by Marcus Wohlsen

When I sit down at my computer to write, I have a view of the street through the front window of my house. If I’m up early enough, I see Russell Knights heading off to work. He’s usually dressed in dirt-stained shorts over long johns and a polo shirt covered in magic-marker drawings made by his two daughters, gifts for birthdays and Father’s Day. Invariably, he’s also wearing a bike helmet.

He pedals down the street slowly but steadily on his green mountain bike. Hooked behind him is a cart filled with the tools of his trade: lawn mower, weed whacker, hedge clippers, the whole landscaping arsenal.

Sometimes earlier, sometimes later, I see Nancy Knights, Russ’ wife, start her commute. She’s always easy to spot in her iridescent green windbreaker. Her bike is red and also hauls a cart behind, loaded with vacuum cleaners, mops, buckets, and supplies. She cleans houses, offices, and churches all over Brevard, North Carolina, in the heart of western North Carolina’s Blue Ridge. (My wife and I rent a house in Brevard from Russ and Nancy two doors down from theirs.)

I’m usually not awake yet to see their daughters-Sam, 13, and Anna, 11-ride off to school, but I know that they probably have. Because, despite outwardly appearing to be a deeply normal middle-class American family, the Knights do something almost unheard of today: Whether it’s work, school, groceries, soccer, Girl Scouts, the hardware store, or piano lessons, they ride their bikes everywhere they go. What’s even weirder, they’re actually quite happy. In 21st-century America. Without a car. Who knew?

Even in a small town like Brevard, population six thousand, where everything is close to everything else, the Knights stand out. In fact, they’re known throughout town as the “Bike People,” a fact they have exploited to their advantage. They’ve run their bicycle-based business ever since arriving in Brevard some 15 years ago. Russ, 47, had a hunch that the bikes and the carts might be a great marketing gimmick. He was right.

“People don’t hire me because I’m the cheapest or the best,” Russ says. “They like the whole package. There’s a hook.” These days, they boast about 50 regular clients and have to turn away new business.

“The thing is,” Nancy, also 47, says, “the business hooked us as much as it hooked them.”

Apparently. The couple’s lime green 1979 Volkswagen microbus sits mostly unused under the carport in the backyard. Russ owned a Ford back in the late 1980s, which he used to commute to college in Asheville, where he was training to become an accountant. He gave up accounting and the car at about the same time and hasn’t looked back. Bikes have become fully integrated into the way they live. As if they ever weren’t.

The couple came to Brevard on their bikes with little else in tow after a bike tour around the world that took them from Australia to Southeast Asia to India to Germany to England over the course of a year. And yet they still had enough money saved up from three-and-a-half car-less years of factory work in New Hampshire to pay cash for their house.

Today they live modestly but well. They invest in mutual funds and make fun of me when I drive my truck the half-mile to the post office or the grocery store.

Yet the Knights aren’t self-righteous, though they could be. They aren’t preening hippies or fitness freaks. They recycle and compost, but no one would accuse them of being ostentatious tree huggers. They’re not in your face. They just do what they do, which happens to be riding bikes. They also just seem to be good at life. When I’m obsessing over a deadline or angsting about my career ambitions or money, I go sit in their kitchen. We laugh, Russ hands me a beer, the kids make fun of their dad’s sloppy clothes, Nancy comes riding in with a joke, and my worries seem petty. By sheer example, the Knights have taught me a lot about priorities, though over the course of a hectic day I often, to my own detriment, forget what I’ve learned.

“I think more poor people should live the way we do,” Russ says one night as we sit in the kitchen, not condescendingly. After all, he’s speaking from experience. Nancy, just in on her bike from Michigan, met Russ, who rode down from Alaska, sitting on a park bench outside the chamber of commerce in Banff, Alberta in 1981. A few weeks later, the two rode their bikes to Arizona. One day, Russ parked his ride outside the library in the small desert town of Wickenburg. When he came back, the bike was still there, but everything he’d strapped to it-his sleeping bag, his stove, his backpack-was gone.

An article clipped from the Wickenburg Sun shows a 25-year-old Russell Knights, a little lankier than now, and with longer hair, standing behind his bike. The headline reads “The Clothes on His Back” and goes on to describe how this chronic traveler had been reduced to his barest possessions: his bike and himself. “Anyone who may have possession of Knights’ belongings can return them-at night-by leaving them behind the Wickenburg Sun,” the article reads.

Russ never did recover his gear. He had to start again from scratch. Hailing from a small hamlet in upstate New York along the shores of Lake George, you wouldn’t call Russ a child of privilege. Nor Nancy, who grew up in a family of five in inner-city Detroit. Everything they have they’ve earned for themselves. Which brings us back to the bikes. “My education level is three years of liberal arts college and a high school diploma. What can you get with that?” Russ says. (Hate to burst your bubble, younger readers, but those of us who’ve been there can assure you: not much). “So you say to yourself, okay, if I can’t make the big bucks, how can I live comfortably on what I do make? And one thing I’ve never needed is a car.”

Of course, that sentiment puts Russell Knights in the profound minority in the United States, a country where the number of cars far exceeds the number of drivers, according to widely held estimates. In my work as a journalist, I’d be hard-pressed to cover most of my stories without being able to drive all over the Blue Ridge. I definitely need a car for my job, even though I work from home most of the time. At least that’s what I’ve always assumed. But something about hanging out with Russ and Nancy-their unspoken, steady confidence, perhaps, that never slides into arrogance-makes you question assumptions you never thought to examine. “People are able to live anywhere they want to now and work practically anywhere they want to,” Russ says. “With the advent of the car and the ability to afford one, people can live 10 miles from where they work and shop.”

