Erik Binggeser: The Art of Resourceful Living & Adaptable Adventure
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Erik (known to many as @truemarmalade) is the first interviewee that I have met in real life, and meeting him made me a bit nervous. I'm a bit of an introvert. I'll admit before Erik showed up on the island, I was putting up walls to protect myself from incoming unknown human interactions. I have been following Erik for a while now and have seen a ton of his content on Instagram. Even though you see a person online, you never really know what they may be like in real life, especially when you've invited them to stay at your house for a few days.
But my pretense was unwarranted. Not only was Erik a fantastic houseguest and immediately got along with my dog, but I learned that he was also a designer, is a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, has bikepacked over 50,000km (31,000mi) in the past year and a half, and has managed to do it as a Type-1 diabetic and eating out of dumpsters. Erik became a fast friend in the few days he stayed with me.
I very quickly understood that not only is Erik smart as hell—he is able to communicate his many ideas and behaviors in an eloquent and convincing manner. We batted around ideas for cycling apps, talked about how he grew up, and everything in between. We spent a day experiencing how Erik lives on his bike. We pedalled road after road, aimlessly collecting Wandrer points and checking dumpsters in Victoria for food and other goodies.
My time with Erik taught me more than a few things. But mainly, I was inspired by his adaptability in embracing a minimalist, adventurous lifestyle through cargo bikepacking. His fearlessness, not just in his culinary and bikepacking adventures, but in how open and transparent he is about it all. If anything, Erik is his own human and seems more comfortable than most people I have met—something to admire.
How and where did you grow up?
I was born and raised in Michigan, about an hour north of Detroit. I grew up before the internet and cell phones were a thing and am very much thankful for that as it meant a lot of playing in the woods and roaming the neighborhood with my friends. I started skateboarding around age 10 and kept that up for nearly fifteen years, getting good enough for a couple video parts but spent most of my time behind the lens instead of in front of it. Macaframa and Mash SF were released when I was in art school and it was the exact sort of inspiration I needed to dive hard into fixed gear bikes which evolved into road, mtb, and cx after I moved to Austin, TX.
What's your first bike memory?
There are definitely some early memories of me riding to and from school on a terrible old bmx bike and building a lot of sketchy milk-crate-plywood ramps back when I was young and invincible.
You have a stunning collection of bikes. What are the top 3 and why?
The Omnium Cargo is for sure top of the podium, then the rest (Cervelo R3 Mud, Tonic Fab track, Ritchey Ti Cx Breakaway, Crust Scapegoat) are all tied for second place. Of my previous collection of 20+ builds I most miss my All-City Nature Boy Zona, the Glenn Erickson light tourer, and Habanero Team Issue. I wouldn't necessarily want them back as they would just be hanging up in my parents garage with the other remains of my collection, but those have some good memories.
Tell us about “the tour” and dropping out of your career?
Doing a biiiiiig bike trip has been on my todo list as soon as I discovered it was a thing that people do. I think it took the right timing of finances being strong enough + anchors holding me in Austin being weak enough + the whole state freezing over making me realize that my big condo full of stuff wasn't helping me stay alive. Getting rid of anything that wouldn't fit in my van did feel scary at first but once I turned it into a project, it easily gained momentum. I lived the vanlife for a year while continuing to freelance before ending up in Phoenix to work on an artist in residency project. When that concluded, I sold the van and everything that wouldn't fit on the bike. Now, I have the luxury of being extremely picky with any paid gigs that come my way, choosing to instead make most of my work volunteer consulting.
Why did you decide on cargo bikepacking vs. a traditional bike totally loaded?
I've always lusted after people looking cool on a cargo loaded up with a bunch of banker boxes or food delivery bags or couches or whatever else they're carrying that day. Before leaving Austin, I had planned on getting an Omnium to replace my car for running errands and ferrying my gear to the corporate photo gigs. However, after Covid everything went remote and that need went away. I kept Omnium in mind though, so when tour planning began and I realized I hadn't seen anyone do long term cross country sort of stuff on a cargo bike—that was gonna be my game plan.
Tell us how you eat on the road? How did this start? What does it say about society?
