Birthday Downpour

After working on my skate-theory opus for a couple hours, I decided to take the board out for a romp. I ploughed through downtown, causing a ruckus along the sidewalk. Tonight, there was what might best be described as a pack of Hispanic kids on mountain bikes barreling along the sidewalk in front of my apartment. They were singing some kind of song, and riding at breakneck speed. As I stepped backwards onto the sidewalk while opening the front door to the apartments I was almost hit by the last two of them. Later tonight, while taking out the recycling, two girls on bikes almost did a similar number on me. Each time that I thought about yelling, "get off the sidewalk!" my conscience stopped me short: I cause the same amount of pedestrian terror each time I weave through downtown traffic on my board. And sometimes I even take a slight mischievous pleasure in it.

At any rate, yesterday, I found my way to the big pay-parking lot on Wilson and John. After five pm the downtown lots empty out of cars, producing a paved field of open playground. I did a no-comply over the painted yellow curbs, and tried, unsuccessfully to do some slappies. The yellow painted island that housed the "arms" of the automated gate provided a perfect centerpiece on which to do some manuals. Mostly, I sped around surfing the 'crete, doing nose and tail manuals and little shove its, revelling in all the empty space. The clouds sat on the horizong like a floatilla of spacecraft, and an orange, almost full moon was coming up over the eastern horizon. It sat, perched atop a distant condo, an I realized that I had forgotten my phone/camera, and so had no way of registering a visual image of the event.

What was making my tour extra-special, was my "new" shoes. They weren't really new because I have been breaking them in slowly since last summer. They are an oldschool looking pair of white Adidas leather lowtops, like my Mark Gonzalez pair, but without the ghosties decorating them. They pinch my toes a little, but provide greater protection than my old Vans, which are mondo comfortable, held together with shoe goo, and have very little resistance or support left in the rubber of the souls. The tighter toes of my Adidas allowed for faster shove-it capability, and I caught a perfect railflip-to-caspar while waiting for the bus (though nobody saw this little bit of magic but me).

I like skating Gore park, waiting for the bus. The fellow who sold me a bottle of water at the convenience store was singing a Hindu prayer. He explained to me how it kept his strength up, because he was a student and working on the side and needed all his energy. The old guy, Doug?, at the pool said a similar thing about swimming. A few downtowners tried to get some change off me, but I wasn't going to give up my last seventy-five cents. It took about half an hour for the bus to finally arrive, and when it did, it had a slashed tire, and we had to wait a little longer for a replacement.

When I finally made it to the park, it was about ten. The skater from Trinidad? was there, and told me it was his birthday. I wished him happy birthday and started skating. There were a couple oldschoolers in the bowl. They weren't the friendliest guys, but I had seen them before. The one guy used to skate Beasley, but was a bit of an outsider. Kind of agressive, always hovering around the periphery. I call him the coyote. The other oldschooler had a vintage board with Bullet 66 wheels, yellowed with age but in mint condition. I dropped into the bowl a couple of times, and on my last run I actually felt like I got the sense of flow on a few lines, carving around the corners and getting a feel for how it's done. It was a nice feeling.

I was skating pretty well last night, not getting to caught up about anything. It started pissing rain at ten thirty, so I ran to the bus shelter with a couple of the kids and waited for the slow Sunday service to bring us back downtown. The kid whose birthday it was was turing 17, making me twenty years older than him. I could be these kid's dad, and yet I'm still cruising around the park like a wierdo. But who cares, its fun!

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.

Moving Crap

Also known as "schlepping". I had to turn in the keys to my office today, so I cleared out some books, the famous (and priceless) Tyger Tapestry, a cookie tin of L.B.'s change (I wasn't stealing--she left it behind) and a nearly empty bottle of Herbal Essence shampoo (waste not, want less). I put everything in a sporty cardboard box and headed out into the beee-u-ti-ful summer's day. Sunlight was dancing through the tree leaves. The humidity had died down. It was great.

So, a good way for old timers to train on their skateboards is to surf around whilst carrying thirty or forty pounds of academic textbooks (including Stuessy & Lipcomb's "Rock and Roll: Its history and stylistic development -- "Stylistic"!? Give me a break!) Anyhow, if you skate around carrying a load of crap, it's like those hard-core joggers who attach weights to their ankles and wrists: when you take them off, you feel so much lighter and stronger. Carrying the extra weight improves your poise and balance too.

