Funny where an idea will take you. Ten years ago, Luna the dog – part pit bull and part Labrador retriever – was gnawing on a piece of bamboo growing behind Craig Calfee’s bicycle shop outside Santa Cruz, Calif.
This week, Calfee is in the West African nation of Ghana, intent on making bamboo bikes for the desperately poor.
It all began with Luna. She was adept at crushing wooden sticks with her powerful jaws. But the best she could manage with the stalks of bamboo was a tooth mark or two.
And that got Calfee to wondering: If bamboo was strong enough to withstand Luna, why couldn’t it be a bicycle frame? Since then, Calfee has gone from building clunker bamboo bikes to fashioning sleek, pricey racing machines that turn heads in the snobbiest pace lines. He has built 91 bamboo bicycles, enough for their reputation to spread across the country.
Calfee started thinking about his unusual form of transportation. The plant itself – a member of the grass family – is common throughout Asia and Africa. And bicycles, he knew, meant transportation, which often translates to jobs in the Third World.
Then Calfee received an e-mail from David Ho, a cyclist from New York who was thinking about buying one of Calfee’s custom carbon-fiber bikes. While on Calfee’s website, Ho clicked on the bamboo-bike link.
It happened that Ho worked for the Earth Institute of Columbia University, a nonprofit organization that focuses on sustainable development and the world’s poor.
The institute eventually financed this week’s trip to Ghana for about $25,000. Calfee, Ho and one other representative from the institute will be in the country for 10 days. Ho said they want to find people interested in making the bike frames. The bottom line, Calfee said, is to be able to make a frame without using power tools.
Calfee says he’s no Pollyanna and realizes there will be pitfalls. But he also thinks success in Ghana could mean success in other places.
“We might fail miserably,” he said. “But it might just take.”
