BASECAMP | LITTLE EXPLORERS | BETCHA DIDN’T KNOW | GETAWAY | BUBBLE STREET Family Camping GET THEM OUTSIDE
TEA TIME AT CHARLIE’S. PHOTO: SCOTT MACGREGOR
[ BASECAMP ] BACK IN THE SADDLE
“How are you today, Charlie?” asks my six-year-old daughter Kate as she bounces through the open door of our shed. Except out here, she’s not my daughter and I’m not her dad and this isn’t our shed. Last fall I became Charlie, the owner of Charlie’s Bicycle Shop. In our game, Charlie has a daughter about Kate’s age, but it’s not Kate. They always seem to miss one another when Kate drops by the shop. She stops by quite frequently, sometimes like today for tune-ups and to drink tea—apple cider served in petite flowered pink china. I pulled our eldest around for a summer in a Chariot bike trailer, but
with two babies it somehow became just too much, not too much to pull but just too much to pull together. My tired, almost vintage Gary Fisher mountain bike lay mothballed with a half restored cedar canvas canoe in my neighbor’s barn. “Whose old bike is that?” Kate asked one day when we were rooting
around the barn for spare paddles. “It’s mine,” I said. “Why don’t you ride it?” “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Why don’t you ride your bike?” “I don’t know how.” That night I booked us for a weekend at Lake of Two Rivers camp-
ground in Algonquin Park. We weren’t taking canoes. We weren’t tak- ing kayaks. No masks, no snorkels. And definitely no training wheels. We live in a hayfield at the very top of a hill. Our steep cobbled lane-
way leads down to a logging truck route on a rural highway. Not the best place for little girls to learn to ride bicycles. Lake of Two Rivers, on the other hand, is a flat, hard-packed sandy campground full of other families racing bikes to and from the nearby ice cream stand. Perfect.
By Sunday morning, Kate had found freedom. She was balancing on her own and I was nursing a sore back. While I was searching for Advil, Tanya was making her second cup of coffee. Kate and her older brother Doug pocketed their ice cream money into their Camelbaks, clipped their helmets and radio tested their Cobra walkie-talkies— they were to call us if they got lost. Babies were the reason we stopped riding. Eight years later, they’re
now the reason we’re back on our bikes in a big way. The kids are on solid little mountain bikes and Tanya and I have both upgraded. On Wednesday nights we book a sitter and go riding with friends, we call it date night. Our Yakima four-bike bumper rack lives on my truck and our bikes come with us on every camping trip. So many bikes, tires and parts now hang in our shed it’s like, well… it’s like I run a bicycle repair shop. By the time we finish our second cup of apple cider I have Kate’s
rear derailleur shifting smoothly up and down the gears. “You’ve been a big help Kate, do you think you’d like to someday be
a bike racer or mechanic?” She brings her finger to her lips and looks faraway out the window
at the bluebird sky. “Um, maybe… But after I’m a mermaid.” I take her bike down from the stand and she rolls it out the door of the shed and down the ramp. “Thanks, Charlie.” She gives me a little wave and rides away. Left alone in my shop to tidy up my tools, I wonder if I’d rather her
grow up to be a mermaid or a bike mechanic—at least now she has options. —Scott MacGregor is the founder and publisher of Canoeroots.
www.canoerootsmag.com 47
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