35-year-old Ultra Romance works as a guide and fisherman, and sells bicycle parts on Ebay, but he only works a total of six months a year, enough to make a living. The rest of the year, he travels with his bike and do whatever he feels like.

"The more you learn about human history, it reveals that in a hunter-gatherer society, say in New England 400 years ago, it took nine hours a week to procure everything you needed to live for that week, and the rest was all leisure time. This is what's natural to us. We've only been living the way we are now since the Industrial Revolution, and it's not for me."

…

"I like to romanticize the ideals of being out on your own and that ultimate freedom of not having any ties. I understand that you need to have some ties — we can't go directly back to that. At this point we've gone too far. And I'm not one to get held up in a mountain like a hermit. I like my internet and I love Instagram and all that stuff — I love Whole Foods. There are plenty of modern conveniences that I love."

For more, read Ian Dille's longer piece about his meeting and re-encounter with Ultra Romance.

I met the man who is also known as Poppi, Bolty, J.B., and a variety of other names (but who, for the purpose of telling this story and out of respect for what he says are "tax reasons," we'll refer to as Benedict) in Austin in 2006. He was a bike messenger and a Cat 5 road racer with the persona of a vain Euro pro: his bike accented with gold parts, his muscular body rippling under white spandex. Despite holding a license that classified him as belonging to the lowest, most inexperienced level of amateur bike racing, he regularly dropped everyone, including me (a former pro), on the weekend hammer ride. He was dating a female bike racer from San Antonio, a woman with soft green eyes and long dark hair, and the words Fuck and Y'all tattooed on the back of either thigh. They fell in love and moved to Benedict's boyhood home on the mouth of the Connecticut River, and I never heard much about him after that, never really thought about him except during those occasional times some of us would swap stories about the characters who'd passed through our local cycling scene.

Photo credit: Via Ultra Romance's Instagram account.

Via Metro (SE).