Fairfax, California
Small town in Marin County at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco. See California (Literary).
At a glance
| Source | Author | Role | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| It’s All About the Bike | Robert Penn | setting | Gravy’s wheel workshop at the Fairfax Cyclery, and the Repack descent above town. |
Sub-places
It’s All About the Bike — Robert Penn (2010)
Source: It’s All About the Bike · Readwise highlight
The previous evening, I’d wandered around Fairfax, a town of 7,000 resolutely individual people and home to Van Morrison in the 1970s.
- Role: setting
- In the book: In chapter 4, Penn flies to California to have his wheels built by Steve “Gravy” Gravenites, whose workshop sits at the back of the Fairfax Cyclery. The evening before, he wanders the town (cyclists coming down from the hills, a blues gig, Peri’s Silver Dollar Bar with its Elvis shrine) and calls it perhaps the kookiest town he has idled into. With Charlie Kelly and Joe Breeze he then walks up and rides down Repack, a steep off-road footpath on Pine Mountain, a foothill of Mount Tamalpais, that finishes near Fairfax. Penn tells how the races held there from 1976 to 1979 drove the Breezer, the first purpose-built mountain bike.
- Why it matters: Fairfax gives the wheel-building chapter its community and its history. The Repack ride is the chapter’s emotional high point, and set anywhere else the book would lose its link to the birth of the mountain bike.
- Note: Repack and the Fairfax Cyclery are folded into this note; no standard-source coordinate was found for either.