Posts filed under ‘Features’
Thanks to our friend Andrew, he put together a little video so everyone can see some trees in motion.
Andrew tossed a tree on his Big Dummy yesterday and rode with me downtown while I pulled two 9 foot Nobles.
It was a beautiful morning and a lot of fun having a buddy to ride with!
That’s me, Max, over there on the left. I had just loaded up a 9′ Noble Fir and two 8′ Doug Firs for delivery. It was hard even getting them onto the trailer to begin with, and it only got tougher.
I moved like molasses across I-5 and into NE. I was getting rained on, the subtle but wet drops. Passing NE 20th I realized that my jacket had soaked through and my wool base-layer was soaking inside-out from sweat.
The first delivery was to a cute family that stood on the porch in amazement as I unloaded their Douglas Fir from the 300lb pile of trees strapped to my trailer. They thanked me for my efforts with a small bag of homemade cookies, tied up with a tip. The tip was a thoughtful gesture, but the cookies were what my body craved, so I scarfed a few.
The second delivery came quickly, at a mere 8 blocks away. Another family greeted me, it looked like three generations of men – all kind of chuckling at my drenched clothes and trailer loaded with tall trees. I set their 8 footer Doug Fir to dry on the porch and jumped back on my bike. It was getting cold. Everything I had on was soaked through completely. If I ran my hand along any piece of clothing it would gush and then instantly suck more rain up.
I headed to NW 22nd, across town. When I hit the Broadway Bridge, the lone 9 foot Noble Fir left in my trailer was feeling like a couple thousand pounds. About 25 blocks from my 3rd and final delivery, I told myself, “you can do this, you can have as many beers as you want later”.
The rain refused to give up. I was now more than soaked, my skin felt like it was even taking on water. In a sort of exhausted, delirious moment I began singing “Who’ll Stop the Rain” in my head. No one stopped the rain.
With 10 blocks left I remember thinking “this is so damn hard” – then suddenly for no reason I thought about a teenage friend of mine, Wayne. He died when I was about 19, after fighting juvenile lymphoma for many years. I thought about how hard it is to lose a loved one. I thought about what it felt like when I saw Wayne at his wake, and how much I wanted him to just “wake up” from some kind of nap or coma. But it wasn’t either. He was gone. I remembered that feeling intensely and it put everything in perspective.
All my thoughts swirled around The Dougy Center, the folks we’re donating our 10% to this year, around the kids and teens who will stand in my shoes – starring at their friend or family they had lost wishing they would just “wake up”.
I didn’t care about my exhaustion or tiredness or how wet I was. I just thought about how making it to this last house was going to raise a small amount to help out The Dougy Center, to help kids and teens deal with what seems like insurmountable grief. I thought about how dark the world can feel, but how my own life had become a flurry of light and beauty in surviving that darkness.
I rolled into my last delivery, hauled that giant tree up to our customers doorstep and smiled through muscle aches and shivers. In the last three years, this venture had never felt so good as it did at that moment.
I’m not a hero or anyone special because I ride Christmas Trees around Portland in the rain, as a matter of fact some folks would rightfully think I’m some kind of dummy for doing that. But we don’t do this to be heroes or special or “good”. We do this because we love it and we do this to try and fill the world with more cheer.
We ride – with blinking little lights on the front of our delivery bikes, that may just a little bit, help make the world a little less dark.
Please download our press release here (Trees By Bike 2011 Press Release) and forward any questions to info@treesbybike.com
Trees By Bike is back for their third year of pedal-powered holiday cheer, delivering even more Christmas Trees and Hanukkah Candles to celebrate the season.
Portland & Portland Metro Area, November 15th, 2011 – Our third official year as a business, we continue our service with even more enthusiasm and BIG aspirations for the amount of trees and other items we deliver.
Starting the Friday after Thanksgiving, November 25th, our riders will be rolling through Portland with the freshest, most beautiful Oregon fir trees. Taking orders earlier this year, we have already started planning the deliveries and hope to make a big showing in neighborhoods throughout Portland.
In addition to our early planning, we’ve permanently added Hanukkah candles to our list, allowing us to spread even more holiday cheer.
Trees By Bike is committed to our promise of giving 10% of all revenue to a charity with a cause we can believe in, and this year we have chose The Dougy Center. The Dougy Center started here in Portland almost 30 years ago and has not lost sight of their cause – in assisting the children, teens and their families with the grieving process. It’s our pleasure to ride knowing that we can help their cause this holiday season.
