photo credit: Ian Pattenson | Flickr Creative Commons

One bike was a Raleigh mountain bike. Knobby tires, those handlebar extensions that look like bull horns. It never saw any mountains, or even any dirt for that matter. It was the turn of the century and mountain bikes were all the rage, as were SUVs. For about a decade, every male in America pretended he was mad for off-roading. We all wanted to seem more rugged than we were. Why? I blame Big Wheels. I can’t answer for anyone else, but I can say that my mountain bike coincided with the birth of my children, and maybe it was my way of convincing myself that I was tough enough for the rocky terrain of fatherhood.

 

We had two boys about seventeen months apart, and for a couple of years the only surefire way to get them down for a nap was to load them into the bike trailer. They’d start off bickering and flogging each other with stuffed animals, but soon enough the sun would heat up the plastic covering, the rocking motion of the slightly off-true wheels of the trailer would soothe them, and they’d be propped against each other like tiny drunks, drooling cutely.

 

It was my own version of the movie Speed: As long as I kept moving, they stayed asleep, but if I stopped, those two little bombs would go off.

 

In the trailer, my boys slept. At home, my exhausted wife slept. I spun the backroads of Brownsburg, Clermont, Attica, Zionsville, like I was powering a generator, recharging my family.