“I’m just a completely normal person like you.” It’s a heartening takeaway: if she can do it, so can we. I’m not superhuman,” says Brent Patterson, a father from Buffalo, New York.

You may not be able to live in your cargo bike, but you can live on it.Ĭanning is careful not to portray these parents as hardcore eccentrics or extreme athletes but as ordinary people in ordinary towns making out-of-the-ordinary choices, just like her. “I’m not an athlete. They ride bulky Bakfiets made in Holland with wooden kid carriers that look like miniature dump trucks jerry-rigged townie bikes with handmade planks for seats and $5,000 electric-assist cargo bikes from companies like Xtracycle, whose founder, Ross Evans, developed the first long-tail cargo bike in Nicaragua in 1995. When she finally breaks down and buys the long-tail (her indecision serves a cinematic purpose, allowing her to digress into a brief but compelling history of bicycles and feminism), Canning discovers a fringe world of industrious, bike-obsessed individuals determined to improve their family’s health and happiness-and the planet’s-by trading four wheels for two. When she begins noticing other parents pedaling cargo bikes online, she immediately wonders: Why were there no cargo bikes to be seen in Fairfax? Wake up when it’s over, and you’ll be a shell of your former self.įortunately for Canning, she lives in Fairfax, California, the self-professed birthplace of mountain biking and a hotbed of cycling culture. The message in the movie’s opening scenes is familiar: child-rearing is an exhausting enterprise, and if you’re not careful, you’ll spend 18 years behind the wheel, driving your kid to baby sing-along class and varsity soccer practice.

A former commercial filmmaker turned work-from-home mom, she’s tired and despondent, mourning the freedom of her life pre-kids and the ease with which she used to take to the roads on her bike. The film-which is an official selection at the San Francisco Green Films Festival, the Breckenridge Film Festival, and others-celebrates the humble beginnings and revolutionary potential of the utilitarian cargo bike, those iconic, long-tail steeds designed for schlepping kids, groceries, gear, and pretty much anything else you can lash on top or on the side.Ĭargo bikes aren’t sexy-at least not yet-but neither is the world in which Canning finds herself after giving birth to twins in 2008. What if bikes could save the world? The notion is as old as the bicycle itself, but it gets a refreshing new spin in the recently released documentary Motherload, produced and narrated by veteran filmmaker Liz Canning.

Motherload documentary canning