Sheldon Brown remembered

The bicycle touring community received some bad news today. Sheldon Brown died last night from a massive heart attack.

By way of a memorial, the above scene comes to mind. It’s a favorite camping site for Myra and me. It’s a sadly peaceful setting, and Sheldon played a role in getting me there in September 2004.

It’s a campsite high above Prairie Du Chien, Wisconsin, in Wyalusing State Park. It looks down at the place where the Wisconsin River flows into the Mississippi. One doesn’t get that kind of view many places in the midwest. The airport is far below, and you look down, not up, to see the planes. Noisy trains run along the Mississippi, but even the nearest ones are barely audible up here.

My bike is on top of the car in this photo, but I rode up to the top, twice. It’s a long, four-mile climb from the river to the top of the ridge, without much letup that I remember.

The previous fall, when riding in in hilly Holmes County, Ohio, I decided I was going to need lower gears if I was going to ride in places like this. I don’t know much about bicycle parts, and many of the components on my bicycle were already somewhat old. But Sheldon Brown at Harris Cyclery knew bicycle parts. (I started to write “knows” rather than “knew”. It is not easy to get used to his being gone.) I used the gear calculator Sheldon has on his web site, but I still wasn’t sure I knew what I was doing. Sheldon provided value advice, giving personal attention as he has done to hundreds if not thousands of other bicycle tourers. And he did it again a year ago when I was reconfiguring my gearing for the 2007 riding season.

For my ride to the Black Hawk war zone in 2004, it was good to have that new gearing. There is a lot of climbing to do in Wisconsin’s driftless area.

And the setting is a sad one. At the end of July 1832 the river was the site of killing. Black Hawk had been trying to retreat back to the west side of the Mississippi. He fought a delaying action at Wisconsin Heights (near present-day Sauk City). Some of his group continued the retreat overland, while others floated down the river to Prairie Du Chien, where most of them were gunned down. Most of those who did make it across the Mississippi were killed by Sioux, who had been in various conflicts with the Sauk and Fox over the years, and who were encouraged at this time by the U.S.

It’s hard to be at this location without thinking of those events, and now it will be hard not to think of how Sheldon Brown helped me get to places like that.

Sheldon’s interests and good humor ranged far beyond bicycling, as can be seen from his web site at sheldonbrown.com. And he was good for an April Fool’s article every year. One of my favorites was FasterCard Titanium, the Credit Card Touring Cycylist’s Credit Card.