Meet Portland bike scene personality, Dumpsta D (video)

I’ve met a lot of interesting people in this community over the past two decades. But I’m always working hard to cover an event or a news story, and I don’t take the time to talk with folks one-on-one, on camera, as much I’d like. As I see more people pass on and pass through our community, I want to capture more stories and personalities from those early years. On that note, I’d like you to meet an old acquaintance of mine, Dumpsta D.

I bumped into him at Sunday Parkways and it was the first time we’d talked for about 15 years or so. Dumpsta is a self-described “technophobe” who doesn’t have a smartphone and isn’t online (“I got no use for any of that shit”), and he doesn’t come out to bike events as much these days. So when I saw him standing there, selling his Street Roots papers, I walked up and said, “hi.” Thankfully he remembered me, and let me film a short interview.

I met Dumpsta in 2004 or so when I first started showing up at Critical Mass rides and other bike events. The first time I mentioned him on BikePortland was 2006 when he rolled up to Breakfast on the Bridges on the Hawthorne Bridge with a patch on his messenger bag that caught my eyes. It said, “Bikers attack cars in this area.” In May of that same year I attended Dumpsta’s bike swap meet in southeast.

The thing I always remembered about Dumpsta were his immaculate vintage bikes. He had all sorts of them, and would build them up himself from parts he found in shop bins, dumpsters (hence his nickname), free piles, garage sales, and so on. He had a late 1980s Colnago road bike that was one of the coolest bikes I’d ever seen (and I spent a long time searching my archives for it, to no avail!) and a strange but cool astroturf bike that always turned heads.

Dumpsta D went on the the KBOO Bike Show in May 2006 and hosts Ayleen Crotty and Sara Stout said he had an, “uncanny knack for finding screaming deals on bike gear.” He’s also a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Street Roots.

It was so fun to see and talk to Dumpsta D. It was almost comforting to me that, after all these years, he’s still finding old bike parts and building up vintage bikes. As you can see in the video, he hasn’t lost his charm, way with words, love of hard rock, or his passion for bikes.