I also recommend trying to skate while balancing a book on your head. It's good for posture, and you will be glad for the trouble if you ever happen to run into the Queen while shredding the local park. "Oh what a marvelously upright young miscreant," she might say before a scrum of secret service men bury you beneath a mountain of cheap suits and Kevlar. This stuff happens more than you would think but we never hear about it due to the Media Glacier.

What more to say? I've got fifty pages to write about the state of skate for my degree requirements. Yes, I'm making my way in academia as a Skate Theorist. It's low impact--until it hits the bookshelves and then POW! Oprah will be all over that sh-t. Anything can be done, with the help of an open mind and Vitamin X.

Keep to the Shade

The skatepark was jam packed with kids watching the first competition to be held at the recently opened facility. It had rained on Saturday, so two days of events had to be condensed into Sunday's time slot. I arrived late in the afternoon, just in time to see the prizes for the last event, the "best trick in the bowl" category, to be handed out. There was music and commentary being pumped from the tent perched atop the "volcano"--an otherwise useless, plateau-shaped pedestal with steep-sloped sides at the street end of the park. It's as though the park was designed with festivities such as this in mind, and the carnivalesque sense of fun pushed aside questions that might arise in an old skaters mind, questions such as "is this really what skateboarding is all about?"

Without going into unseemly ideological discussions here, let me relate my response to this spectacle of organized skateboard mayhem. I can't take the modern, UV-laden sunlight in large doses. It radiates up from the concrete and undermines my ability to concentrate on the task at hand. So I took refuge in the only shade available: a laneway between the skatepark and YMCA that allowed access to the garbage bin enclosure. There were about five or six skaters likewise situated, and an exchange of skateboard maneuvers ensued in the shady patch of pavement. A tallish curb was also available for our enjoyment, and we took turns finding creative approaches to engaging with this feature. When we got too hot, the air issuing from a wall-sized exhaust vent from the Y's swimming pool cooled us.

The spot was a little oasis of shade, cool air, and chill-scale urban obstacles that offered a counterpoint to the glare, noise and crowding of the competitive skateboard comp raging just a few feet away. The situation was made all the sweeter by the manner in which systems not designed for human enjoyment were reappropriated to alternative use: the cooling system, the garbage removal lane, the tall curb surrounding the underground AC unit (ten feet down, past a protective metal grate set in its surface), and, finally the skateboard competition itself, which provided a carnivalesque background and "mirror", revealing the incorporated version of the original practice that spawned it. There in the shade a group of skaters gathered who did not feel comfortable amongst the prescribed herd of spectators/competitors and took refuge in the shady, industrial grotto inadvertently provided by the chance constellation of events and infrastructure. Thus, the spirit of street skating flourished for a moment on the very periphery of the structures erected to attempt to tame and corall it. Thank God for Vitamin X!

It's Getting Late

But not too late for Thrashin. I made it out twice this weekend. Saturday afternoon was overcast and cool enough for physical exertions. The "B" was deserted, as it has mostly been since the opening of the new municipal skateboard facility, earlier this spring. I hauled the grinder box over to the flat. It's surface was worn from a winter of being exposed to the elements. Having the park to myself, I went through some basics: ollie to tail, rail slide, various flips. Started working on the "hump ramp" -- I don't know what else to call it. Due to winter erosions, this obstacle rocks as you hit it. I was having fun just ollieing onto it and turning around, riding off. Some bikers came by, and some local kids.

When I got tired, I lent my board to the kids, who took turns surfing the park and trying to ride up the curb. They spoke a beautiful and unfamiliar language--Samolian, it turns out. I told them it sounded nice, and they said "thanks". It was great to have the park largely to myself, and to watch the kids skating when I got tired. Then Scott showed up. We skated a bit, and he told me about some physiotherapy options. He was working on blasting ollies out of the bowl, and seeing how high he could clear on flat...pretty high, it turns out. "It's all a head-game," he said. I did one ollie over the lowest part of the metal grinder bar he had configured, tapped my back wheels on it on my way over, and, rolling away, decided to leave it at that.

For a couple of old skaters, we could still hold it together. As the body wears out, one becomes more cautious and calculating. But it's hard to quit, perhaps even reckless and dangerous to do so. Giving up the expanded senses and widened reflexes that skateboarding offers, quitting outright leaves one in a reduced an vulnerable state. Skating keeps one focused and aware of the here and now, like moving meditation. It's also choc full of Vitimin X.