowboy has lots more to accomplish before riding off into the sunset.
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello cycle touring enthusiasts! Thank you for tuning in to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. As I am passionate about bicycle travel and I love books, it’s not surprising that I have a small collection about bicycle touring. One of the books I have is Metal Cowboy: Tales from the Road Less Traveled, written by today’s guest, Joe Kurmaski. Metal Cowboy was published all the way back – yep, long time ago now – 1999, and since that debut effort Joe has gone on to write a bunch more books, gaining a worldwide following. Besides being an accomplished bicycle traveler and author, Joe is also a bicycle advocate and I look forward to learning more about his current efforts at WashCo Bikes. So Joe, thank you so much for being a guest today on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Joe: Hey, thanks for having me, Gabriel. Looking forward to chatting all things bicycle. We’ve grown from WashCo Bikes, we’ve grown into Reborn Bikes, Gabriel. And, you know, world domination takes time, so we’re slowly and steadily trying to flood the streets with bicycles.
Gabriel: Oh, that sounds good. I’m going to have to hear more about that evolution in a little bit. Right now, I want to start with a story that you have told a thousand times, but I love it. So that’s how you came to be nicknamed the Metal Cowboy. And it’s in the book, and I thought it was such a great story when I read it. So would you mind starting off with that?
Joe: No problem. Yes, I have done it so many times, but I enjoy telling the story and it’s a Spider-Man Origin story, really. I look more like an aging surfer, you know, no big belt, no ten-gallon hat, no spurs. So it’s ironic that I became, you know, from here to South Africa to Istanbul, people know me as the Metal Cowboy. It all started in Pocatello, Idaho, on a cold morning, 5:30 a.m., misty rain, blocking sunrise, and I had just been kicked off the train. You know, they told me this was my departure spot that I had on my ticket. I was barely awake. I built my bike up the way so many of us have in train stations and airports and what have you. Put on the panniers and I realized, Gabriel, I had forgotten one very important piece of equipment for the next 3,000- mile ride to Mexico from Pocatello, Idaho. I looked around, had my water bottles, had my helmet. I had two wheels on the bike. What I realized I had forgotten, I had forgotten to train in any way, shape, or form for the last few months. And so I was going to suffer what we call “initiation week” in the touring business. That’s where your body, it may remember, but it’s going to take a little time to dust off the cobwebs. It may remember doing 75, 80, 100 miles a day, but it’s not going to be happy about it. So I had these thoughts as I pedaled down, and it turns out the train station was at the top of the hill in Pocatello, Idaho, just at the time, in the early 90s, just one light town, really, western town. And so I drop off the hill and I talk and I go and I just keep going and going and going and I get to that stoplight. I think about how my legs are going to freeze up as soon as I start really putting those miles in. I think about how I’m going to be sitting by the side of the road doing what I call, Gabriel, a cockroach. And that’s where you dump the bike in the culvert or on the side of the road, hopefully drive- side up if you’ve got any sense about your gearing. You lay down and you start trying to stretch the muscles out that are cramping, those quads, and you look very much like a cockroach in its dying throws. So I’m having all these thoughts, having my thoughts, when out of the mist, ambles up this old rancher. Long coat covered in tobacco stains and cow spittle. He’s got that little border collie with him, you know, the gray and black one, a little Australian sheepdog or whatever they call those. And he’s tapping his way across the intersection. And I look at him and there’s one eye drooping shut, like it’s been a tomcat in too many late night back-alley fights. And the other eye is open, Gabriel, but it’s not looking at anything in particular. Staring off into the distance, kind of gray and cloudy, a little milky. And he’s got that three-day stubble. And as he gets to me, he starts to tap this cane over my bicycle. And I got to tell you, that’s a pretty in my moment at 5:30 a.m. in Pocatello, Idaho. And I almost pedaled off, but I let him finish that slow survey of my person. Tap, tap, tap. And he went the other way. Tap, tap, tap. And then he raised that cane up and he said, “Ahh, metal cowboy.” because that blind old rancher, he couldn’t see me. He could only feel me. And what he saw through a ruin of teeth – I’m talking Stone- henge in the morning light, sports fans. He had opened that mouth and he had said, “metal cowboy,” and it was like some kind of iconic branding. He could only feel that bicycle being my trusted old steed and the asphalt, my dusty trail. And then he tapped his way into the rest of his life and I pedaled off, found my footing, found my cadence, and also found a name that has stuck with me for, you know, the better half of my life. It’s brought me a lot of, a lot of good friendships, a lot of good experiences, and sort of set me on a path to keep riding, keep exploring and keep learning.
Gabriel: I know you’re always working on a book. So what number of book are you working on now?
