If you think of the Champaign-Urbana bike community as a large, multi-tendrilled beast, as I like to, then Pat Schmitz has that sucker covered from head-to-toe as well as anyone I know. Schmitz, a graduate student in Plant Biology by day, spends his free time on a diverse array of bike-related endeavors. You may have seen him on his ultra-long kids’ bike or tall bike during Critical Mass, riding in a chariot race around the quad or working as a bicycling advocate for ChampaignCountyBikes.org.
I caught up with Pat before we were set to play a game of bike polo in the Krannert parking garage. After the jump, hear his thoughts on freak bikes, fixed gears, and building trailers.
Smile Politely: How did you get started riding a bike? Any cool stories there?
Pat Schmitz: My first bike I got when I was five. On my inaugural ride when I learned to balance, I veered off the sidewalk and headed straight toward the house. I didn’t know there was a backpedal brake; I wasn’t aware yet. I headed straight toward the downspout that my dad had just installed and smashed it, and it remained smashed for the next ten years until he put new gutters in and re-sided the house. So that was my inaugural ride.
SP: Where did you grow up?
PS: I grew up about an hour and a half from here, a small town called Delavan south of Peoria. It’s about five miles off Interstate 155, it’s about 1,900 people now, graduated with a class of 32. It’s definitely a farm town. I didn’t ride bikes in high school after having had a paper route from the beginning of fourth grade to the end of eighth grade. Up to that point I had ridden my bike quite a bit, but I didn’t know a lot about bikes and my reintroduction to bikes as an undergrad was a slow one.
SP: So did you go to undergrad here also?
PS: I did my undergrad here, yeah. I got back into bikes as transportation here. For the most part, they remain transportation. I’m more into goofy stuff and transportation than country riding. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s more that I don’t have friends that do it and I’ve never really ventured. My friend Mike (Okelman) and I have done it, but I don’t think that I’ve really found my place there yet. It’s something I’m interested in, I just haven’t ventured.
SP: You’re on the Champaign County Bikes board of directors?
PS: I joined Champaign County Bikes two months ago, and I’m now the member chair for Champaign County Bikes. I’m thinking about ways to bring people into the fold of Champaign County Bikes. We have a fairly small membership, it’s pretty small, it’s really only about 30 or 40 paying members. Rick (Langlois, CCB director) and the other paying staff, in the last year, have done a stunning amount of work. When they put the bike map out and did the bus wrap, that made me really excited, and I really wanted to participate in what they were doing. So I donated some money and went to their annual membership meeting and Rick invited me to be the membership chair.
SP: I think it’s good to have some young blood in there.
PS: Yeah, I hope so. I hope they like me. I think Rick puts a very positive motion into the bike community here, and I found that to be very inspiring.
SP: So how did the bike polo thing get started?
PS: My friend Mike had been talking to his friends about it for a while, and we had been talking about it for a while, and one weekend two summers ago he picked up some golf clubs and made some mallets and that’s when we started playing bike polo. It’s been very occasional until recently, we’ve been trying to get it going again. We’re trying to play every week or every two weeks. There’s no set team, it’s very casual the way we play.
I was in Brooklyn two weeks ago for an event called Bike Kill, sponsored by a club called Black Label. They’re a rat bike club. They’re basically punks that build crazy bikes and have a lot of fun. They have a clubhouse; it’s this whole floor of this warehouse building. They get a permit for this alley and people come from all across the country with their crazy bikes. It includes our local semi-club called Shampoo Banana. I’m technically the only one living here right now, and I haven’t met anyone who’s quite interested in it yet. I’ve met people who build bikes, but we’ll see. It’s fun and it gives me an excuse to go to places I don’t live and meet kids I don’t know and ride rat bikes and have fun.
SP: What was the craziest bike that you saw there?
PS: There was some crazy stuff, you can see it on YouTube. There was this bike with ten-foot wheels with an axle that goes through them and there are basically two hanging recumbent seats so when you pedal, the bike spins and you can get it spinning really fast. And people grab onto the outside of the wheels and spin around. They’re these massive wheels made out of mild steel and have these big spokes made out of mild steel and you can grab on and spin around.
There was this other bike called the bucking bronco that had this eccentric wheel and the only way to ride is to figure out how to bring it around over that hump. The best thing about freak bikes is learning how to ride them. A lot of people build them specifically so that they’re the only ones who know how to ride them. Unless you can ride the bike, that’s like the goal of bike club. So you see a lot of kids on pretty dangerous tall bikes. It seems like it’s done mostly on purpose.
SP: What about the crazy folks that came down for the alley cat last spring? Who are they?
PS: Rat Patrol: They’re a bike club from Chicago and all over the world at this point. They came down for Shampoo Banana Split, which was when basically everybody else was leaving town. They’re straight-up punks, and we’re kind of punks but not really. I like the movement because they’re building their own things out of scrap, they’re not spending any money, and they’re treating it like art, and it’s functional. I think that’s my favorite thing is that it’s functional; it’s stupid, but it’s functional. I generally like to use stupid in a positive sense. I’m not using it as a term for ignorant, rather unnecessarily ridiculous. But fun, because it’s unnecessarily ridiculous.
SP: Does it cross over with messenger culture much?
PS: Not really. There’s actually some conflict there. There’s no messenger culture here so we don’t really see it, but there’s some talk of it, but I don’t really buy it. Most kids that are into bikes, if they aren’t into something they just don’t bother with it. Most of the time when there’s conflict, it’s just posers making shit up because they want to be assholes. But I think that happens in a lot of scenes, though.
SP: Yeah, where there’s a scene there’s got to be an orthodoxy.
PS: I try not to buy into that. Mike and I both have bikes of every variety. When I first heard of it, I was like, “Freak bikes … what? What is this?” But I guess I learned that it’s kind of fun. So now I’m going to be on a mixed bike for polo, but I have a half a dozen cruisers in my basement, a folder bike, road bikes, my everyday bike is a fixed gear, just because it’s fun and it’s flat here so why not?
SP: Of the bikes that you have, how many are bikes that you built and how many aren’t modified?
PS: I’ve worked on some level on all of my bikes, but not all of my bikes are freak bikes.
SP: How about trailers?
PS: I’m starting to build them in my basement. It’s kind of a weird concept to me, building something and selling it, but I don’t think that you can buy a good bike trailer for a reasonable amount of money. And even the trailers that you can buy aren’t built out of solid materials. Even the $100 Burley trailers, you can haul a hundred pounds, I don’t know. But even the trailers that we build out of conduit can haul several hundred pounds.