In 2000, Bill still got down to the waterfront every once in a while, and we had to behave while he was there. It was hard. Fortunately for all of us, that didn’t happen all that often. One of the times he came down, Collin and I thought it might be fun to ride our bikes off the end of the dock into the lake. We asked Wendi if we could, and she said no. When we insisted, she whispered into Collin's ear to wait until the scouts left. Collin told me she had said to wait until Bill left. Then we realized what was going on, but carried on with our whining to make it look good.

He seemed like he would never leave, but of course he did eventually (after all the scouts had left, so I didn't learn until much later what Wendi had actually said). After all, it was almost dinner time. Of course we didn’t want to use our own bikes to do this, so we used a crappy one without gear shifts, (I don’t remember whose). It was fun, but the pedals were metal and had sharp points and hurt our feet. My bike has rubber petals, and all the spikes had long since worn away. In a rare moment of whimsicalness, I decided “What the heck, it’s not like my bike hasn’t been wet before.”

So, we built a ramp, and I attempted to ride off of it. But, I still had some caution and prudence then, and didn’t trust either my ability to hit the narrow ramp, nor the ramp’s stability. I hit it so slowly that I got no air whatsoever, and just fell head over heels of the end of the ramp into the lake, the bike landing on top of me. I tried to regain my dignity by riding the bike out of the lake, but that didn’t work either.

Collin, however, is both very practiced with a bike, and has a wonderful ability to throw caution to the wind. He hit the ramp fast, popped a wheelie, and hit the water with the back wheel first, and it almost looked like he was skidding along the surface of the lake. It was beautiful.

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