Joe: Well, bicycle related, I’m working on Book 10. But book related, I’m working on Book 13 right now. I had a stint as a rock journalist in the ’90s. So imagine every grunge and every rock band from Jacoby Dillon and the Wallflowers to Lyle Lovett to Pearl Jam. I got to punch way above my weight class, because we were living in a small town in New Mexico and all the bands would come through on their way to LA. And I was the only reporter in the area. And so I’m working on a book right now called That Was a Good Drum Break: My Brief Flight as a Golden God of Rock and Roll Journalism.
Gabriel: Okay, so wait, let’s get the chronology straight. That means you wrote some books before Metal Cowboy? Because I thought that was your debut effort. That’s what I had said in the intro.
Joe: It was my debut effort as far as published books. I had sold a book called Still Life in Transition in college to the University of Michigan Press. And I was being lauded as the next Jay McInerney or Ethan Canin or that whole series of authors. And then my champion for the book, the chairman of the department at University of Michigan, had a bum ticker and he was 83 and he left us, and left me with no champion for the project. In university publishing, you either have the person on staff that’s going to usher everything through or the book’s just not going to see the light of day, at least back then. And so I got a kill fee. And all this relates to Metal Cowboy, because had somebody given me the opportunity to see that book published and had done well, I would have had way too much money as a 23-year-old and I would have done just immature things with it. Instead, I got what felt to me like a king’s ransom at 23. You know, you give a 23-year- old without a lot of responsibilities seven or eight thousand dollars and he can take this bicycle a long way. That’s what this Metal Cowboy did. And so it was a slow burn. I was able to go out and have the experiences. Had that book been published, I don’t think we’d be talking right now, Gabriel, because who knows, but I had already done my Maine to Florida trip and another trip, but I hadn’t gone across Australia and gone and done the stuff that became all the fodder for the eight bicycling books and travel memoirs that are out there.
Gabriel: Right. And your family journeys, which I definitely want to touch upon.
Joe: Yes.
Gabriel: That’s incredible to me. So I have a small son that listeners of the show will know, Emilio. He’s a baby and we did a little bit of touring with him and people thought we were crazy. But I thought, “No. No, no, no! This is nothing,” because I know about Mud, Sweat, and Gears, which is your book about your adventure across Canada. And you have this bicycle train because it’s, I believe, you, your wife and your three sons. You had three sons on that trip.
Joe: Yes, three sons at the time. We have four now. Let me back up just a little, Gabriel, because there’s a book called Momentum is Your Friend that won the Lowell Thomas Travel Writers Award and did really well. And that was a story previous to Mud, Sweat, and Gears. And that’s where I towed – from Portland, Oregon, to the Washington Monument – I towed two boys and my dad’s ashes across America on a secret summer of just fathers, sons, and hometown heroes adventures. It was on a Rodriguez touring bike connected to a Burley Piccolo connected to a chariot trailer. And at the time, I had gotten the contract to write a cover story for Men’s Journal. And the cover story was, “What Men Want.” And apparently one of their surveys – who knows if it was made up – but their surveys said that 32 percent, 32.9 percent, because they were all into decimals, 32.9 percent of the male readership wanted to take a cross-country bicycle trip. And so they engaged me to do this trip for these folks. They could live vicariously through a 40-year-old man taking himself across America and writing great stories about it. What they didn’t know at the time was I had two sons and the other half of that marriage was in grad school. And she was not having any of that. And she was not having me leaving the kids at home. She said, “Look, you’re going to take the boys with you.” And I said, “Okay.” And I promptly called up Parenting magazine and got another contract.
Gabriel: Ha! That’s brilliant.
Joe: And when I do my show, I have two slides up there and I have the kids blocked out. So it just looks like me going by Pikes Peak. And then I reveal that there’s two kids in tow behind me. And I say, “This one’s Men’s Journal, this one’s Parenting magazine. Men’s Journal, Parenting magazine.” I even had lined up a National Geo friend of mine, a photographer, to meet me in Utah and ride the rest of the road. And he would take the photos, you know, be my photojournalist, my sidecar. He was going to do that. And so I felt pretty smug and smart about it all. Until… until, Gabriel, Men’s Journal said, “Yeah, we’ll hire him, we’ll pay him, we like his photography, but we haven’t used him before. So we’re going to also send out a photographer in three or four spots along the way.”
Gabriel: Did they at least tell you what spots they were going to be?
Joe: Here’s the problem with that, Gabriel. I thought about that, but it’s real hard to hide two children attached to your whole rig on the road, somewhere in the great west of Montana. You know, there’s not a lot of places to stash children. And, you know, I mean, if they showed up, what was I going to say? “Oh!”
Gabriel: “What are they doing back there?”
Joe: “What are these, stowaways? Kids, get out of here. Scram!” So what I did was I called up Men’s Journal owned by Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner, got on the phone with the editors and said, “Look, I think I mentioned that my family might meet me in a couple of spots. That’s shifted and the boys will be with me the whole time.”
Gabriel: Smooth.
