The location of a proposed personal and RV storage project off Airport Road, the third storage project heard by the Planning Commission in as many months.
Our recent drive to see fall colors in the local mountains got me to thinking about something else from long ago…bike rides growing up.
Nope, I didn’t have incredible mountain vistas to ride through. My realm was the San Fernando Valley of Southern California in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. The Valley was a great place to grow up back then, and once our folks were convinced that we could be trusted to obey traffic rules and look out for each other, it was safe to ride our bikes on short adventures.
I found it funny and a little ironic that it was while driving through an Aspen grove on the backside of Hinkey summit, that I had a glimpse of the past. The Santa Rosa Mountains of Northern Nevada are a far cry from the suburban Los Angeles of fifty plus years ago; but I guess you never know what will trigger a meaningful memory. Driving with my mom and daughter through the cool, colorful tunnels of trees brought back memories of tree lined streets that I grew up riding my bike through. We’d race from our neighborhood, past Petit Park and toward an old Sav-On shopping center with the greatest back parking lot. It was huge, perhaps ten acres, with ramped and graded paved edges instead of retaining walls that extended fifteen feet or more up to the neighborhoods beyond. It was like having our own velodrome half a mile from home. For the most part, few parked back there and it was a kid kingdom.
We spent hours perfecting jumps, no-hands, and waiting to drink from a garden hose that one kind elderly man would extend from his backyard through old grape stake fence to the edge of the parking lot for kids to get a drink. It was blazing hot on that asphalt and rarely did we make it more than a couple hours before skinning a knee or just getting exhausted.
On the ride home, we generally took the most direct route which was straight up Petit Avenue across Devonshire and Chatsworth Boulevards, then a quick right at Tulsa Street where we lived. The best though, was when we took alternate sightseeing routes. Sometimes this was to ride by a friend’s home and sometimes just to look around. Petit Park had a pool, but it was rare that we would swim there. It seemed expensive, crowded and beyond noisy to our mom, and even looking back now, I freely admit that it lacked all aesthetic nuance. Still, it was fun to ride by it on the way home. The strong aroma of chlorine, bright white and light blue walls, screaming kids and splashing off the high dive were always worth a look. My favorite part of our alternative routes were the days when we’d wind through older neighborhoods with shady, tree lined streets. It was such a relief to go from one hundred plus degrees of blast furnace Valley heat to the soft, cool, sheltered streets of old Granada Hills. The houses were all pretty similar, single story homes with low pitched roofs built right after the war. The only difference between the high and low end were trim and the occasional backyard pool. The trees in the older neighborhoods were bigger, and sheltered the yards and streets from the extreme summer heat. It was pure bliss to hit one of those quiet streets, take your feet off the pedals and coast through the cool corridors. The leaves would twinkle in afternoon breezes and the heat of the day was momentarily forgotten.
It’s really funny how our memories work, it astonished me that just the change in temperature, fluttering of fall leaves and filtered sunlight took me back to my own childhood in an instant. Even now, when I close my eyes and think of coasting along one of those old streets, I can almost see, hear and smell it all. It takes me to back to a time when backyards in our neighborhood were dirt yards for chickens and a garden, when the big mulberry, elm or carob trees were just made for forts and climbing and when it was common to see an old neighborhood man pushing his Italian ice cart, selling lemon or cherry in tiny paper cups for five cents regular or ten cents large (oh how we loved the days when mom could afford the large), or an old B&W photographer walking up to each house that seemed to contain children, leading a Shetland pony and props to transform us into cowboys and cowgirls for $3 a head or $5 a family.
I guess for me, everything came full circle…I didn’t get my real chance to live the cowgirl dream until I was past thirty and married a rancher; but, I sure had adventures on both sides of my life. It was very literally a sweet trip down memory lane to relive a few of those memories this week, all thanks to a tree lined road.
Kris Stewart is a rancher in Paradise Valley, Nevada.