Lessons from My Daughters

Thanks to my all-grown-up girls, I've learned a whole new way to roll

- Peter Carter

One sunny Saturday afternoon in 2014, I was south-bound on Highway 427 in Toronto aboard my purple 1993 Harley-Davidson Sportster. This stretch of road, some 20 kilometres long, is one of the busiest in North America. At certain points, there are 14 lanes of traffic, much of it moving at 110-plus kilometres per hour. I was in one of the centre lanes—keeping a close eye on an 18-wheeler about 100 metres ahead.

I wasn’t worried for myself. I’d been biking for decades. My eyes were riveted on my 23-year-old daughter Ewa, a novice rider who was balanced on her recently purchased BMW F 650 GS. She was right beside that semi, in its dark shadow, looking as vulnerable as a snowflake. Thoughts swirled. One wrong move, and our world ends. Iam powerless to help her. I let this happen. Am I the worst father ever?

Ewa, a student at the time, made it home safely and hasn’t stopped riding since. She has put thousands of kilometres on that BMW, riding from our Toronto home east to Halifax, south to Tennessee and west to Vancouver in all types of weather and road conditions. The best part is that for exactly 8,208 of those kilometres, I’ve been riding with her.

I’ve had some stunning adventures with Ewa’s identical twin sister, Ria, too. In fact, both of my girls have taken me places I never imagined I'd go.

One afternoon in August 2016, Ria, at the time a funeral director and now a student psychotherapist, arrived at our house. She told my wife, Helena, and me that she was taking me to a festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada called Burning Man. Our daughters had attended a few years earlier, frolicking in the desert with 70,000 stoned hippies.