DIXON, CA (MPG) - Driving past CA Jacobs Middle School, I noted there were no children in sight. The expansive grass area was empty where just recently there would be at least a several children playing with their dogs.

I searched Taco Bell around lunchtime where just a year ago there were several police interceptions with unruly students messing up the dining area or fooling around outside but I didn’t even see one bike.

I drove by each of the parks and happily spotted a Dad with a couple of his children playing football at one but not even the playground swings were swaying on another.

Dixon seemed eerily void of children. And this wasn’t a school day. It’s a beautiful, cold, last-of-Winter vacation day and we’re in a shutdown.

So where are the children I wondered since it is actually still okay to go to the park? I found them at the Hall Park Skatepark. Dozens of mask-less children in all shapes and sizes were on their scooters and skateboards rolling up and down the concrete hills and valleys.

Some parents were huddled on a park bench and one was in her folding camp chair looking no different than a mom might be sitting under a ‘sunbrella’ on the beach watching her children play. Another mom was adjusting the helmet of her 2-year-old son on a pint-size scooter.

“We live next door to Veterans Park and get outside every day,” said Erin Sorensen, mother of four children aged 10, 8, 6, and 2. “I love it when we get to find friends at the park.”

It was the eldest son’s idea to start walking around the park every day for exercise after seeing an Instagram challenge to get 1,000 hours in. Now, they walk 30 minutes every morning, she said.

Maxwell, the 10-year-old, came by after some scooter jumps to proudly tell me he’s been biking for four years and skateboarding for two.

“We’re a pretty outdoorsy family with camping and hiking but a thousand hours might be pushing it. I’ll be glad if we get 50 percent of that,” she said with a laugh.

Sorensen moved to Dixon with her husband a year and a half ago thanks to his new military assignment at Travis Air Force Base. They are originally from Utah and she candidly shared that one child is enrolled in distance learning while the other two are being homeschooled.

“I love the teacher and I think we have adjusted pretty good,” she said in regard to the changes the pandemic imposed. “I think that’s the takeaway from all this; they’ve learned how to learn on their own. And we’re getting outside a lot so we’re just all better now.”

Crystal Hickerson, the woman snuggled in a thick scarf in the camp chair, also has four children, ages 13, 12, 9, and 8 comprising three boys and a daughter, all busy out on the concrete ramps and talking with other children.

Their family was on a kind of ‘Skate Park Tour,’ she said. One of the boys rolled by and added that he liked scooters better than skateboards because “scooters are easy to learn and do stuff on.”

The family lives in Davis and after spending many months of the pandemic mostly doing “indoor things like baking,” she noticed the children needed something more.

“You can tell they missed the interaction with other children,” she said. “And I struggled with the online school thing and finally took them out for homeschooling. But, with so many things closed, there isn’t a whole lot else to do. We’re trying to go to different skate parks, and I’ve noticed they make friends very quick.”

Equipped with new skateboards and scooters for Christmas, they have ‘toured’ Napa, Cordelia and Natomas now and the children pick up things quickly from the other children.

“They have trained and practiced and learned what not to do,” she said. Two of her sons were in shorts and one of them was barefoot but didn’t seem to mind the crisp December weather while he cruised around the other children.

“We’re from Minnesota and have been here more than a year. They are just now starting to wear pants,” she explained.

Pages and pages and graphs and charts of a recent study on the early effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on physical activity and sedentary behavior in children living in the United States was published this past September by Denevieve F. Dunton et al via BMC Public Health.

The results were that children needed to be more active and their sedentary behavior from too much screen time may be creating long term patterns that could negatively impact their health. See https://rdcu.be/ccSYq

They could have just gone to the Dixon Skatepark to talk to a couple of parents and they could have saved a whole lot of effort.