Friday June 22 – My first Kabuki shift. The newspaper notes it is the 250^th anniversary of George Vancouver’s birth. A good omen. Vancouver visited the Pacific Northwest three times, setting off first with Capt. James Cook as a 15-year-old for Cook's 1772-1775 expedition, returning twice again as Captain of the HMS Discovery on exploration of what he called "this lonely desolate land" in 1791-1795. Sailing boldly off into the unknown. An apt metaphor.

I am nervous. I get up at six am. I force myself to eat a big breakfast. I load all my stuff - lock, sunscreen, snacks, water, blanket, tourist info - into my bike panniers and set off at 8:20 am for my 9 am start. It takes 10 minutes to bike through Victoria's downtown to the barn from my home.

Before I can take a cab out, I must pass a knowledge test. Randy makes me study one more time a wall of printed information in the office, depicting various diagrams of parking spots and street restrictions, the shift sign up and general decorum rules. One iron clad law: any use of alcohol and drugs while on shift is grounds for immediate termination. One sip from a beer and you are out, no exceptions, even if a ride invites you into a restaurant for dinner and a drink. "I have got to be strict. Zero tolerance," says Randy. But you can have a drink at the barn if your shift is over.

We sit outside the barn in the sun on plastic garden chairs, Randy puffing on a cigarella while he quizzes me about pedicabbing rules and etiquette, i.e.: "A ride hands you $200 for a $150 fare, what do you say?"

"Just a second and I'll get your change," I respond.

"Right!" says Randy. "Never assume anything is your tip until they tell you."

We go over questions for 20 minutes or so - Randy assisting and elaborating on any challenging topics, supplying the answer on any hesitation. His objective is to have as many drivers as possible knowing the rules and out plying the street. Only real dunces would fail this test. Randy hands me the uniform - a sweat shirt and for women a rather skimpy pink singlet with the Kabuki Kabs logo right at the breasts. Marketing genius this guy, but he probably didn't factor in a 49-year-old. I decide to stick with my plain white Tee.

Shift report check listRandy then takes me slowly through the pre/post shift inspection report, a 47-point check list that must be completed and signed off at the start of every shift. It itemizes every part and function of the vehicle to ensure every pedicab leaves the barn in good working order and that problems that need attention and repair are identified immediately on return. Gears shift smoothly? Breaking power good? Treads on all tires? Check, check, check. Even with Randy's help it takes me 40 minutes to understand and go through the rundown. What is an 'inside and outside bead'? (The tire rims, I learn.) I watch veteran riders arrive and zip through the list in less than five minues.

It takes me more than an hour to get off the lot. "Don't worry, " says Randy. "Go slow your first day." As an added incentive to take it easy he waives the lease fee for my first shift. "Get to know the bike and the streets, don't worry too much about getting rides."

I ride off the lot after 10 am, coasting down along Wharf to the Inner Harbour. I love the feeling of freedom on my big white trike, the wind in my hair. I am out 5 minutes when I spot my ideal niche market - two small frail elderly woman, not 130 lbs between them, walking with cruise ship bags and maps in hand, looking a bit lost and disoriented. They are travelling on the opposite side of the street in the opposite direction but I can see they notice me. I smile and coast by, but am too nervous to actually sell them. A block later I muster my courage, turn around and come back, startling them as I ride up behind them. I give my spiel - a customized tour to suit their needs, I can show them the sights, the places to eat and shop. They look mid-70s, British accents. They seem interested. Can it be this easy? "How much?" one asks.

"It is based on time, a 30 minute tour is $15 each," I say and can see them do the math... hmm that't $1 a minute...is she worth it? They hesitate, look at each other, look at me. The moment of decision. They look at me again and you can see the decision on their face. Something about me lost the sale. They back away. "Not today thank you."

I was so sure I had it. What happened? That look?...Damn, I left my sunglasses on.... "Always take your sunglasses off when you are making the pitch. They need to see your eyes," Randy had stressed.

As the day wears on and on - with no rides, I learn that selling rides is as hard or harder than carting tourists up hills. I have no luck nor skill getting people into my cab. I watch other veteran drivers chatting up tourists on the street, doing the pitch, and then they step into cab. How do they close the sale?