Joe: Timing is everything, Gabriel. The best moment that happened was that the owner of Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal had just had twin boys. And his friend, Tyler Hamilton, I think the surfer, had also just had twin boys. And everybody over at Men’s Journal got behind the owner’s enthusiasm. “Oh, this is even better. He’s going to bring his kids along. That’ll be great.” So I lucked out and I no longer had to live in shame or in the shadows. I carted both boys across America.
Gabriel: You mentioned Tyler Hamilton, but I think Tyler Hamilton was a professional cyclist.
Joe: I think you’re right. It was either that or it was Slater, Tyler Slater or something. Chris Slater. Anyway, the guy that was a big surfer back in the day.
Gabriel: Yeah, Laird Hamilton was definitely a big surfer.
Joe: Laird it is. Between the two of us, we got one working brain this morning. I like it.
Gabriel: Oh, I like Christian Slater though.
Joe: Yeah, yeah. He’s doing his Jack Nicholson as he’s peddling. “I’m about to hit the hills.”
Gabriel: That’s tremendous, that you had done that. That was one of the books I wasn’t aware of. I have to admit.
Joe: Yeah, it’s called Momentum is Your Friend. The best part of that project was, or the hardest part was, this wasn’t Race Across America. This was see every gold panning and everything you can do. It looked like a child’s squiggly line drawn across America. I was up in Idaho, down in Utah. When we got to the Midwest, I rode the boys across the Katy Trail, the rail-trail. Normally, any sane person would go straight into Ohio. We dropped down into Bowling Green, Kentucky, and back up into West Virginia. It was not a straight line, which made all the difference, actually, because my life hasn’t been a straight line. It’s probably my favorite book, because I bring my father back for a few hours for the readers. The biggest compliment I’ve gotten is from people who knew my dad and said, “Look, you didn’t bring him back as Mother freaking Teresa or the devil. I really recognize that guy in your book.”
Gabriel: Did you have a complicated relationship with your dad?
Joe: You know, I would say that I had a lovely… as lovely as you can have with a madman, 1950s, Irish. He liked his drink, but he was also a kind human being and he was doing the best he could with the tools that he was given in that era. He was never abusive to us. He had his failures, as we all do. I think one of his failures for me was that he had a New England reserve to him. It was hard for him to be as demonstrative as I would have liked him, but that’s his time and his upbringing. When he was, it was very… it was very significant. But one of the things I got from my dad is that I never wanted to work a corporate job. I’ve never touched the drink. I’m not a drinker. I’ll have a beer, and I’ve talked about it in my stories. I had a drink or two as a young man, but I was always the guy holding a drink at the party and it was the same drink at the end of the party. I got those from my dad, but I also got that even if you stumble, you try and complete the motion.
Gabriel: Did he have any wishes for his ashes to be placed anywhere or was that something you did?
Joe: Well, here’s what I did. A few months before he passed, I had been on a bike trip in Mexico, Puerto Vallarta or the mountains, La Bufa, the mountains above. In his later years with me, he lived vicariously through my adventures. He asked me, you know, to describe the terrain because it was fall. You know, asked me to describe the trees and the landscape and all of that. And I remember thinking when he passed, “You know, I need to take this guy on one last adventure. I need to get him out.” He wanted to be a forest ranger and a photographer and he went into corporate America and, you know, it sort of ate him alive, just like it does many people and he spent too much time inside buildings working for the man. I’m going to take him on an adventure. So what I did was I chose the spots, things that I felt he’d appreciate and also some of it that was meaningful to him. I’ll give you one quick little story from the book. We were in Kentucky and we were riding along and my mom and dad, they used to take a week in the summer, every few summers, and my mom would get dropped off at Gethsemani, Thomas Merton’s monastery where they make the fruitcakes.
Gabriel: The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane was established by French Trappist monks who settled in Kentucky in 1848. Trappist monk, social activist, and prolific author Thomas Merton lived at the Abbey from 1941 until his death in 1968. Generally, Trappist monks lead a simple life of worship and work, often supporting themselves by selling handmade products. While the Trappists are famous for their beer in Belgium, in Kentucky they are known for their bourbon-infused fruitcakes and fudge.
Joe: And my dad would drop her off. She’d spend a week with the monks, communing and, I don’t know, making fruitcakes. My dad would go on to do a tour of the best bourbon distilleries and then he’d go to the Kentucky Derby. He’d go and have his little adventure and they’d pick up my mom. In the time that we went, in 24 hours, we were at the monastery, we did a tour of the bourbon distillery, and then we went by the Kentucky Derby with our bikes. And I say in the book, “Three forms of bluegrass religion in one day.”
Gabriel: Very nice. That’s a nice story. It’s cool you got to do that as a tribute.
Joe: It is, and it’s a heartfelt story and it’s told in my own way throughout the book. You know, there’s the culmination kind of chapter. It was lovely and I wrote that book as a tribute to fathers, sons, and all the miles in between. And then the bookend of that, Gabriel, is Mud, Sweat, and Gears, because that’s mothers, daughters, and the glue that holds the world together.
