You would never arrive at Tom Ritchey ’s house, deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains, unless you were going there to see him or you were lost. Built years ago by Ritchey himself from rough-hewn logs, his place is a long ways from the hyper-packaged cookie-dough construction that has infected much of Southern California’s landscape. Ritchey has created a shelter equal to the storms that pound it each winter—a sturdy, no-nonsense structure reflecting homegrown values and attention to detail.

Rolling down Tom’s football-field-length driveway, I find him in his shop, performing the alchemy of transforming metal tubing into some of the world’s fastest non-motorized machines, a.k.a. Ritchey Bicycles.

Looking up from his workbench, he smiles and walks, hand extended in advance, to my car, before introducing himself and greeting me with a warm handshake. Returning to his shop, we speak about him, his bikes, and Project Rwanda, a movement that he recently birthed in a passion for bringing bicycles to Africa, to help reestablish a solid economic base and national pride.

A quick tour of Ritchey’s home makes it is obvious that this place was crafted to enhance, not contain, life. His hands still bear the scars from a hammer swung decades ago. This is all backdrop to his stor y, but the reason for the story and what matters most is Tom Ritchey’s vision that millions can be saved by a device that the average American kid believes is grown on a Christmas tree.

Tom is deliberate and confident in his speech, passionate to the point of tears about the things he loves. His kind heart is balanced by a mind that has conceived a blueprint that might just rescue an entire nation. Or, maybe, as he explains, it wasn’t really his idea at all.

Risen Magazine: Did you tinker as a kid?

Tom Ritchey: My dad had a nice shop and if I wanted to build a go-cart or a sailboat, we would do it. I built a three-story tree fort when I was five, and it got to the point where my father said, “You’ve gotta take this thing down; you’re gonna kill yourself.” I built an electric car when I was 11 that he helped me figure out. In 1971, when I was 14, I told my dad, “Hey, I think I can build a [bicycle] frame.” We were able to reverse engineer things and I built my first bike. At that time there were only a few people building bikes in the U.S., and just getting tubing was a huge deal. I started winning races and when people noticed that I had built my own bike, the beginnings of a business were not far off. I built my friend’s bikes, made some money, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

RM: You’re a Christian and an environmentalist. For some reason those two things don’t often go together.

TR: I was part of that isolation for a good part of my life. I didn’t really get it. Then, when I started having some things crumble around me, there were a bunch of great people around me at the same time—the catching mechanism, the grace mechanism, the forgiveness, all that stuff seemed like it was set up for me in the last five years or so. To me it has been a great midlife crisis.

When I went to Rwanda, I had a lot on my mind, like the need for forgiveness, personally. There I saw signs of hope from people who have committed themselves to looking forward, rather than back. But some people live only for earth, others live only for heaven.

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