Ride safe & see you on the road!
About The Dougy Center
The mission of The Dougy Center is to provide support in a safe place where children, teens and their families grieving a death can share their experiences. Through our National Center for Grieving Children & Families, we provide support and training locally, nationally and internationally to individuals and organizations seeking to assist grieving children. To read further about The Dougy Center, please visit – http://www.dougy.org
About Trees By Bike
Trees By Bike is Portland’s original Christmas Tree bicycle delivery service, making their first official deliveries during the holiday season of 2009. Starting with humble roots, delivering around 50 trees and operating out of a local bike shop, Trees By Bike has grown incredibly – doubling their deliveries in 2010 and now further expanding their delivery area and operations to accommodate another boom in business for 2011 holidays. The founder and “Yule Dispatcher”, Max Kirchoff, has big dreams for this tiny business. Read more at http://www.treesbybike.com
Media contact:
Max Kirchoff
The Yule Dispatcher
Trees By Bike
971 506 5205 info@treesbybike.com
Now you too can be “delivered” from tyranny….by bike!
Be thankful of everything that our founding fathers stood for: the ability to free self-determination. Never underestimate the right to move about whether it’s by car, bike, foot, balloon, kayak, or otherwise.
SO! Breath in some life, celebrate wildly with liberty, and pedal your ass off in pursuit of happiness!
Happy 4th!
Portland Design Works, or “PDW” to the fans like us, are an excellent local bike accessory (& more) maker. From super sweet cup holders to supremely designed grips – PDW really brings a breath of fresh air into an industry weighed-down by bland utility and cold, corporate packaging. Portland Design Works’ gear is not just functionally fresh but it’s also about as far from vanilla as one can get. Products bearing neo-retro-space-age names like “RADBOT 500″ and “spaceship” & illustrated packaging hollering back to the best toys of my youth, PDW already sets themselves apart. But it doesn’t end here – they’ve gone further, making connections in the community and innovating in both ways big and small with their practical, everyday & urban bicycle accessories for everyone from PRO racers to work-commuting hobbyists. They really have got it happening.
Why am I writing this on our Trees By Bike blog?
Well, besides the fact that I love their stuff to begin with, PDW also hooked us up in a cool way this year. They provided us with a handful of their wonderful lightsets for nighttime deliveries. The heartfelt gift will keep our riders safe, and hopefully it will give them even more attention that they so totally deserve.
Just as a little note, their products make great holiday gifts. As a cyclist I get a lot of bicycle related gifts for my birthday and Christmas, and let me tell you there’s nothing like getting these simpler essentials. Whether it’s a lightset, some grips, a shirt, clip-on fender, or a rack – these are pretty perfect products that would make excellent presents. Just saying.
Thanks PDW, thanks for keeping our riders safe and illuminating our way through the cold, winter nights.
Check out Portland Design Works on ze interwebz
http://www.ridepdw.com/
http://twitter.com/portlanddesignw
We’ve updated our deivery area for this season. While the largest area is no longer included, we’ve beefed up the regular delivery service area and added downtown Vancouver, WA to our Extended Weekend Delivery Area.
As always, though, if you ask real nice and provide some hot refreshments for our rider, we can normally extend our delivery area for you.
That’s right, Trees By Bike is happy to spread the love to our jewish friends! Celebrate the Festival of Lights with some pedal-delivered candles this year.
Thanks to the suggestion of our friend Beth Hamon, we have procured some boxes of candles from Congregation Beth Israel here in Portland, and are ready to ride them out to you today. Here at Trees By Bike we may not celebrate Hanukah every year ourselves, but we have a great appreciation for the meaning and tradition of this holiday. Hopefully this can be a small “mitzvah” to get our Jewish friends’ hanukkah going. So get your menorah ready and let your friends know!
We will be delivering until Dec 1st, the first day of Hanukkah!
*Thanks to the very generous Congregation Beth Israel, we’re able to lower our price to $5/box!
HANUKKAH CANDLES ARE SOLD OUT FOR THE SEASON. HAVE A WONDERFUL HOLIDAY AND BE BLESSED.
We are proud to announce that ProjectGrow will be hosting our dispatch lot this year in their North Portland Farm. It’s wonderful to work with such a great organization and we are very thankful.
Also, this year 10% of all our sales will be gifted to Project Grow to say “thanks” for all the excellent stuff they do.
Check out Project Grow’s website and get involved today!
