By Rowan Utzinger
The Evergreen Bike shop returns with a few changes: a greater focus on student-led, student-focused learning, and a brand stinking new name: The Evergreen Bike Co-op!
The last that many of you may have heard from the Evergreen Bike Shop was a touching eulogy published by this same paper in February of ‘22. But never fear valiant students, for we have returned from the grave as something not dead, nor even undead; but instead as something totally alive!
But let us start from the beginning (the end? The beginning of the end? I digress.) In the final months of 2019, after a long and prosperous (though somewhat chaotic) era, the outlook for the bike shop was bleak. The circumstances vary based on who you ask, but everyone agrees that it was a combination of misfortunes that did the bike shop in: a changing Evergreen suffered a variety of cuts to beloved programs, the attitudes of the administration toward anything that suggested anarchy had begun to shift, and a dwindling student body couldn’t provide the lifeblood of volunteers and patrons that the bike shop depended on to survive. Couple this with an alleged (though quite compelling) scandal that we cannot elaborate on here, but that involves an off-campus party taking advantage of the chaos of the shop and using it as a secret headquarter for a bike-napping scheme? Administration couldn’t kill the program and bury the body fast enough. In fact, the corpse still lies in a chain-link cage underneath the CAB building to this very day; the milk crates of brakes and piles of seats and frames growing a little dustier every week that they linger there. The deed was done under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic, an era that encouraged many similar quiet murders of public spaces which are home to community-led collectives.
At first, it seemed that would be that. It was the end of an era, plain and simple. But as our campus slowly comes to life, the bike shop is rising as well. It is responding to the desires of students to control our own transportation, learn repair skills necessary for self-sufficiency, and to our desperate need for third spaces in which we can rebuild the community that a dead campus has stolen from us all.
There are many challenges to overcome. The excavation of the tools from the various storage places where they were scattered is a long and dusty process, one fraught with tangled dangers of rusty chains, spiderwebs, and the acolytes of Mother Milk Rat that dwell in these tunnels. There is also the matter of finding a new home for the shop itself. Our old shop location was immediately filled by another institution, adding further complications to an already difficult process; so for now, we exist as a collection of carts, a caravan geared toward the nomadic life of pop-up workshops and one-day appearances. Then, there are the challenges posed by the administration (the grand They from the planet Them) many of whom shudder at the thought that the bike shop will rise again as a hub for student learning unsupervised by so-called real adults.
They should shudder at this thought. It has been argued before that the students of this college may be better-served by a “real” bike shop; a faculty-run, well-organized, institutional-type beat. It is true that this kind of shop would have more legitimacy, more stability, and more permanence, but I am here to argue that a permanent, sterilized shop catering to our repair requirements is not what this campus needs. Not what we, as students, need.
The shudder-inducing thing that we need, the thing that the bike shop has always been, is a place where students can help students. A place that you can walk into with a broken bike, and not only leave with a fixed bike, but with the knowledge you need to fix it yourself next time. A place to leave with grease-stained hands and a wave goodbye to an entire shop full of students with the collective knowledge to build and fix just about anything, as well as the desire that everyone else should know these things as well. This chaotic, loving, innovative space is what we would lose if the bike shop never came back, and what we would lose as well if the shop was taken from student hands and placed instead into those of some institutional organization. Would bikes still get fixed? Sure. But what makes the bike shop special is that every bike is fixed by student hands, and the shop is alive with the thoughts and dreams of students. The shop is allowed to follow the needs of the students at will, to adapt and grow and change without the miles of red tape and emails that it takes to change any “real” part of this college. The shop must be of the students, for the students, by the students. Period.
So this is the future we work towards. Look for us in Red Square, fixing bikes during pop-up clinics (information to follow.) Meet with us on Fridays, on the ground floor of Lab 1, hanging out on the couches and talking about our plans and dreams for the shop. And most of all, look for us out and about on our bikes, spreading the good word, and working toward a future where everyone can have and fix a bike.