I cycle around for hours trying to pitch. I fear my first day will pass without a ride. My shift is almost over and I am parked outside the Empress when an animated, happy couple spy me. "I want to do that," says the woman, who is a few years younger than me. "I was a bike courier and I loved it! It must be sooo much fun!"

When I confess it is my first day with no paying rides yet, they jump in - a pity ride. "We'll be your first," she laughs. Her name is Lurvie and she is originally from Atlanta, now in Seattle. I am both elated and freaked. The man, Paul, is about 6'4" and all muscle, a linebacker. I can feel his side of the cab tilt when he gets in. They want to go to Darcy's pub -- uphill along Wharf St. I start out gamely and then my deepest fear is realized. I have momentum until the light changes on the grade by the tourist centre. When it turns back to green, I can't move. I can't budge the cab. Cars start honking. I try and try and then confess: "I'm sorry, but you are going to have to get out and walk a few feet," I say.

"What???" says Paul.

"No, I am serious, can you please just get out and walk across the intersection? I can't get it moving." I can feel my face is beat red in both exertion and embarrassment. Cars are still honking. All the tourists standing outside the info centre start to laugh. Bet none of them will now take a pedicab ride...

Lurvie and Paul hop out and walk behind me 10 metres, laughing uproariously as I sheepishly cross the intersection and get to a flatter spot.

"Okay, now get back in," I say. It has been a long time since I felt quite so humiliated.

I try to regroup, tell them the stories of Victoria's history. "In 1843 (pant, pant), the Hudson's Bay Company (pant pant)." I can't talk. I can't give a tour and pull them. Oh God. I am insane. I can't do this job.

I drop them at the pub, breathless and sweaty. Heart racing at 200 beats per minute. Paul gives me $5 (no tip). Lurvie signs my guest book and squeezes my arm. "Don't worry honey," she says in her warm southern drawl. "You'll get it together."

When I cycle away I can feel that Paul's weight has done something to the back right wheel of the cab. There is a rubbing noise, a groan.

I have no more rides for the day. I am sure I am emitting a 'please don't ride we me' vibe -- I can't do this.' I limp back to the barn, taking the hills in high gear to get stronger. I write on the  shift report: 'rubbing sound over back right wheel after heavy ride' and sign out.

I have made $5 in six hours.

Tomorrow, Saturday June 23rd, is my first official pedicab shift. All week I have been getting ready.

On Tuesday June 18 veteran pedicabber Steve C., a.k.a "Jeeves", gives new trainees a walking tour of Victoria's old towne and Chinatown. Again, I am the oldest by a good 25 years. I take copious notes as he gives us the historic details we need to entertain and enlighten our rides, tantalizing tidbits about Capt James Cook, George Vancouver, founding father Sir James Douglas, architect Rattenbury and the Hudson Bay Company. I've written travel articles about Victoria for years and I assume there will be little new that Jeeves can tell me - but I am wrong. He points out features - like the old dimensions of Fort Victoria's palisade in the brick sidewalk up Government Street or the masonic symbolism throughout the city -- I've never seen before. I buy two books about Victoria's history from Munros books ( Victoria: Its History in Pictures; and Victoria: the Unknown City by Ross Crockford) and start brushing up on city arcana.

Brushing up on Victoria loreThis week I've gone to three noon hour spin classes at the Y  - hour long workouts on stationary cycles --  concentrating on the hill climbs in heavy gears. It stresses my cardio, but it doesn't help my confidence. My continuing struggles with steep inclines leave me more nervous than ever.

You can't buy fitness, but you can the accutrements. I drop more than $300 to assuage nerves, including mandatory items for the job:  lock, $5.00; blanket, $22; stop watch, $15.00; stiff cycling shoes, $155; new cycling shorts, $34; two Victoria history books, $48; large nalgene water bottle, $10.99; sunscreen with 60 SPF, $11; Fanny pack (which my teenage daughters say is SOO hideous and embarrasing), $24.95; guest book for riders to sign ( I hope with glowing comments So much fun. You're terrific.), $12. Total  $337.94. I am going to have to land some pretty successful rides just to break even.  I spend Thursday afternoon putting together a duotang folder of information about me and my summer blogging kabuki kabbing together with a collection of my Victoria travel stories - at least it gives people something to leaf through when I am too breathless hill climbing to tell tales of Victoria lore.