Gabriel: Yeah, let’s talk a little bit about Mud, Sweat, and Gears, because in that one, you’re then up to three sons and you also convince your wife, Beth, to get on the saddle. So maybe you want to talk about that.
Joe: Well, we went across Canada and people first off marvel that I pulled a triple tandem. Beth came off onto her own bike. I gave her my Rodriguez. So it was only, we took the S&S couplers out and made it from a triple to a double, but I also had a trail-a-bike and a trailer attached. So I had three boys, only one really thoroughly contributing on the tandem. The trail-a-bike, you know, you want to contribute, but the best you can hope for is they’re dragging you down, you know, and then another child in the trailer. And so it was 18 feet long, Gabriel.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joe: Just that alone was sort of inspired insanity. I would pedal that thing and I would be burning so many calories and sweating so much that when we would stop for even more than 10 minutes, you know, it was September in Canada, so it was cool at times through Banff and Jasper and all of that. National parks and glaciers. I would have to do jumping jacks just to stay warm or put something else on because, you know, I’d be sweating through my kit, even wool. It was quite a feat when I look back on it. I’m not trying to sound like, you know, the glory of my youth. I’m still in great condition, but I think to myself, boy, that was a young man’s mentality to have that level of misplaced confidence in your abilities.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s insane. I mean, this bicycle train is already incredible. And then to say, “Oh, let’s just go across Canada!” With this little thing called the Rocky Mountains in the way.
Joe: Yeah, the Yellowhead Highway. We’re talking about up and down, brother. We’re also talking about the amount of calories needed to keep that thing rolling. There is a story in Mud, Sweat, and Gears about pulling into a truck stop and the trucker’s dream. First off, it’s a challenge to your cardiovascular system, just the amount of terrible things for your body in there. But the key thing was I could eat anything and everything, because I was just a furnace burning it all up. Nothing stuck around long enough to cause any damage.
Gabriel: Right, I think you even mentioned that in the Metal Cowboy that everybody agrees with. One of the advantages of bicycle touring is you can basically eat anything, because you’re going to burn it.
Joe: You can. It’s a get out of diet jail free car.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joe: It really was. In fact, going across America, somewhere in Pennsylvania, I think it was, it was August, Gabriel. And I’m just sweating bullets pulling these two kids and my dad’s actually across the continent. And I was disappearing. I mean, I couldn’t eat enough calories. I was probably 183 and I usually walk around at 200. And by the time I get to the Washington Monument, I’m probably 177 and dropping. But I remember looking in a hotel mirror at one point and thinking, “I’m going to miss this body when it’s gone. Because it’s just a work of science.” And it was a sculptured thing at that time. To the point where when I got back, and I was riding my bike to the store just two days after I’d gotten home, felt like Pegasus. You know, I wasn’t carrying kids. I wasn’t carrying gear, fishing poles and lightsabers. And I mean, I was carrying 400 pounds behind me. Just to be on a bike without all that, you are just gossamer wings.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joe: If there’s any form of training that I would instill into some of these guys in the pro ranks is, pull three kids across Canada or two kids across America. It beats blood doping.
Gabriel: Yeah, for sure.
Joe: Yes. And I’m going to do full disclosure. I had a I had a grave illness about eight years now in my mid-forties that… that nearly killed me. I bounced back from it all, but I was a country music song and you know, about 70 percent of relationships don’t make it through that kind of a seismic shift in your health. And mine didn’t. But we’re still really good co-parents. We have four boys. It was three at the time. I’d like to say in my shows, “We weren’t Catholic, just careless.” We had four boys and they’re the loves of our lives. I couldn’t be happier with the way things turned out in that respect. We’ve gone on, at least I have, to have a blended family with a lovely partner. You know, life works out. It works out the way it works out. And unlike some people, I don’t discredit or try to distance myself from Mud, Sweat, and Gears. It all went the way it went. And it was just a flat out adventure and some of the best times of our relationship.
Gabriel: First of all, sorry to hear about both your illness and your divorce. Been divorced myself, so I know how hard that is.
Joe: Try doing it when you’re fighting for your life. That’s a tough one.
Gabriel: I can’t imagine doing it without full health. You know, it takes so much energy.
Joe: Well, I’ll tell you what, pulling kids up the side of a mountain and all the energy I did have and still do have – or have reclaimed – really helped, because when I went into it, if I had not been in the athletic health I was in, it would have killed me. It’s a genetic disorder called hemochromatosis, which is iron overload. And it’s a Viking disorder and it turns on in your 40s very often, and you load iron, and that iron, beyond your daily allowance, causes your body’s organs and tissues to stiffen up and it just cascades into presenting illnesses that kill you. Patrick Swayze died of it. He didn’t die of hemochromatosis. He died of the illnesses that it causes. Ernest Hemingway, Steve Jobs and his liver cancer. They discovered the genes after very often. It’s one of the most underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed deadly genetic disorders in the world. They call it the Viking Curse, but I beat it. I’m a Florida cockroach, Gabriel. You can drop a phone book on me and I’ll lift that thing up eventually and walk across the room. One of the things that did for me was I was already a Buddhist and a grateful person, choosing kindness over cruelty as often as I could. Facing down the existential questions and, you know, not as a thought experiment, changes you in some ways.
