I've been so busy with home renovations, reading for school, swimming, gallivanting around, and, of course, skateboarding, that I haven't had time to update the blog in a while, but I have the sore knees and sprained wrist to prove that the last few weeks have been full of radical-ish thrashing activity (well, it's all relative, isn't it?).
So, having just wrapped up a ten day trip from Hamilton to Prince Edward Island and back, I managed to hit a couple of skateboard parks. Our intensive driving, party attending and furniture delivering schedule didn't leave much time for skating on the way to the east coast, but on the trip back, just around dusk, we stopped at the town of Grand Falls New Brunswick for some dinner, and to check out the fabled Big Chute. Water levels were low at the chute, but it was still an impressive gorge.
And the photo we found in the lobby of the only restaurant with an open kitchen depicted a daredevil crossing the gorge on a highwire while a crew of lumberjacks looked on, themselves perched precariously but nonchalantly on the rocks above the falls. The photo was a strange testimony to an era before safety railings, lawsuits, and work-safety regulations would make such behaviour seem reckless and crazy (I mean the standing around on the rocks past which the water is sweeping by on its trip over the falls). But for lumberjacks who, as the song goes, go "burning down white water", traveling across the masses of floating logs which, according to the same song are where "the lumberjack learns to step lively" (I can't find this song on the internet, but it's a classic, and different from the famous Monty Python song), for these lumber industry workers of yesteryear, the dangers of water and rocks would probably be something they were comfortable enough with to not succumb to vertigo on the edge of the Grand Chute precipice.
At any rate, the pizza was delicious, and the parking lot we landed upon had a small skateboard park with three or four elements enclosed by a mesh fence. There were a few kids mulling about, one of whom offered to trade me his bike for my skateboard. It was hard to do any tricks after having sat in a car for six hours--my joints were stiff and my friend Matt the driver and I were both hungery, but I landed a couple of grinds on the metal box before heading off to dinner.
The second skate session happened when we got back to Montreal. I managed to locate the park I used to frequent when I lived there, down St. Laurent and past Jean Talon. Since I had last been there, which was at least five years ago, some new elements had been added, including a steel mini-ramp, a hump, quarter pipe, launch ramp, platform and slider bar. It was mostly a group of young kids hanging out, and I felt a little awkward, as usual, being ancient and all. But at the same time, my years of skate experience allowed me to completely dominate the park, as feeble as I have become in old age. I think I put on a good show, and I shared my Slushie with a couple kids, whom I couldn't entirely understand due to the language barrier.
The next session occured in Ottawa, at a nice park just a short hike from my parent's place. The problem with this park is its usually full of kids on bikes. Skating with bikers in a park is like swimming with sharks. They are fast and silent, so its hard to see or hear them coming, and most of the time the bikers themselves are plugged into their iPods, so they likely don't hear you coming either (despite the racket skateboards tend to make). The bikers at the Ottawa park were respectful, and waited their turn, but their presence prevented me from carving the canyon as I would have liked. I mostly limited myself to the flatground area, which had a platform identical to the one at the Montreal park (supplied by the same company, it would seem). Unlike Montreal, however, the Ottawa park was host to a tribe of young, amazing skaters, one of whom was doing crazy tricks on the platform. Unfortunately, my camera was entirely full of pictures from the trip at this point, so I have no photo evidence of these amazing feats of skill (backside smith grinds, backside tail to 360 shove out, etc).
To return to my original thesis for this post, radicalness is relative, and flawless performances of the same moves that led to my feelings of elevation at the Montreal park just made me feel antiquated next to the fast, dexterous kids ripping up the Ottawa park. But it's not a competition, right? I'm keeping the traditions alive just by showing up and refusing to let gravity and multiple wrist trauma keep me from rolling. I met a couple young guys from North Bay who had recently moved to Ottawa. Much like my hometown of Barrie was in the eighties, North Bay is bereft of skateboard facilities, so these two guys were not so proficient at navigating the transitions of the park. The three of us carved out a space in the transitions and tried to land some ariel tricks off the inclines, but to little effect. We then had a game of "SKATE" on the flat, and it was here that their North Bay skills came through. When you don't have ramps or parks to skate, you end up learning a lot of fancy flatground tricks, and we took turns trading my oldschool craziness for their newer heelflip and pressure flip variations. There was also a kid who arrived later who had the largest "Afro" hairdo I have ever seen. It was at least a meter across, like a giant, fuzzy halo around his head, and the kid himself was so lanky that it seemed as though a strong wind might lift him into the air like a balloon.
So, it was at the Ottawa park, on the second consecutive day of skating, that I fell a couple of times trying to do a simple railslide off of the platform. I landed, as I often do, on my wrists, which now hurt, along with my ankles, back, elbow and right knee. My left knee seems more or less ok, but I'm going to take it easy for a while to recuperate.
I missed the last day of the Beasley Park Skatebaord Jam, which got rained out three weeks ago and was postponed until yesterday. I would like to have attended, and all reports indicate it was an amazingly fun time, but I was still making my way back to Hamilton, and stopped in Toronto to have dinner and watch a bad movie with my girlfriend. Even if I had made it back in time to skate, I was so tired and sore yesterday that my performance in the Oldschool division would have been more embarrassing than usual, so things probably worked out for the best. But I haven't even made a post about the Skate Jam that I did attend, before it was rained out on the second day, two weeks ago. Photos and reportage to follow...