One last thing: today I measure my pulse and blood pressure at the DIY machine in London Drugs. BP 110/58 (pretty good)  heart rate  72 (yuck, too high). Starting measurements: bust 36", waist 29", hips 38"; thickest part of thigh 22"; weight 133 lbs and height 5'5". I don't expect the height to change. But everything else.. who knows? With hope, the thighs as least will get bigger.

Every Saturday at noon new drivers are trained at Kabuki Kabs. This morning I am cleaning the house, trying to decide whether to show up. As noon approaches I am full of rationalizations: guests are coming; the house is a disaster so I must clean; go next week.

Frankly I'm scared.  I am not going to go, I tell my husband. Not this week.

And then, at 11:50 am my brain commands: GO!

Oh hell. I'll be late again. I arrive at the Kabuki "barn" at 12:10 out of breath. All the other trainees sitting in the office are post pubescent boys - four of them ranging from 17 to 23.

Trainer Jason Koett, 30, hands me a registration form and tells me I am hereby operator number 201. The form asks for my birthdate. For the first time in my life I lie about my age. I cannot put down 1958. It is too old.  Instead I write January 11 1964 - my birthday six years later -- making me a newborn when the Beatles debuted on Ed Sullivan and therefore still technically under-the-wire as a bonafide babyboomer.

We sit around the desk, on chairs, bench and ratty frat-house couch, listening to Jason's spiel on what it takes to be a pedicabber ( enthusiam, energy, thick skin for rejection), how to sell the tours, and how the leasing and shift system works. He takes us through pedicab rules of the road: how and when to U-turn, where we can park our bikes without being ticketed.  He points out "Suicide Corners" on a map of Victoria's Inner Harbour -  a pinch point of busy traffic outside the main tourist information centre that is the most dangerous spot in the city for pedicabbers. "Be especially careful here," he says. "Repeat this commandment: Thou shalt always shoulder check," he stresses.

And then he gives a rather important tip about how to mount the seat of a pedicab: "Don't get on the way you get on your bike.  If you swing your leg backwards, you'll kick your passengers in the head."

We go out on the street with the pedicabs. I am teamed with 17-year-old Joseph, a skinny little wraith who must weigh all of 115 lbs. Peddling the cab with Joseph in the back is a breeze. We take turns testing out the five gears, climbing up the slight incline of Herald St. and gliding back down again, getting a feel for flow of the bike and how it handles over bumps and curbs. We do figure eights. It is like a giant, stable tricycle. Wheee!

Then Jason takes us into a parking lot across from the barn with a short steep pitch. One by one we take turns climbing the grade with two passengers. I can do it with Joseph alone, but when Jason - an average-size male of about 5'10" and perhaps 180 lbs - climbs in the back I come to a dead halt. I simply cannot budge the cab up the hill.

"Try again. Get momentum and get into the lightest gear," coaches Jason.

 The pitch is only about six metres long but everytime, halfway up, I grind to a halt. I push and push. But my legs  can't overcome the gravitational pull.  Joseph and I are the only trainees who can't do it.  We can't make the grade.

"You'll get it," says Jason. "There are few hills that steep and you can avoid them. Sign up for a shift anyway."

But I leave feeling sunk. I haven't got the legs for this.

For 16 years each spring versions of this ad run almost daily in the classifieds of the Victoria Times Colonist:

Tour Guide.

Work for yourself. Get buns of steel.

Make good money. Get fit pedicabbing tourists. 

Ft/pt 

613 Herald St @ 11:30 am.

For weeks now I've been finding reasons not to go. Cold rainy weather, too much work. Or I'll look up from writing and it is 12 noon. But today, Tuesday June 12th, I look up and it is 11:25 am - I'll be late but I am going. I expect a crowd of  applicants.