Gabriel: I want to take a step backwards because I’m trying to place you geographically and then also, you mentioned your dad. I’ve heard so many places mentioned.
Joe: Yes. Well, I’m that song. I’ve been everywhere, man.
Gabriel: It sounds like it, but can you just briefly say how you got into bicycle travel?
Joe: Sure.
Gabriel: Where were you living? Where was your childhood?
Joe: So I grew up in Pittsburgh and then about age nine, the parental units moved to Florida. My dad worked for Westinghouse and he was transferred to Florida. And I like to say that Pittsburgh stimulated all my intellectualism and Florida made me an athlete. Florida is where I was able to ride a bike 365 days a year. Really took to it. When I was 19, you know, I was working for a high- risk use program in the Everglades and having all kinds of adventures. But, you know, I had a retirement plan and I had too many responsibilities for a 19-year-old. One day I was commuting by bicycle 30 miles one way into the swamps of the Everglades to this Last Chance Ranch.
Gabriel: What a name!
Joe: I know. I realized that maybe this was my last chance not to get sucked into a situation where I would be regretting that I hadn’t done the things in my youth that I should. I listened to a lot of triumph songs, “be young and wild and free,” but I was not so young and wild and free at that time. I liked this bike thing and I was riding the bike so many miles. I remember I left the Everglades to see a girl in Sarasota. I rode a hundred miles on a Friday morning. I got there Friday afternoon, stuck around till Sunday morning and then, about middle of the day at the barbecue, I said, “Alright, well, I got ahead home,” and home was a hundred miles away on a bicycle. Then from there, I ran a lot of summer camps and did a lot of adventuring and ended up in New Mexico for a while with Beth and started a family there, moved to Portland and have based out of Portland, Oregon, ever since.
Gabriel: Okay. And you said it was a small town in New Mexico? Which one was it?
Joe: It was Silver City, New Mexico. It was the gateway to the Gila Wilderness. And I was a wilderness ranger at the Mogollon Visitor Center. And one of my favorite moments was I actually got to be the Metal Cowboy off the bike and onto a horse. I had learned how to ride horses down the Everglades. And I, as a wilderness ranger had 10,000 square miles of wilderness down there in that big empty space you see on the map in New Mexico, 10,000 feet peaks and beautiful subalpine and alpine and scrub oaks. And I would take a horse in a pack because it was a wilderness and I’d go out and ride the trails and ride all over to make sure that the hunters were doing the correct things and people weren’t damaging the wilderness. That was off the bike, but it also gave me the idea to ride from Antelope Wells to Montana on the Great Divide Trail on a mountain bike. That’s one of the few rides, Gabriel, that beat me. I got waylaid by snow. I left too late in the season. I should have gone from Montana to Antelope Wells, but I went the other way, south to north. And so I had to come off the trail in Colorado. And then I wrote a story about going back and completing the motion and finishing the ride.
Gabriel: Good. You got to go back there. That’s a tough one.
Joe: You know, at this point in my life, I don’t really have markers that I have to check off. Unless it’s for the nonprofits that I’m trying to deliver bikes for kids, I don’t personally have to complete every ride or distance doesn’t matter to me. But in that case, I felt that the weather and everything had beat me and I had to go for a rematch.
Gabriel: Right. And when was that?
Joe: Oh, good golly. 1996.
Gabriel: Oh, okay. So this was still in the early days?
Joe: Yes. No kids, but married.
Gabriel: I want to talk briefly about two other books that you have written. One is Lightning in a Saddle.
Joe: Lightning in a Saddle. Yes. And that’s the one that kind of got pushed back by COVID and we’re trying to figure out the best way to relaunch it in a big way, because right now it’s optioned for a film. It’s really exciting. Lightning in a Saddle is the story of the long untamed life of Evelyn Hamilton.
Gabriel: Obviously no relation to Tyler Hamilton or Laird Hamilton.
Joe: Her name, Evelyn Bayless, when she was born, that was another interesting thing. She had seven different names over the course of her lifetime.
Gabriel: Okay.
Joe: That one was a labor of love. I was researching it. I was over in France. I was doing all that. I was writing articles for travel magazines. And this was all in like 2013, 2014, 2015. Doing all the great research about this female Jackie Robinson of the British cycling world that went on to become a French resistance fighter and heroin. She was as fast as the men and her time showed it. She lived from 1906 to 2005. She was 99 and a half years old when she passed. She grew up right in the suffragettes period. They were still very much recording women’s times in their unofficial books. And the women were making peanuts to race. They had just been allowed to start their own racing. And they would come on after the men’s racing when the porches were being lit. And they would race by candlelight very often.
