Old school track community? It sounds a bit like a Del Webb retirement community for rap music's pioneers. I'm imagining Afrika Bambatta pushing one of those walkers with the tennis balls on the back legs down the street to Curtis Blow's crib. Okay, not that old school and not that track community. So what, if not a geriatric rapper suburb, is the old school track community?

Ultimately one thing is pretty clear, it's amorphous and hard to describe. Some folks out there like the aesthetic of the bikes themselves, some dig the vintage paint and chromed track drops, and some think its all about the simplicity of the single fixed drive train and the beauty of bars with no brake levers, some folks like the way they handle. On the other hand, some folks counter that toe overlap has no place in traffic, that bullhorns with frankenbiked front brake is plenty cool all on its own.

All of these points of view fall within this community of fixies, at least to this gearhead/fixie freak, and more to the point, author.

If I may cut to the chase, ultimately, the reason we ride these things is because we think they're cool. Conveniently, on this point we are all right.

So what then, makes this a community? We are, after all, spread around the entire world. We consist of professional messengers, desk jockey fixie commuters, folks that ride their fixie to the corner liquor store for booze every night and those that only ride once every week or two to our favorite donut shop 50 miles from home.

Well, distances of over about 100 miles are pretty much left to the domain of internet, sites like this one, fixed gear specific lists, and emailed questions and answers about chain choices and where to find the best ghetto mechanic how to websites. This ether-realm, the la la land of the Internet and the global community and blah blah blah is all really great and very important, I swear.

But for me, the fixie community, the old school track community, call it what you will, matters the most where the rubber hits the road, on the very streets upon which we ride.

Hence the call: Yo Fixie! across Haight street, locked up at a parking meter at the Fuel Cafe across Washington park, in front of the Picasso in Daly Square, leaning up against a tree in Echo Park, on the Diag in Ann Arbor, resting against the shrubbery at Winthrop Square, piled on top of each other at Lee Valley Park, locked up outside Veloblitz. Yo Fixie! on the homeward commute. Yo Fixie! on the way to Kissena. Yo Fixie! Saturday morning up in the Canyon of the Gods.

The Community exists when you call out, it's strengthened when you stop and stare, it endures when you ask "Do you solder your own spokes?"

Our wandering eyes focus on different things, and reveal to which corner of the fixie community we owe our strongest allegiance, my eyes might fall on the old school Sugino Mighty Competition pista cranks while the bike's owner waxes poetic about how proud she is to have the high flange Campy hubs before they started breaking everywhere. Two days later she's scoping someone's steel keirin bars while he's talking about how much he loves that his hubs are field serviceable. Later that same day he's tripping over the fact that someone repainted their '64 Paramount rather than keeping the original decals scratched though they were.

The important thing, comrades, is that we're comrades.

© Aram Shumavon, 2003

Aram Shumavon is a former messenger, rides track bikes in the street, contributes frequently to the fixed-gear mailing list. He bought my custom Matt Chester bike titanium track (photo above) which turned out a bit too small for me. He'll be putting it to good use.

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