Summertime

A couple weeks ago, I went in search of the secret skate spot that my neighbour's kid had told me about.



Not too far from my house is what looks to be an abandoned school. The concrete playground/parking lot behind the school is covered in cracks and weeds, and from the fence I could see that some makeshift obstacles had been constructed on a raised portion of the yard.



But the prominent "NO TRESSPASSING" sign kept me from jumping the fence; now that I'm respectably employed, I'm even more wary than I used to be about certain things.









So I headed off to the other side of the property to see if I could get a better view of what are called in skateboard park lingo, the "elements". It appears as though people had made a slider rail out of an old ladder, but I couldn't see the ramp that my neighbour had mentioned. There was, however, some pretty neat street art decoration the building.

Before I could complete my mission, however, a skateboarding friend of mine accosted me from his car, from the far side of the street. I've known M. for a while. He's a wicked painter and artist, and an excellent skateboarder. M.T. was in the car with him (there's no real reason to conceal people's names, but I try to anyways for the sake of privacy). These guys were on their way to a new skate spot and asked if I wanted to come. I was actually kind of depressed due to relationship-related issues which I can't even remember very well now, so I was happy to embark on a trip to a new skate spot with a couple of friends whom I hadn't seen for quite a while.


We drove to Dundas, to a beautiful municiapl park. The park has a bandshell with a decent sized ledge that drops off onto a sea of the smoothest grade of concrete. Beside the bandshell is another, lower ledge that is good for grinding, and has a slight curve to it. This was an ideal spot, and I had had no idea that it even existed. Another skater, S., was already there. It was early evening, and still light but cool as well; the perfect hour for skateboarding. I'm a little out of shape--actually, I'm just old--so the smooth, flat expanse was great for the flatground, freestyle tricks I like to do. You could manual forever at that place! The other three guys had more juice in them, and were doing awesome tricks on the ledges. M.T did some ollie to nose manuals on the bandshell platform, and S. did some wicked boardslide/hurricane grind combos on the curved ledge.
M. landed some perfect frontside halfcab flips. S. had brought a large, impressive-looking camera, and M. was filming some of S.'s lines. S. has been skating for a while, and has a lot of tricks at his disposal--he always has some impressive and quirky variation to throw into the mix.
I tried grinding the lower ledge a few times, but wasn't feeling too confident. I partially blame this on my deck, which was old and comfortable, but was quite ground down on the tail.

After skating for a good while, we decided to head back to town. S. took off in his '84 Porsche Carrera, while the rest of us packed into M,'s more utilitarian vehicle. He had a painting of a pair of Adidas sneakers in his back seat. It was well executed, and M.T. was buying it from him. We all went to the Vietnamese restaurant and hung out for a bit, and then M. dropped me off at home. I was going to meet back up with these guys at a local skater bar later that night, but I got tired and just did some reading before going to bed.