Gabriel: Wow.
Joe: She trained with 1923 Tour de France winner Henri Pélissier. She was as fast as them and they knew it. And she set land speed records that were unofficial, but you know, the prime minister and the head of labor, they all came out and she had thousands of fans and she had her own line of bicycles. And all she wanted to do though, Gabriel, was to ride against men and ride in the Tour de France. And she just lived and loved and raced on her own terms when it was kind of a dangerous thing to do. Another thing she did was she was the godmother of European cyclocross. She got all the Tour de France organizers. She used all her clout to film a Pathé newsreel of her organized cyclocross in the wintertime going over hills and rivers with all women, showing that they were tough as anybody else.
Gabriel: Incredible.
Joe: The screenplay is written straight linear, but the book is a mystery within a mystery. It’s my story of trying to find her and discover her from a photograph, just a photograph. The same thing as if you found a photograph in an attic floor and then…
Gabriel: So wait, where did you find the photograph?
Joe: Well, that’s the part of the book that you’re going to have to read, but it’s exciting.
Gabriel: Oh, okay.
Joe: In a way, I found this photograph in the University of Montreal. I was doing an article on suffragette cycling and I just found this picture of her up in the corner on this woman’s thesis online, but there was no name to her. She wasn’t mentioned in the article. She was just one of the pictures. And what was crazy about it, Gabriel, was that she looked like she could be from 2005. She had on a wool jersey. She was leaning up against a touring bicycle. She rode 10,000 miles later in life in some crazy number of days. She was the real deal. I didn’t know who she was, but I saw that picture and I thought, “Who is this? This person’s got a story.” A glint in her eyes. She’s looking down at a map, got this blonde hair up in a bun, and I said, “I got to find out more about her.” And I clipped the picture and I put it into a file. And the rest is a mystery that I don’t want… to ruin the book, about how I found her.
Gabriel: Okay. Well, that is super engaging, and it sounds like a real scavenger hunt to unravel the mystery.
Joe: Well, it’s engaging in the same way that if you ever read Born to Run about the Tarahumara Indians and the runner.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joe: Yes. It’s in that way. His story is juxtapositioned in there, but only when it ties into their story. You know, his story of running. And so I get into the story of my hemochromatosis briefly, because in the middle of researching all this, I got deathly ill. And I say in the first section that had I died, Evelyn would have died twice, because she was lost in the sands of time, Gabriel. She didn’t have a Wikipedia page, but she had like 10 Pathé newsreels. She went on to help change the course of the war, World War II. And she’s one of those iconic figures that was going to be lost to the sands of time, and I dragged her across the finish line. And people have asked me on NPR, what have you, “Why do you think that was?” And I say, “we can sure code it all you want, but it was just sexism.” She was a woman, so she was discounted for so many years as to her contributions.
Gabriel: Yeah, I wonder if she could be posthumously made into a dame or something else like they do in England, you know.
Joe: Well, I’ve been talking about that. And what I’m hoping is when the book comes out, in the big way, and the movie, all of that will happen. When you read the book, you’ll see how much impact she had on other cyclists down through the years. There’s a real beautiful circle that closes at the end of the book. It’s quite the story.
Gabriel: Yeah, it sounds like it. And I love it that it started just from unlabeled photograph. That’s to me, it’s just so cool.
Joe: Me too.
Gabriel: Very good. I’m sure we could dive a lot more into that. I want to touch on a couple of other things.
Joe: If anybody wants to see that book, we do have an ebook form, and I’ll send you a copy of it, but people can purchase that at evelynhamilton.org. Okay. And Evelyn spelled with a Y. We’ll put it in whatever notes you guys do.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s right. We’ll put it in the show notes for sure. There are going to be multiple links on this episode because we’ve covered so much ground. What advice would you give to someone who is interested in maybe one day publishing a book about their own adventures?
Joe: Sure. I’m going to tell anybody that they need to hone the craft of writing. It can’t just be their story or their journal, talking about Campground X or raisins in their oatmeal or how many miles they went a day. Have something to say, I guess. It was useful for me, as a writer. I also knew that I had to tell a universal story because if you get too much into your own head as a writer and you forget about the readers, that you’re on a journey together, you’re doing them a disservice. You know, even when you’re having fun and you’re filtering it through your own sensibilities, what I try to do with my work is I try and tell the truth. There’s truthfulness and authenticity in the way you tell the story and you try and shoot for that, some universal truths. And what I always tell my audiences when I’m performing is that the more ridiculous the story, the less accoutrements have been added.
Gabriel: Excellent. That’s good to know. The last book that I’m curious about of the ones you’ve written, Sweet Tea Existentialism: Pedaling the Backwood Bayous and Rebel Roads of the South. Now, this is interesting because I’ve had a few guests who have crossed the United States and, unfortunately, several of them have had bad experiences in the South, whether it be having an object like a beer can thrown at them or being chased by dogs or being run off the road. I was very interested to see that this book seemed to be your collection of experiences in the South and I wanted to hear your take on it, when you hear these stories from other travelers.
