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Every Thursday, school-age children make their
way to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, anxious for the
weekly bike polo games. They run up to the rec center
checking for Patrick and Jon and the trailer full of
helmets and mallets. Patrick Orozco, 20, and Jonathon
Moo, 21, are Bike Bakersfield’s current Safe Routes to
School coordinators, and they are responsible for putting
on bike rodeos and demos at city schools, for providing
support for the park’s kids-only bike workshop,
and for teaching kids how to play bike polo.
The center is already a hub for children in the
neighborhood, many of whom come from single-parent
homes. “They are left to entertain themselves at
the center,” Orozco says. “There are families that use
it as a daycare, so when you give them attention and
you hang out and play with them, they have fun. They
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love the attention, and I don’t mind giving it to them if
it’s going to keep them out of trouble.
“These kids are not in the highest [income] class so
they don’t have access to vehicles; they rely on bikes,
and alternative methods of transportation—and their
bike-handling skills are insane. These kids can literally
haul ass into a pole and then miss it and haul ass again.”
Bakersfield sits equidistant from Sacramento and
Los Angeles and is the metropolitan hub of the San
Joaquin Valley, a major agricultural zone. The area has
more clear days each year than most North American
cities, with early springs and mild autumns, but it also
trumps most of the nation in violent crime, robbery,
poverty, obesity, unemployment, and pollution. It’s a
city where more than 60 percent of children live in
poverty, where gang membership has continued to