Ah! the beginning! Where did it all start? --If I really want to get to the roots I'd have to tell you about Mushmara. No. That's too far back... Then where? Perhaps it will suffice to say that my wife Ellie was the happiest person I ever met in my life. Our baby Sandy Laughing-River was our joy.

We lived in a log cabin deep in the northeastern forests. Ellie knit warm sweaters for us. I made a skylight in the roof so we could watch the shooting stars. Our lifestyle was different from what most people call "normal". We had... living poetry... deep and real love..

In the summer of 1980 with Sandy Laughing-River safely strapped in a babyseat, Ellie and I rode Peugeot bicycles across Canada from Atlantic ocean to Pacific, 3000 miles. The trip was accomplished on a shoestring budget. I learned to repair our bicycles along the way. By the time we reached Vancouver British Columbia I knew quite a bit about bike repair. The journey across Canada was the most beautiful journey of our lives. We cooked our meals over campfires, slept in a snug tent. The journey was a sort of spirit quest for us. Our hearts and souls grew by leaps and bounds during our journey. Sleeping snug and warm together beneath the stars we were safely in the Creator's hands. We averaged 35 miles per day. In all, the trip took about three months.

Sandy was always waving at all the people we passed. She giggled and oohed and aahed, pointed out things to me. Gosh it was beautiful.... When we arrived in Vancouver British Columbia Dr Sue Comey at the Pine Street Clinic looked at Sandy Laughing-River and said she was the healthiest baby she had ever seen. But soon afterwards, the government took Sandy away from us. We needed a really good lawyer... But they cost money, and we were poor. The courts were cold hearted, even evil, the way we look at it.  Those people, in their svelt suits and expensive new cars and fancy homes, could not in the foggiest reaches of their minds understand us. And nothing we could do could make them understand. We tried and tried. We never could get Sandy-Laughing-River returned, no matter how hard we tried.

Of course we don't know who adopted her so we don't know her last name, just her first and middle -- But if any of you  folks living around Vancouver, British Columbia happen to know a young woman  named Sandy Laughing-River who was born in June of 1979 would you please ask her to get in touch with us???

(On April 23, 2003 we found Sandy Laughing River, and are now getting to know each other now after being separated for two decades. Blessings to all the friends who helped make this possible.)

Between the fall of 1980 and spring of 1982 we struggled to regain Sandy Laughing-River, to no avail. Then when we learned she was going to be adopted by a family in Southern California -- a family who refused to allow us to know her as our child, refused to allow us to hold her or show any emotion around her, or even to see her --  we knew we needed to leave California and go away somewhere to heal our hearts. We had been visiting with my family in southern California. In the spring of 1982 we got on our touring bicycles and headed north along 101, rode through California, Oregon, Washington, crossed Puget Sound, up Snowqualamie Pass, across the desert and into Idaho.

Overlooking the Columbia Gorge in June of 1982, the temperature was 108 degrees fahrenheit My bike, trailer and gear weighed 150 pounds. My wife Ellie's bike and gear weighed about a hundred. Mountains might slow us down but they never stopped us. We picked up an Irish Setter named Benny to keep us company. He was to be our closest friend for five y ears... We camped at Last Chance hotsrpings in the mountains for nearly a year,  and then we bought a 1959 VW Westphalia Camper and came to Missoula, Montana, camping outside the city in the forests, beside the rivers. We met a Flatfoot Indian family who invited us to stay on their land. We fixed up bicycles for all their children.

Our hearts had been deeply wounded by the ordeal of losing Sandy Laughing-River... Teaching the Indian children to work on bicycles went a long way towards making us feel better. We stayed with them about a year. I was buying bikes at the landfill and rebuilding them, even painting some of them. I sold a few, traded a few, gave a bunch away. Pretty soon I had about 30 of them lined up in Chief's yard, all rebuilt, in perfect condition. We found a wonderful old bus, a 1941 International highway bus that had been fixed up as an RV inside. We got it for $300 cash and a bunch of stuff I had gotten in barter for bikes, like a camera and crossbow... I had a welder put a corral on top of the old bus and a ladder on the back --  and we stuck the bikes up on top. We were ready to go anywhere, ready for to fade, into our own parade...