Joe: Sure, and that book is still in the works. There’s many of those stories in other books, but I’ve put them all together with new stories and other stories that create a theme of growing up a cyclist in the South and then riding a bicycle in the South, from running a bike touring company in Northern Florida and Southern Georgia, bike and canoe tours, to all those experiences good and bad that you’re speaking of. And the way Tom Petty talks – the Southern Fried philosopher Tom Petty – there’s such a dichotomy and such a beauty and a brutality in the South. You know, there’s Southern charm and there’s lynchings. So you got a place that’s a powder keg, you know, and there’s parts that I don’t even consider the South like Key West. Anything south of Sarasota or on the coast, none of that’s the South. That’s more like retirement Jersey. I wanted to tell all of those stories. That’s one of the ones that still has not seen a lighted day, but it will.
Gabriel: Okay.
Joe: The title there, Sweet Tea Existentialism, it kind of wraps up that there’s this sweet tea that sometimes you can choke on the aftertaste. And existentialism that, you know, to survive and to thrive in the South, you do have to take sometimes an existential view of things. For me, I grew up as they were laying an asphalt in some parts of Florida, so the bicycling has changed in the South. Some ways good with bike lanes and bike trails, and that’s what I advocate for more of because, you know, the drivers aren’t going to watch out for you.
Gabriel: Right. Yeah. We heard that a lot. It can be a dangerous place at times.
Joe: Yeah. And I survived my childhood on a bicycle there. And though I do like to go back and visit friends, I could never live there again, just because… I mean, it’s too racist and sexist for me, but also the cycling infrastructure, you know, we need more advocates down there. Speaking of advocacy, though…
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s a perfect time. Yes.
Joe: We covered my recovery from hemochromatosis and I get bled every two months. It’s very medieval. They give you phlebotomies and it leaches the iron out of your tissues and organs and brings you back. And I was fortunate. Some people, the damage is already done. I was fortunate in that mine clotted it up in my liver. And thank God I wasn’t a drinker because it would have been cirrhosed. But I was close to cirrhosis and as soon as they started getting the lead out, as they say, getting the iron out, it bounced right back. So I didn’t have any real permanent damage. But coming out of that about six, seven years ago, I was thinking, well, I can continue to do all the stuff I do and write and speak. But I was getting tired of traveling so much with the speaking. And I thought to myself, I really want to give back something in a major way. Serendipity and timing and everything else, there was this organization called WashCo Bikes that really needed some direction. They were giving a couple hundred bikes away and they had a little storefront in Hillsboro. And in the last six years, we’ve grown that from giving a couple hundred bikes away around the holidays to six affiliates, all under the umbrella of Reborn Bikes. And that’s the link you put in there, rebornbikes.org.
Gabriel: Hillsboro, to put it in the minds of the audience who may not be aware, that’s a city that’s to the west of Portland, Oregon.
Joe: Yeah, it’s a bedroom community of Portland where Intel is and Nike, near, and Beaverton.
Gabriel: Right.
Joe: But we’ve branched out to the point where we’re all of Portland, we’re all the way out to the gorge. We’re all the way to the coast. We have geographic coalition partners like WashCo Bikes and Orca Bikes and Free Bikes 4 Kidz in Portland. And Reborn Bikes is the administrative hub. And we give away about 10,000 to 12,000 bikes a year.
Gabriel: Amazing.
Joe: We are the largest free and low income bike distribution on the west coast and probably this side of the Mississippi. We do summer camps. What I really love is that we’re not Goodwill. We don’t just give a bike dusted off and hand it back out. We put it through with all our volunteers, all our Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs and Scouts and everybody that helps get those bikes cleaned up and then my paid mechanics that do the real cable changing and break changing and some bikes need two hours. We get those bikes out and they go out to about 75 Title I schools maybe 25 or have immigration groups. We give bikes to Ukrainian refugees, Afghan refugees, migrant workers, Catholic charities. I’d like to tell people, if the devil is behaving himself on a Tuesday, I’ll let him give out bikes. We’re apolitical. We just really try to be holistic too. We’ll give a bike but not without a helmet, a lock and a light and some safety training. So we hold these bike fests and there’s nine stations, Gabriel, and what those stations do, we roll out the bikes, 75 or 100 bikes off of one of our box trucks, and we line them up for sizes and ages, and then people from the community that know about the event being held at a me center or a school or a church as we’ve advertised, they bring bikes out of their garages, bikes they’ve outgrown or outused, and they roll them into the truck for the next program for us to work on. And then our third station is that of repair stands and mechanics. And we always ask the people bringing their bikes in, “Hey, do you want to donate this bike because you’re done with it or is it because there’s something wrong with it?” And the people that say. “Well, I’d like to keep the bike if I get it fixed,” we’ll see if we can’t fix the bikes there, rather than having them donated for us to give them back another bike later on. And then we have flat tire relay races and slow races and foot down races and we have obstacle courses and chaos boxes and safety gardens and we have a helmet giveaway section and we have a group ride too. We enlist the police and the League of American Cyclists and we have all kinds of volunteers and staff and they’ll take them on a ride in their neighborhood to show them the safe ways to get to the stores and home and wherever they need to go. So we try to be real thoughtful about it. And the other thing we try to do is not just get a kid in the school a bike but we give the family members that might need them too, because if a kid gets a bike and his family is not going to ride with them then we haven’t closed that loop. These are all the things that I’ve tried to do, Gabriel, and I don’t do that alone. I have 12 paid staff and full time and nine part time and another dozen seasonal workers for our summer camps, and it’s just what I wanted to do with the time that remains. And I didn’t need to go and find a job per se. It’s legacy work, which puts me in a bit of a position where I can say no when I think it’s bullshit.
