Rhythmanalysis

About "cough" twenty years ago I went skating for the first time in Toronto. Being from a smaller northern city where the tallest building in town at the time was about ten or twelve stories, it was a real thrill to be surrounded by all the towering glass and steel architecture of downtown Toronto. As I recall, it was also the middle of winter. My friend's parents owned a bakery and sent him in the van (one of those blunt-nosed Toyotas from the eighties) to pick up some supplies in the big city. Living an hour north of Toronto, in the snow belt, one didn't get a lot of chances to skate in the winter. I would spend my time in the two car garage of my families house, listening to mixed tapes on a portable boom box and practicing freestyle tricks, while wearing about three or four layers of clothing.

But downtown Toronto was a different story. Due, perhaps in part, to the "lake effect" there are days in the cold, dry dead of winter when the Toronto streets are devoid of both snow and moisture. They lay there like the grey skin of some giant sea creature, covered in salt crystals, and eminently skatable. After picking up the baking supplies, we had a few hours to kill, so we took a completely illicit (by my friend's parent's standards) trip to downtown.

One of the central hubs for street skaters at the time was Trinity Square, behind the Eaton centre. Back then, there was a series of raised ledges that were so good for skating on the property owners eventually planted trees on top of them. (They have now been removed altogether). At Trinity, we met up with two downtown skaters named Phil and Cookie. When they found out we were yokels from "the boonies" they decided to show us the downtown spots and do a little demo of their skills.

At that time, my friends and I were probably the most advanced skaters in our town, but even then, our moves had a decidedly old school feel. I was just learning kickflips, but the majority of our moves involved grabbing the board in some way and launching off, or over, obstacles. One of my favourite tricks of the moment was a fastplant, but we were big on bonelesses, airs and fingerflips as well. So, when Phil and Cookie started launching down the Trinity plaza stairs, grabbing their board and doing tricks as if they were going off a launch ramp, it really blew our minds. They then took a rectangular metal garbage can and set it lengthwise down the 3 set of stairs, and proceeded to do rail slides and grinds down the side of it.

This was just at the time that skaters were starting to learn how to slide and grind down handrails. Phil and Cookie were trying to work their way up to this feat by practicing on the garbage can, which was lower than your average hand rail. Cookie even tried sliding a real rail several times that afternoon, but never actually succeeded. He said that he had landed one or two of them before though.

The pair took us around to other famous downtown spots. A slightly angled wall to ledge behind what is now a Starbucks on the corner of Bay and Queen is still there. They also showed us a long, yellow painted curb that divided the entrance and exit portions of an underground parking access ramp. They did some long rail slides down the slick yellow curb, noting how much fun it was, but my friends and I were too astounded, and timid, to try.

As we hit more spots, more and more skaters started coming out of the woodwork (or pavement). Soon, there was a whole hoard of us wheeling through the downtown core. As we reached the interior of the financial district, I felt transported into a dreamlike land of Oz. In the cold winter air all of the slick marble and smooth concrete and glass seemed to sparkle. I felt as though I was traveling through a lost city that had recently been raised from the depths of the ocean. I remember falling a couple of times, and I'm not sure I even did too many tricks. Just being around all that skateboard energy, in the midst of the towering architecture of downtown was enough of a thrill. The marble plazas and fantastic landscapes of ledges, benches and curbs seemed to go on for ever, one enclosure opening up into another. The cold air stung our noses, and the collective din of all those skateboard wheels was deafening.

Our guides knew their way around. One plaza had a large circular fountain in its midst. The fountain itself had been covered by a metal cone to protect if from the winter elements. Phil and Cookie were charging at the cone and using it to launch off, grabbing their boards and pulling up into the air from the slope of the cone. I had never thought something of that sort would be possible, and the feeling of exhilerating possibilities was intoxicating. My friends and I talked about that night for many months and years to come. The thrill of it got us through the rest of the horrible Ontario winter and well into the summer months.

At one point, earlier in the evening, while we were skating Trinity Square, a thin, long-haired skater breezed through the plaza at great speed, carving in between a row of columns, then disapearing around a corner. As soon as they spotted him, Phil and Cookie shouted "Spencer" in unison. It seems that Spencer was something of a legend in the downtown Toronto skate scene in the mid to late eighties. He was an older skater who didn't do tricks. His bliss was the bare act of carving through the city on four Polyurythane wheels, the wind in his hair and the pavement rumbling by beneath him.

At the time I thought this fellow a passing curiosity, though it was obvious that Phil and Cookie held him in some reverence. In the heyday of youth, with magazine photos and video footage of the latest tricks to come out of California raging in our imaginations, skateboarding was all about improving one's skills, getting higher air off launch ramps, and jumping down increasingly larger sets of stairs. But now that I've reached a certain, shall we say, plateau of physical capability, I appreciate more and more the basic act of skating through the city.



Just tonight, on Canada Day, I did a circuit of downtown. The air was damp and close, and dark clouds were shifting their way through a darker sky. At about ten, the fireworks stared, and I found a perch atop a park fence to watch them from. The fact that some of the lower ones were partially obscured by an appartment building only added to the joy with which I watched those that broke free of urban horizon to explode in full view in the sky. The ricocheting echoes of the crackles and pops multiplied in the four directions, implicating the entire city in the spectacle that was unfolding above it. It was a more or less random (and largely unsuitable) spot to stop and watch them from, but a great calm descended upon me as I sat there, surrounded by the dark green dampness of the park.

Skating home, I was confronted by the crowds leaving the waterfront area. The walked in contented clusters as I rode the gravity downhill towards my appartment. The rough sidewalks and cracked streets of Locke gave way to the smooth concrete of King St, but the frequent clusters of pedestrians necessitated my steering off onto the rougher ratatatat of the flanking unistones. I was on my way to a party, which I didn't manage to locate, and I had a couple beer in my backpack which I didn't want to get too shaken up, so I was keeping my centre of gravity as low as possible and avoiding any kind of jarring or jolting motion. This mild anxiety made me all the more attentive to the warp and woof of the sidewalk and street. As I passed rapidly through the lamplight, the soothing clack-clack of the sidewalk tiles built a comforting rhythm, like a miniature train in the night. I was alone, yet I was in the midst of the firework crowds, on Canada's national holiday, and I felt like something of the energy of the fireworks had passed into my body, continuing the magical transformation of the summer night that fireworks momentarily effect.

As I passed through the rough asphalt planes of a nightclub parking lot, a glaring overhead halogen lamp afixed to the wall cast two simultaneous shadows across the pavement. I saw my double silhouette stretch to the very periphery where the parking lot met the street, and felt like an alien just touched down to earth. It was then, while contemplating that double, superimposed outline of myself, that I realized time had come full circle, and I had become like the mythical Spencer to whom the Toronto skaters attributed a mystical significance. There in the limelight of the Hamilton Strip Club parking lot, I felt, once again, something of the intimacy that exists between the city and the lone skateboarder, a communion rarely, if ever, celebrated in skateboard magazines or lore, but yet somehow central to the spirit of wheeled celebration and rebellion that lives at the heart of the practice.