In the spring of 1986 we put our VW camper in storage and climbed aboard our new Bicycle Bus to begin the journey. Our friend Allan came along. He's the fellow leaning against the front of the bus in the picture on the left. Ellie and Benny are in front. The old black bus sure needed a paint job! But the International was really an outstanding bus in many ways. Basically, about 20 feet long, it wasn't all that heavy. --It did not sink into soft land and get stuck like many buses do. It could go anywhere high as it was. We even forded shallow streams with it. The body was galvanized so it never would rust. The oddest thing about it was the way it was built.

In 1942 the state of Montana needed highway buses -- but all the companies had ceased making vehicles and turned their industry into the war effort. So the state of Montana bought the pieces from International and hired local blacksmithes to design and build seven buses. This is one of them. The engine was a 308 cubic inch Black Diamond, more powerful than some V-8s. It had a four speed transmission. It rarely broke down. And when it did, it was usually something I could fix myself. Most of the time it started up almost instantly and ran like a top.

So began our fantastic  wandering bicycle business. Deep down in our hearts the true reason for creating this business was the hope that if we could make it a success we might finally have some leverage in the courts. We aren't the sort of people they could take a child from and we could just forget it. The heartache never left our minds. if nothing else, there was always the chance Sandy Laughing-River would hear of the wild Bicycle Bus someday and come to see what it was and in this way we might be reunited.

Fixing bikes wasn't our only reason for traveling. We are hotsprings lovers. We headed straight to Jerry Johnson's hotsprings, then on to Owyhee hotsprings, and from there to Bagby and Cougar hotsprings. If the truth be known we probably spent more time soaking in wilderness hotsprings than fixing bikes that summer of '85. Hotsprings are also a great place to do art. You got peace of mind and the natural beauty of nature. I enjoy carving wood, sculpting in clay, painting in oils, and photography. Ellie and Benny our Irish Setter loved taking long walks together. Hotsprings are good medicine, a place to clean one's heart and soul.

One thing Allan was good at was cleaning the bus. He wouldn't let us help. He said we just got in the way. So we'd leave and he would throw EVERYTHING out of the bus and proceed to scrub and clean every inch of it back to front, top to bottom, fast and furious.

Gosh, I wish he'd come visit us again...

The old bus needed a paint job if we were to ever be taken seriously -- which was a thing that friends like Dick here on the right could never do... On a warm spring day in 1986 we painted the whole darn bus in the downtown area of an absurd little seaside town. We put newspapers down on the pavement and were very careful about not leaving a mess. Heck. We had to do it somewhere. We didn't see why anyone should mind...

Notice the nice new wood door and the compartment in the rear... (We bartered a bicycle to a carpenter..) The stylish insulated curtains Ellie sewed by hand... The green visor came from a boat...

I believe our talents are given to us by the Creator. I was struck by lightning in 1969 in a stormy cornfield in Iowa and came through it okay. It is things like that that have given me my unusual perspective. The Bicycle Bus is a very odd thing to exist upon the earth in the United States at the tail-end of the twentieth century, if you stop and think about it. There is obviously some deep spiritual purpose going on here. Recycling bicycles -- with the earth running out of oil... Isn't the Bike Bus like a sign? A huge incredible sign? Whereever we went people loved to see the Bike Bus. They smiled. They waved. They rubbed their eyes in disbelief.

In the picture on the right we are set up in a small Washington town fixing the local people's bikes. They would let us stay for a week or two without bothering us at all. After all, the nearest bikeshop was a roundtrip of a hundred miles away from there. The kid's bikes needed someone to adjust the brakes and fix the flats, and repair the bearings. I came through twice a year, more or less. I bartered when people couldn't afford to pay cash. Sometimes we got fresh pies and loaves of home-made bread... Sometimes fresh Salmon or Dungeness crab... Once it was a large pot of fresh crawdads and a pound of butter...

