Huh? What’s This All About??
This is the ongoing tale of me. Well, not every boring detail, rather, the ongoing tale of me trying to skate again.
See, when I was a kid, I used to skateboard. I loved it. I remember being 13, and walking around with my yellow Town & Country skateboard. I would take it with me everywhere. The trouble was, I lived in a part of town that was – well – it was on the side of a mountain. So I either had to get really good at skateboarding, or be prepared to enjoy a LOT of wipeouts and endure a large amount of road rash. The end result was that I didn’t ride as much as I wanted to, and I never got all that good.
Now to put this into perspective, when I started to really skateboard as a kid, the “new” wide boards had just come out. They were more stable than the old “banana boards” and for the first time, encouraged a whole new generation of tricks that weren’t possible on the original boards from the 70s. I remember reading Thrasher Magazine – cover to cover – back when the only real color was on the cover, and the rest of the magazine was only newsprint. The highlight of my skateboarding days back then, was going to a big contest in Stanley Park, Vancouver. I don’t remember much about it, other than there was (what I thought at the time to be) a HUGE ramp… that and Christian Hosoi won the competition. It was before X-Games, and way before today’s double edged modern boards.
My Town & Country board was a horrible yellow color with nice, wide Independent trucks, and some cool, green Powell Peralta mushy wheels. I still have the board – it weighs a ton and rides like a Cadilac! Back in those days, I’d go to my friend’s house in town where we could ride on streets that weren’t the death slopes around my house – yet, despite that, low-flying 30-foot strides were not uncommon.
Anyway, let’s fast forward a number of years (cough – ok a LOT of years), and now I find myself in my mid-30s. And one of my friends decided that he was going to buy skateboards for his 6-year-old twins. At the same time, he realizes that his desire to skate has come back to him. As he tells me about this, I realize: I now live in a neighborhood that’s PERFECT for skateboarding… not to mention there’s a couple of skate parks nearby.
This is the story of me, a mid-30-something guy, reclaiming his days of skateboarding!