The Davis Enterprise: Dec. 22, 2008

Davis Bicycles! column #005

Title: Biking in my early years
Author: Christal Waters

photo caption:
Davis resident Christal Waters is all grown up now and pulling children and cargo in a bicycle trailer, but she remembers clearly the thrill of riding fast downhill, feeling the wind in her face, as a high schooler in SoCal. Now, however, she protects her head by wearing a helmet. (photo: Wayne Tilcock, Davis Enterprise)

When I sat down to write about why I bike, I realized that I've always been a bicyclist at heart, but certain personal weaknesses, specifically a predilection to avoiding personal mortification, obstructed the enjoyment of bicycling early in life.

My first bike was a boy's bike named "Speedy". I learned to ride Speedy before entering first grade, as he was my ticket to a quicker trip to school, and thus a later rising time. The principal required us to walk our bikes on the school grounds. The distance from the street crossing to the bike racks seemed terribly long and fraught with terror because the sixth grade boys teased me about riding a boy's bike. I learned to bike all the way around the school and enter at a side gate to avoid the sixth graders.

I rode my bike to school all through the elementary years, and the first day at junior high school. There I found that the ninth grade boys were no more mature than the sixth grade boys, and within the first week, my elementary school friends and I had stopped riding bikes. From that point on, we all walked to school or got rides from parents. Even the most independent kids succumbed to peer pressure about bike riding. This didn't change even in high school as we started to mature and respect other people's opinions. There were also no parents who set an example by riding their bikes. Had we seen an adult we knew on a bike, we would have wondered what was wrong with their car.

The peer pressure changed just a bit in high school. We still did not ride our bikes to school, but we started using them for recreational purposes. On Friday afternoons, my troop would occasionally ride our bikes to Peter's Canyon Girl Scout Camp in the low foothills of Saddleback Mountain. There we'd "dirt camp" for the weekend and ride back Sunday afternoon. I loved the feeling of exploration and independence that came with biking to camp. Plus we had the whole ride to rid ourselves of the pressures of school and be ready to relax or go crazy at camp. Recently I visited a friend and troop member back in Santa Ana and we tried to find our former route to Peter's Canyon on the map. It was impossible. The entry onto Peter's Canyon road was confused by a warren of small residential streets, so tightly packed the map used a legend to identify the road names.

One Sunday I bragged to two casual acquaintances about our troop's trips to Peter's Canyon and how I knew that the route connected someway to the road coming down from Irvine Park. They said "Let's bike it! Today!" I was on the spot. I knew that my mother wouldn't let me go and I didn't think their mothers would either, so I said let's check with our parents and grab a picnic lunch. It turned out that either their moms were less strict than mine, or they lied about what they were doing, because when I called, both of them were ready to go. As I'd predicted, my mother had flat-out said "no". She knew the distance of the full route, the remoteness of Peter's Canyon and she remembered the steep curvy downhill road from Irvine Park. I had to think fast to save face, so I asked my mother could I just hang out with Doreen and Janie for the rest of the day. To my surprise she said "yes". Since I didn't know where the Peter's Canyon road connected with the Irvine Park road (I just relied on logic that it would), I had no idea if this trip was even doable in a day.

With great foreboding, I packed my lunch, met Doreen and Janie and we started off. I anxiously set a pretty fast pace because I really did want to see where the two roads connected up, and by early afternoon we were on the Irvine Park Road and heading for the downhill stretch. Never have I ridden so fast or so dangerously as I did on that downhill stretch. My glasses didn't prevent the wind making my eyes tear up and I squinted to try to see the pavement far ahead, as I knew that braking suddenly would be instant injury. I envisioned my imminent death. I had images of my mother visiting my broken body in the hospital and saying "Chris, I told you not to go on this bike trip! You're grounded until graduation!" We made it safely to the bottom of the hill and home and nobody questioned me about my whereabouts that day. That evening as I lay in bed waiting for sleep to come I thought about the high I got from traveling fast on two narrow wheels that could spin out and dump me at the slightest bump in the pavement or mis-steering on my part.

I still like to ride my bike fast and feel the wind in my face, but not so fast that the wind brings tears to my eyes, and now I wear a helmet. My brain, as I tell my kids, is still of some value to the family. I'm going to protect it and I expect them to do the same with theirs.

The Davis Enterprise: Dec. 29, 2008

Davis Bicycles! column #006

Title: By biking, I'm doing my part
Author: Christal Waters

Last week, I talked about why I enjoyed biking as a kid. This week is about how I joined the hundreds of others in Davis who use their bikes as their main form of transportation in Davis.

Air quality was the initial reason why, after a 20-year hiatus, I started biking again. As I mentioned last week, I grew up in Santa Ana and saw the air substantially worsen over the 18 years I spent there. Once on a drive home from Los Angeles, I started crying -- not because I was sad or angry, but because even with windows rolled up, the air quality was so bad it stung my eyes.

The air quality deteriorated so badly that I could only see Saddleback Mountain on the days the easterly winds blew the yucky mess out to sea. I realized I was just contributing to the problem and ought to try to do something about it. So I left. Rather than try to do something personally to improve the air, my solution was to "get out of Dodge."

Many years later, my husband and I bought our house within a certain radius of downtown Davis that we had established as "close enough to be able to walk or bike downtown for a movie, dinner and ice cream when we retire." I bought a used bike trailer so we could take our son on recreational bike rides before he was old enough to ride a bike himself.

As I watched the air quality worsen in the Sacramento metropolitan area, I would occasionally try car-free weekends where I would consciously not get into the car for a whole weekend. On those weekends the bike and its trailer became my vehicle for shopping and running errands. But while the kids were growing up and I was working, I relied mostly on a car -- a high mpg car, but a motorized vehicle nonetheless.

Then "An Inconvenient Truth" came out, global warming emerged as a serious issue, and I retired and got serious about bicycle riding. As is true of everything in life, I had to find a balance. I wanted to travel and camp across the United States in a camper van, but I also wanted to reduce my carbon footprint by reducing my vehicle miles traveled. To try to meet the Kyoto goals, I developed a simple formula to compare my gasoline consumption in 1990 with my consumption after retirement.

I calculated that if I bicycled everywhere in Davis and went by bus or train to Sacramento and the Bay Area, I could make up for the extra gasoline consumption of my trip after just two years of "good behavior."

I made my camping trip this spring and have about six months to go before the two years are up. But like any diet, I've fallen off the wagon every now and then, so I'll be recalculating the formula.

Also, the scientists are now saying that going back to 1990's levels of carbon dioxide production isn't nearly enough. It's going to take a while to reconfigure our infrastructure and produce the most efficient vehicles. So I guess I'll be bicycling as long as I can.

I love my bike, and at 60-plus years of age, I'm very grateful that I still can ride.

-- Christal Waters has lived in Davis 25 years, has two children, and is enjoying bicycling into retirement.