I arrive at 11:40 am. Kabuki Kabs at 613 Herald St is a 1920-era autoshop garage backing onto Victoria's historic Chinatown. My feet crunch across the gravel parking lot.  The left side is a big open garage with a roll-up red door and a grease-stained asphalt floor, holding more than a dozen 2 and 4-person pedicabs. A workbench in the back left corner is ladened with tools, spare parts and WD40-like lubes and oils. On the right side of the garage are two small rooms; one a  storage room with cupboards, hanging bike rack and a blue door to a delapidated and rather scary-looking loo. The back room is a glassed-in office obscured by bamboo blinds. The place smells of stale cigarette smoke. It is quiet. Is anyone around?

I poked my head in the office door. A wiry man wearing a baseball cap is writing at the desk. He looks up and eyes me, surprised, as if thinking: who's this, some driver's worried Mom? A bill collector? 

"Umm, I'd like to try being a pedicabber... am I too late today?" I ask.

At least he doesn't burst out laughing. "No... Time is rather fluid here," he says. "Weather's been so crappy..."

He is Randy Phipps, the guy who 24 years ago, in his early 20s founded Kabuki Kabs, one of the oldest pedicab outfits in North America, winning young entrepreneur awards from the Chamber of Commerce in the process. He is boyish looking, rakish. The walls and ceiling are plastered with coloured-handwritten squares, as if hundreds of ADD kids have been let loose with a rainbow of magic markers. The squares have handwritten names of drivers, exuberantly marking for posterity a memorable day: "Chico - $950!" "Steve $780." One wall holds a magic markered calendar system of numbers and dates on a laminate white board whose complexity seems to rival the Mayans.

I sit on a bench across from his desk. He takes 15 minute to tell me the deal: he owns and maintains the 20-some cabs and he sets a lease rate for each shift based on how many tourists are expected to be on the streets. He explains the complex numbers on the laminate boards as shift rates and times.  Drivers pay him the lease rate and take the cab, trying to earn out the lease, plus a reasonable profit, plying Victoria streets during the allotted shift time, returning the cab on time or facing a fine. "It is all up to you. You are selling unique, customized tours of Victoria and the experience of the ride."

And then he asks me the question hanging in the room: “Some might ask, why would a middle aged woman want to be a Kabuki Kab driver?”

Ahhh. How to explain summers slipping away unmarked and unremarkable? Day after day spent indoors at a computer only to look up to see September has arrived; the longing for sun and wind and summer scents, for carefree movement and energy of my youth, the excitement of never knowing what a summer day will hold. How to explain creaky knees, wanning strength and the desire to feel strong and capable and really fit again? And of course, the constant need for a gregarious, outgoing writer to find new experiences to chronicle rather than spend days alone in a room with only words on a screen as her inspiration and companion.

Too long and inexplicable. So instead I say. "I think it might be kinda fun... "

But will tourists ride with me? Do I look too old and wimpy and motherly? Given a hot young, muscular stud, and me,  would anybody ride?

Randy looks me over.  "You've got an open face and a twinkle in your eye. I think some people --like the elderly-- might go for you."

But can I do the deed? Can I pedal two adults up a Victoria hill? "Come back at noon on Saturday and we'll see," he says.

 They pedal the touristy streets of Victoria British Columbia, fit youthful men and women on big tricycles called Kabuki Kab pedicabs with seats for two or four passengers in the back. Using leg and lung power alone, they taxi tourists between hotels, bars, and restaurants, or give funny and informative tours of the city’s checkered history and stunning landmarks.

And for some reason I can’t explain, I have always wanted to be a Kabuki Kab driver.

As each summer passed since I moved to Victoria in 1991, I would watch them – fit and tanned and vigorous – smiling and laughing in the sun as they pedaled furiously around the Inner Harbour while tourists lounged happily in the back. But my secret desire seemed nuts: each year I told myself I was too old, too physically weak, too established in my writing career and middle-class life to do something so strenous, bohemian and sweaty.

But this summer I’ve said to hell with all that. Six months short of my 50^th birthday, it is now or never. I have put my heart, lungs and legs into becoming the oldest, fittest and most successful female Kabuki Kab driver in Victoria history. (And my friends divide into those who think I am certifiably nuts and those who secretly envy me.)

Will I be able to haul big tourists around hilly Victoria? Will I get fit enough to take two adults up the murderous 15 block climb to Rockland’s Craigdarroch Castle? Will I make money or go broke?

Hop on and come for a ride. Let’s see what happens in my summer of kabuki kabbing.