Facebook is a great tool! My old college roommate at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln found me yesterday. The last time I heard or saw Nate was at his wedding and I was still living in Colorado. It is just the way things happen sometimes when one person heads west (Nate now lives in Oregon) and another heads east (I’m in Kentucky). So thanks to facebook, I get to see what he’s up to.
Nate was always a “creator” of things. He crafted our kitchen table in our apartment, he and another friend (Dan) built a couch and chair out of old ski’s, etc. His deal was art. He and Dan both played guitar too. Needless to say, I hated it. Mostly because I am not artistic in the same way they are. I can’t draw a stick figure, I can’t tell the difference between a note that is sharp or flat – but I can appreciate the arts. A passion of mine since a high school project on Dylan Thomas and with the intersection between poetry and hip hop has been poetry. Watching the two of them live “artisticly” emboldened me in some ways to be more open with the poetry I wrote.
It’s interesting how these things can come back to you at unexpected times. Just last week, Dan and I were on the phone discussing “Passion”. We were asking ourselves, “What it meant to make a living doing what you are passionate about”, “Is it possible to make a living only with your passion” and “How does one know the possibilities surrounding their passion.”
We talked about another friend of ours that lives in Telluride, Colorado and works within the ski/sport industry. Which is another passion that Dan, Nate and Scott have (that I have not gotten into either). I remember a time that I came home from classes to find Nate in snow goggles and boarding gear watching a Warren Miller documentary on tv.
Why all the talk about passion? While in college, Nate worked at a local bike shop in Lincoln called Bike Pedalers. It was a pretty cool store that was in a couple older homes, one for service and one for sales (which is apparently not the case now looking at the website). So bikes were a passion for Nate and were becoming a significant passion of mine too.
I had heard that Nate was building bikes for a living now, but never really knew the whole story. It appears that is the case. The business is called – Signal Cycles in Portland, Oregon. Here’s a video of their work and team they posted on their blog. It’s is exciting to see him building bikes as an occupation. It helps me answer a few of the questions Dan and I were talking about just last week.
You can also find Signal Cycles on their facebook page.
Signal Cycles Cyclocross from Benji Wagner on Vimeo.