Gabriel: Well, I love the holistic approach to it. Like you said you’re not just giving away a bicycle. It’s really getting people involved into the bicycle culture and building a sense of community, which is amazing.
Joe: And what’s also neat is we have seven or eight warehouses, and at any one time there’s bites flowing through those warehouses. There are three storefronts where we sell the to help fund the 10 to 12,000 bikes we’re giving away. So it’s quite an operation, Gabriel. It keeps me off the streets.
Gabriel: You’re managing all of it?
Joe: Yeah, I’m the ED. I’m the executive director and founder of it. I was born with a little bit of energy and until that energy goes away I’m going to cross the finish line dead tired, my friend.
Gabriel: What an amazing tour this has been of your life, really, and there’s so many more stories I’m sure that you have.
Joe: We’ll have me on again sometime.
Gabriel: Yeah
Joe: I only made it about me in that my life is so intricately connected to the bicycle and what the bicycle gives. You know people talk to me sometimes, they think I’m going to get real technical and I can about bottom brackets and cog ratios and whatever you want to talk about, but that’s not the stuff that really juices me. What jazzes me is what the bicycle gives us in terms of exploration and community and sustainability. It’s not a panacea for all of our ills but it’s a good piece of the solution.
Gabriel: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t want to give up bicycle riding myself because it just seems like it’s got so many benefits.
Joe: Well, and Gabriel you do not have to even though you have children, let me be an inspiration touch point on that. You know, so many people they give it up when they think they’ve hit a certain milestone in their life and that’s a mistake. They don’t have to, and in fact, they shouldn’t.
Gabriel: No. I never want to have an unused bicycle in my garage, that’s for sure.
Joe: Well, we call that, the unused bicycle, in our marketing for people donating bikes. We call that, “It’s just a sculpture unless it’s being ridden.”
Gabriel: Right.
Joe: One last thing about the programs. You know, we don’t do it alone. I wrote a grant and worked out with the people that collect all the garbage, they were throwing away and burying thousands of bicycles a year, and people within the organization and me were just trying to get through the bureaucracy to somehow keep those bikes from going and getting burned up or buried. and we did, and so about two summers ago now, maybe a year and a half, we started a program that they put all the bikes that come in, in a tent and we recycle them in that we, say we get about 400 a month and we take about 60 percent of them are usable and we can save, and the rest of them we strip for parts, like hyenas. You know, we just go over them and take kickstands and grips and handlebars, and so we’re keeping about 90,000 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere a year. For me, that’s the kind of impact I want to have. I know we’re dismantling the planet as we speak. America is trying to… I don’t know what we’re trying to do.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joe: I’m not part of that, and I would love to tell your listeners worldwide that there is a huge number of people that did not ask for this and are not going quietly. You know, we’re going to do our part to continue to try and create a better world, not dismantle it.
Gabriel: Yeah, the situation is crazy right now.
Joe: Well, all I can do is be a happy warrior, but also just do the things that I’ve always done in as big a way as I can. You know, we use the word “resistance.” I don’t want to just be a rock in the stream. I want to be the water that flows the other way.
Gabriel: That’s a good way to put it.
Joe: And also be joyful about it, because the worst thing we can do is let someone steal our joy in the here and now, no matter what the situation is. I’ve been through the fires and I’ve been over the hills and I’ve carried those kids. There’s no quit in me, and there’s also no lack of joy. We’re gonna have a good time no matter what situation is.
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
Joe: I went to the race. I was third place, and I stood up there and I had no training, no nothing. I just said, “Good night Detroit.” And I held up my little medal around my neck and I said, “That’s the last you’ll see of me.”
Show Notes
The central repository for Joe Kurmaskie’s extensive work is the Metal Cowboy website.
Visit this website to find out more about the untamed life of Evelyn Hamilton.
To get involved with Joe’s refurbished bicycle programs, visit Reborn Bikes, WashCo Bikes, or Free Bikes 4 Kidz.