While on tour, I get the majority of my day-to-day calories from dumpster diving or food rescuing, as someone in Fresno called it. In the United States and Canada it's dead simple to ride behind a few grocers, dollar stores, or pizza joints, look inside their various trash receptacles and pick out some free fuel for the day. It's something I accidentally discovered in Phoenix, AZ one night after running out of onboard snacks, ending up in a donut shop parking lot, and luckily stopping right next to an open dumpster filled with bags of pastries from that day. Food rescue has become my favorite game on this trip due to the utterly chaotic nature of never knowing what I'll find. Rampant food waste seems to be perfectly acceptable in most of the so-called civilized world and while it's a disappointing thing to discover, I'm doing my best to bring awareness to it and show people how they can benefit from the waste of others.
Any advice for new cargo bikepackers out there?
The only reason to choose a cargo over any other kinda touring bike is either you want to bring a dog with you or wanting every single person you cross paths with to ask you about your bike. It is a dreadfully annoying thing to tour on. You're gonna be 25 lbs heavier than any other bike setup, it is impossible to get onto mass transit or hotel rooms or elevators or over gates or fences, and it is the least aerodynamic box of a machine to push down long windy highways. But every single good ol' boy outside of every gas station you ever stop at will walk up and say some form of “that's one helluva rig you got there!” so if you're into chatting with locals, cargo bike touring is the way to go.
What's the one piece of gear that the tour would be impossible without?
My sillcock key for getting water out of nearly any building and my snake wrangler tongs for grabbing pizzas out of Little Caesars dumpsters. I could probably get by with no tent, but those two things get me free food and water and that's most important.
Tell us about “is it piss”?
Ahaa okay... this started after seeing so many piss bottles, tossed by those on road trips who can't wait until the next rest area, on the side of what seems like every road and always wondering “well maybe that one isn't actually piss? Maybe that's actually Mountain Dew that could fix my low blood sugar?” The first one I stopped to check was in Mexico and definitely wasn't piss but also was definitely too much dissolved plastic to drink. There's been about a dozen I've checked since then and now I just slam 'em back after one quick sniff. Hasn't been piss yet!
You seem to be into hacker and crowdsourced digital efforts. What does participating in these do for you?
Growing up playing with Lego, building skate ramps, and then messing around with bikes feels like I've always been a sort of tinkerer type. I like learning how something works and then testing the limits of a system to see where it breaks or how I can exploit weaknesses. Setting challenges for myself with dumb rules and achievements. Sometimes this leads to social media bots and breaking Strava and sometimes it leads to gamifying bike riding. If there's a realllly dumb leaderboard for a thing that I'm uniquely good at then I'll find a way to minmax it. The Wandrer leaderboards are very much that sort of satisfaction and the wardriving WiGLE stuff more appeals to the tinkerer in me, as it may be my gateway into a new hobby of messing around with electronics and code.
There's not a single interesting story from my years working in the corporate world...but every day on the cargo bike...I see interesting things that are worth documenting.
Where are you going? Where does it end?
I'm always trying to find new roads to ride and new communities to be a part of, if only for a couple weeks at a time. This phase of my life, if we want to call it that, has been so much more rewarding and worth talking about than anything I've done for the previous couple decades. There's not a single interesting story from my years working as a designer in the ad agency corporate world but every day on the cargo bike exploring fresh roads in a city I see interesting things that are worth documenting. There's almost nothing about my previous life that appeals to me now and I'll try my damndest to keep from getting sucked back into that.
What do you listen to while riding?
I have a headphone in 100% of the time, but 90% of the time it's playing a podcast rather than music. A few of my faves are The Adventure Zone, a Dungeons and Dragons campaign played by three brothers and their dad. They are idiots, and it's incredible. Also, The War On Cars—if you want to get started with the “oops I learned this, now my brain is broken” sort of train, here's a good way to go about it. And lastly, The Memory Palace—very short stories told by a perfect voice that will often hit you so hard in the guts that you'll need a moment to recover.
I also have a playlist of music (in Apple Music, sorry Spotify users) that I do revisit often because it's really fun to sing along to some mid-2000s sad songs when cruising down an empty road in the middle of nowhere.
