Me before Meeting John Drake.

Really, great custom bike makers aren’t just unusual. They’re practically unicorns. 

It rained for four days. I sat at the computer, looking for a custom bike builder, day after day, never once brushing the brakes. On the fifth day, the rain stopped, the sun rose, the sun set. I went and sat on the porch, the chair still warm from the day, and counted out seconds between meteor showers. I’d found a custom bike maker named John Drake, and he was just one town north of us.

I assure you there’s nothing like this, remotely like this experience. 

When you call John Drake on the phone, he is instantly John Drake. Each of the 40 years he’s been working on bicycles seems to be filed away inside him, loaded with information, ready to access. He has been assembling bikes by hand for 40 years and makes some of the most technically advanced bikes in the world. Each John Drake bike is made especially for a specific person, like a musical score that is technically, defiantly, and joyfully composed just for you.

Entering John Drake's studio, I felt like I was melting into the fabric of the bicycle universe. 

Dipping under and rising over smooth rolling hills, passing pastures, with cows decorating the vistas in the distance, I found John’s road. In his driveway was a 1989 Ford F-150 with an appearance and condition that could net a trophy. I stepped from the car and walked down the slope to John’s workshop. The shop’s overhead door was open, the sun streaming in. John was moving back and forth from a workbench to a bike on a bike stand. The bike catching the light was gorgeous, alluring, had a golden color set off by silver chain rings and disc brakes. We shook hands. He nodded toward a stool beside the bench. I sat. He resumed his work, quick but without haste, organized, careful. If the bike he was working on were a symphony, it would begin loudly, with the frame, the bars, the saddle, but soon slide into subtle entangling developments—the wheels and ceramic bearings. I got the sense that this bike John was constructing would give the rider the sensation of flying at zero altitude. 

“It’s amazing how much you don’t know about a game you’ve been playing your whole life.” 

—Mickey Mantle / Ken Burns Film: Baseball

I love bicycles. Going to Tangent Cycles in Asheville is like inviting bike lovers love. I think of a bicycle as a form of a mathematical language. One I thought I knew something about. Today I realize I was as unfamiliar with the intricacies of a bicycle as I am with Euclidean geometry. For 40 years John Drake has been obsessed with bicycles, with their symmetry, balance and proportion, science and engineering/ Everything, repeat everything that goes into constructing the very best bike attainable—for you. 

As a great man with a rhinestone piano once said, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful.”

—WSJ

That first day, settling in and watching John work, I was reminded of some of the best moments of my life, those moments when I felt myself experiencing something of real value: salmon fishing on Norway’s Alta Fjord, with a dark blue sky and white columns of mountains; Keith Jarrett at Carnegie Hall, striding out gospel chords so joyous, all of us in silent thrall; a fall night at Boston’s Fenway, the bottom of the 12th, the game tied. Carlton Fisk reached down and clubbed a low, inside fastball, launching the ball into the night, high over the left-field wall, all of us jumped up on our seats, hands raised straight up over our heads. Those were shooting-star moments. That first day sitting in John’s shop, I knew it was sizing up to be one of those moments, a moment when I felt moved and changed, a moment almost without consciousness.