The Bike Kitchen has plenty of ingredients
b'January 4, 2022 \\u2014 There\\u2019s something missing from the Ukiah Farmers Market this time of year\\u2026like the market itself, which will be coming back next Saturday, but without one important fixture.\\nThe Ukiah Bike Kitchen is heading into its tenth year of fixing bikes for free, coaching aspiring mechanics, and amassing enough bike parts to cancel out global supply chain woes.\\n\\nI\\u2019ve never actually taken my 1983 pink Bertoni road bike to the Farmers Market stand, but I love the idea that on any given Saturday, I could. Devin Vagt, one of the Bike Kitchen\\u2019s main volunteers these days, assured me that, come spring, that much-missed opportunity will be available again. In the meantime, his two-car garage, which contains exactly no cars, is the Bike Kitchen\\u2019s winter headquarters. He handed me a headlamp when I showed up after dark in a light rain, to enthuse about bikes.\\nSo the Bike Kitchen still exists. It was founded in 2012 by Lucy Neely and Jen Smart, who worked what Vagt calls \\u2018grant magic\\u2019 to score the money they needed to buy a tool kit, bike trailer, and hire mechanics from Dave\\u2019s Bike Shop to train the first volunteers. The Kitchen has donated bikes to the Boys and Girls Club, fire survivors, and the Hopland Tribal Youth Center. And the organization pays a small amount to interns who have volunteered for six Saturdays.\\nBut there\\u2019s something about working on bikes that\\u2019s simultaneously so wholesome, so obsessive, and, it turns out, almost transcendental.\\n\\nVagt muses on the meditative qualities of truing a wheel, what is kitchen-like about the Bike Kitchen, and learning to accept new features on the roadscape.'