There's a lot of ways to get paid for life. Sometimes the guy who receives piles of money for his "work" is miserable. One thing is for sure. I was never miserable. Not only were these kids great, but their mothers and fathers were great too. Hard working people most of them. The Indian culture has retained family values that  have fallen into disuse in white society. They still all gather together to eat dinner around the same table. They still respect their elders. They still enjoy doing things for themselves and knowing the thing is done well, and that they have accomplished something. I mean, you see it in  the children's eyes. But watch out when they are pissed at you! The white world hasn't always been their friend... So there I was, in the thick of things you might say. Up to my ears in clashing cultures. Sometimes kids would steal my bikes, or parts. I would go out looking for them. Sometimes the kids would help me, because they knew everyone in the neighborhood and had a pretty good idea who had done it.

Some summer days there'd be six or seven kids hanging out all day long. Most of them thought they knew how to patch an inner tube when they arrived. They simply didn't understand why their patches rarely held. There are little tricks you have to know. i made sure they learned them. Truing wheels was a really valuable art to them. Because Indian kids are born atheletes and they aren't happy unless their bikes are jumping over things, and this tends to bend and crunch wheels, and wheels are expensive to replace. Bike shops charge ten bucks to true a wheel. I showed them how to repair their own wheels.

Sometimes a youngster would come along, twelve years old, smoking a cigarette, with a pack rolled up in the sleave of his shirt. It bothered me too much. I have seen too many adults who wished they could break their addiction, for me to say nothing when a youngster comes sauntering along thinking that smoking will make him appear mature and independant. Times like that I would put my foot down. I am an easy going guy most of the time. I would tell the kid he couldn't hang out around us and work on bikes as long as he had cigarettes on him. He'd put up a fuss at first, but often as not he would get rid of them and come back. I have always preferred orange juice to beer. Some people think that is odd. But I like to have a clear mind whether I am driving a seven ton monster bus down the highway or trying to read a good book. So there was no alcohol abuse around my bus either. No drugs. No cursing. No violence. No meanspiritedness. No dishonesty.

I like to think all the kids strengthened in some way from their experiences with our bus. I saw them grow up... Because I came back to their towns year after year. Boys that were four foot tall when they patched innertubes and packed bearings at my bus came up to me seven years later taller than I am and in the army. It is a strange feeling. Once, in Merlin Oregon I shot pool with a bald fellow who said he was honored to be shooting pool with me. I laughed. He said no, I didn't understand and went on to explain that his first bike had come from my Bikebus, when his mother had led him there by the hand and helped him pick it out. Sure made me feel old...

The old Bicycle Bus never got a moving violation in all the years it was on the road. People sometimes ask me how that is possible, considering how wild it looks. I suppose part of the reason was that basically it was a well known fact that all of our bicycles were legal. We very rarely bought bikes from people and when we did we photographed them standing beside the bike, got a bill of sale, and called in the bike's serial number to check it with the NCIC before we gave the seller any money. But we bought very few of them that way. Most of our bikes were recycled from landfills, and then fixed up as good as new with excellent bearings, cables, etc. You could walk around the whole bus and search and you would not find a single bike with a flat tire, or a tire with no tread, or a bearing that wasn't adjusted correctly, of a wheel that wobbled or a cable that was broken, or a derailleur that was defunct. My bikes were dependable and safe. I was filling a vital need in small towns. I was working hard. I always drove slow and careful. I always kept my bus in good repair.So there was no reason for me to have any trouble.

Headlights were a problem though. The ten bikes in front obscured them. So I put a pair of Model T Ford headlights up above the bikes. I ran it that way for several years before an officer one day casually mentioned to me that technically it was not legal to have headlights mounted so high. But I never got a ticket for them. We had a 12 volt color tv inside, and a 12 volt VCR. The nicest part of the day was often the evenings after all the bike work was complete, when we would fix a meal and relax and watch a movie. We also managed to save up and buy a RCA camcorder when they first came out. We videoed many wonderful moments, preserving them, hopefully forever.

1986 Newspaper articles. The color picture on the far left was in the Bend Bulletin. The color picture on the right was the Eugene  Register Guard.  BW on left was the Oregonian. Click on pics to enlarge...

Approaching Coos Bay Bridge in the summer of 1985

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