GREAT OUTDOORS: Chuck Wood: From tomatoes to trails

It’s perhaps a lot less exciting than busting down the Baja on a Kawasaki 250, but Chuck Wood has found a pretty fulfilling replacement for “Wood’s Tomatoes,” anyway.

“It’s the camaraderie, good exercise, and seeing God’s beauty all over the desert,” explained the transplanted Ridgefield, Wash. tomato farmer and former motorcycle dirt devil who annually tackled the Baja before it became civilized.

He discovered a group a few years ago that rides both trail and road bicycles regularly throughout this area, and looks forward each week to calmer, but still calf-testing retirement exercise.

Wood, 78, who easily looks 10 years younger, was riding by himself up to Madera Canyon one day and met a couple of mountain bikers at Kokopelli’s Gelato Factory on the way down.

“We got to talking and they asked me to ride with them.”

Wood soon found that his trusty old $300 Trek wasn’t going to hold up in desert terrain, so he invested in an Iron Horse four years ago, and now goes with the group regularly for Monday/Wednesday desert rides and Friday highway excursions on his specialized road bike.

He says he averages about 150 miles a week, and has logged about 23,000 biking miles over the last four years.

It’s a far cry from his 1969 to 1975 trips — a California boy who escaped with his buddies about 150 miles south of the border where there were no roads in that region in those days, buzzing over dusty bumps on his motorcycle and sleeping under the stars, but he still finds the “getting out in the desert” experience just as important to him now as it was then.

He always had a bicycle as a kid.

During World War II in 1942 when rationing kept him from replacing the one he used for his paper route when it wore out, he still remembers appealing to the ration board for permission to buy a new one, because newspapers were so important on the home front during the war.

“I paid twenty bucks for a Victory Bike,” he remembered, “and I sold it for 20 bucks in 1946.”

When Wood retired in 1982 as a research and development and management specialist with Alcan, living in Vancouver, Wash., and working in Portland, Ore., he bought five acres near Ridgefield, Wash., and decided to put in a few tomato plants.

“I planted too many,” he remembered, “and they did so well, I started to sell them.”

He eventually kept five supermarkets supplied, and added 13 head of beef cattle, keeping track of everything every day on his bicycle.

His wife of 57 years, who was still working then as a coordinator for Meals on Wheels of Clark County, Wash., recalled how much he loved to talk about his tomatoes.

“Two ladies came by one day to buy, and he invited them into the house to demonstrate canning procedures,” said Patti, who admits she tried to learn to ride motorcycles, too, but found them too dangerous.

So, on their monthly camping trips in the Northwest in his 76 converted van, which he still has today — it still looks new with only 72,000 miles on it — they always took their Treks along.

“It was something we could do together,” she said, although she doesn’t ride as much or as far as her husband anymore.

He built a reputation for “Wood’s Tomatoes,” and the couple, who now have five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, still managed to raise 11 foster boys (not all at once) and hosted Japanese college students before selling the farm in 2003 and moving to Green Valley.

Chuck still remembers fondly the day one of the boys, an L.A. police officer, returned to show his family where he lived with his foster parents.

Wood’s 6,000 or so miles per year on two-wheelers now include occasional trips in and around the ghost town of Fairbanks and over to Tombstone from there with the group.

He recently rode to Rio Rico and back, exactly 78 miles to commemorate his birthday.

He rides the shorter distances in the El Tour de Tucson and the Senior Games, but it’s not about competition or goal-setting for him; he just likes taking in the desert surroundings he loves with his friends.

“I’ve always been physically active,” he said, “and I feel blessed to be able to cycle at my age.”

Patti sometimes wonders when they’re going to go camping again in that cherry 1076 van that still sits in their garage.

What’s keeping him?

“He’s too busy bike riding,” she says.

Mike Touzeau is a freelance writer for the Green Valley News.