Whatever floats your boat
Bob Harlow has sold ice cream on the Rideau River for 13 years
There’s a seasonal Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect to the two professional hats worn by Bob Harlow. During the winter, he drives a highway snowplow, and nobody, he says, wants to be around him: “People don’t want to be in front of me. And they don’t want to be behind me.”
During the summer, though, it’s an entirely different matter, and when he pulls up in his ice cream float boat, people come from all directions.
He’s been selling ice cream on a small stretch of the Rideau River since 2000, and keeps things simple: there are six flavours — French Vanilla, Black Cherry, Rolo, Triple Tornado, Maple Walnut and Triple Chocolate Brownie — and one size of serving in a single type of cone. Whatever you want, it’ll be $2.75, and there aren’t many complaints.
“In 13 years of doing this, I’ve only had one boat pull up, two people in the boat, and I didn’t have the flavour they wanted and so they drove away.”
Most of his business occurs when he pulls up at Baxter Beach, part of the Baxter Conservation Area near Kemptville, where picnicking families and kids attending day camps can almost set their watches by his 1 p.m. daily arrival. He’ll stay there for a couple of hours or, if it’s not terribly busy, pull up anchor and ply the waters, selling cones to passing boaters.
He starts each year on the long weekend in May, working just weekends until school is out at the end of June. Then it’s seven days a week, weather permitting, until school starts again in September, and then only weekends until October arrives and he moors the boat and readies his truck.
He’s lived on the water — his house is directly across the river from Baxter Beach — for 26 years, and one day in the mid 1990s was sitting around with friends thinking of a way to stay on the water as much as possible. “And somebody said, ‘Where’s the Dickie Dee guy when you need him?’” At the time, Harlow was a long-distance trucker with plenty of time to think. “After a couple of weeks I had the whole idea built in my head.
“I never have to deal with an irate customer,” he adds. “I’m on the water every day. I get to wake up when I want in the morning, and I work every afternoon. What’s not to like?
“People ask me what I do on a slow day? I enjoy it. I’m on the water, I’m talking to you, I chat with people at the beach. What’s not to enjoy?”