He contrasts this state of affairs with the situation on our street in Brevard several decades ago, when a big cotton mill stood at one end. The houses we all live in were once company housing, with the big superintendent’s house farthest from the mill and tiny one-room workers’ bungalows right next door (ours is a one-story two-bedroom-we figure it belonged to middle management). Back then, everyone walked to work. Sidewalks made sense.

“But if the bulk of the population moves away from the town center, what’s the point of sidewalks? Now you drive to the Wal-Mart and then drive to the Bi-Lo at the other end of the parking lot to get your groceries,” Russ says. The Knights do live in town, which allows them to ride to most of the places they need to go to supply their necessities. This runs counter to the still-prevalent Thoreauvian impulse to move way out into the sticks if you want to simplify your life. Yes, you have more solitude. But, unlike the Knights, your car becomes your lifeline-and your money pit.

Russ, a self-described bicycle “militant by default,” carries himself with a self-deprecating, ironic sense of humor that makes him disinclined to tell other people how to live their lives. But when it comes to the car-centric lifestyle, he just can’t help it.

“If you don’t have a good job, then what are you doing? I mean, the first thing you do is you get rid of that car,” he says. “You find somewhere you can live close to where you work and you can walk.”

The sprawling, sub-divided, mall-based paradigm of community development that prevails across America today is making even that simple effort harder. In a way, it’s easy for Russ to say that making that change is simple. He’s always worked for himself.

But that kind of self-reliance is an integral part of the example they set. If more families would simply change their habits, get more active, worry less about material gain, and put up with whatever seeming inconveniences or perceived hardships come with consciously choosing to bike or walk more often, community planners would be forced to look to the needs of those families. It could be simple changes like more sidewalks, bike paths, and bigger shoulders along the sides of roads. Or planners might even look to sweeping smart-growth measures that would make communities more centralized and accessible to their residents. But around the country, the political will to make those changes just isn’t there. Cars have become a natural part of the landscape, no more remarkable than houses or trees. “You get in that habit of driving that car everywhere you go,” Russ says, “and city planners cater to that mentality-live that mentality. They only plan for that lifestyle.”

Naturally, stripping down to a car-free lifestyle would require some sacrifices for most people-not a concept that seems to get many politicians elected these days. For instance, because Russ doesn’t drive, he usually goes to the hardware store downtown instead of to Lowe’s. He can’t get out to the multiplex to see the latest movies; he has to rely on whatever comes to the one-screen theater in Brevard. Yet from all the money he saves both by not maintaining a car and not spending it on a night out in Asheville or Charlotte, and the free time he has by making his own hours, he’s discovered other, less immediately obvious perks. “I can eat out when I want to. I can take trips when I want to,” Russ says. “I may even be able to retire at 62 or 65. If I had the car, I don’t think I could.”

A few days earlier, Nancy sipped tea and told me how she and Russ make it work. “I don’t care about being rich and neither does he. And that’s a big help. I think that’s why a lot of marriages fail. There’s a discrepancy between what the husband and wife think is comfortable to live on.” By the exacting standards of the country-club set, I suppose you could argue the Knights live a rough-edged life. Their kitchen table came with the house, and it sags a little. Some of their kitchen appliances are second-hand. Even though they spend so much time outside, they don’t get decked out in North Face. And despite the importance of their bikes in their lives, their bikes themselves are decidedly low-end.

But no one with any real sense of proportion could say the Knights want for much. They have a DVD player and a computer. They have savings. Their kids go to good schools. “You just kind of fall into it. If you don’t have it, you don’t use it,” Russ says. “It’s like a lot of other things in life. If you don’t have it, you don’t miss it.” Besides, whatever they lack in luxury, they more than make up for in time together.

As a compulsive striver myself who, I hate to admit it, measures his self-esteem in bylines, I understand all too well the American tendency to associate free time with laziness. The Knights don’t seem to worry about that so much. I hate to do this, but since she’s rumored to be dating Lance Armstrong and this is an article about biking, I will say that the Knights seem to embody an adage Sheryl Crow bludgeoned us with a few summers ago: “It’s not having what you want/It’s wanting what you’ve got.”

In the case of the Knights, having more of their own free time means more time for their kids. Or as Sam and Anna would probably put it, to pester and harass their kids. During one of my more philosophically inclined conversations with Russ, Sam and Anna sat within earshot. I asked Sam what she thought of her family’s self-powered, two-wheeled lifestyle. Her answer was indirect, but her meaning was crystal clear.

“Kids that don’t usually ride a lot, they love riding if they don’t do it too often,” she says. “If you do something so many times, you just get sick of it and want to kill the bike.”

From behind the stove, Nancy reminds Sam that she’s not forced to ride her bike to school. She’s welcome to walk or take the bus. But Nancy also reminds her that the bus comes at 7:05, and that if she rides her bike, she doesn’t have to leave until 10 minutes before 8:00. Sam concedes the point. “I’m not much of a morning person,” she says. Anna, meanwhile, takes the long view. A cyclist since age four, Anna rode her bike to school the first day of kindergarten.

“We were taught to believe in something. Just like religion,” Anna says. “We were taught to do something. Other people might not be taught the same thing.” Russ looks a little shocked at this, clearly struck at by how deeply a part of his life he’s come to take for granted seems to have taken hold in his daughter.

“I had no idea it had reached the level of religion,” he says. “But I guess to an eleven-year old it comes across as the same thing.”

Talking to the Knights about how they live, I’m struck by the lack of self-consciousness they bring to a practice that seems radical by mainstream standards. I have all these questions for them about why they do what they do. They’re very happy to oblige. But what comes through more than any individual answer is the underlying sense the Knights project that it’s just not a big deal. It’s how they live. They’re used to it. It’s what they do.

“I bet you we die doing this,” Nancy says.

“Yeah,” Anna says, “when you get run over by a car!”