Around the time I was 9 and was actually riding a skateboard for real I heard kids making a bunch of noise in the ditch behind my house . They were older and smoked weed and cigarettes & stuff so we were afraid to go back there and check out what they were up to . I could crawl down to the fence at the edge of my backyard and peeked through the bushes and saw that they were riding their skateboards in this ditch .
I had seen magazines with people riding pools and stuff , but this big dirty sewer ditch was suddenly a whole new world to explore . We had to wait till they were done down there fucking around because we were " little kids " and they wouldn't have it if we tried to join them , but eventually we made some time back there carving the huge cement banks and acting like we were surfing the giant walls . Technically speaking , and knowing what I know now , it's easy to see that the flatbottom is too big , and the walls are too steep , but we beat it into submission and that's all we knew for a long time .
Soon we were dropping in from the top and making it all the way back up the other side , stalling at the top , doing 360's before we came back down . . . super lame kid stuff , but to us it was amazing and never before seen technology . We spend day after day in that nasty dirty ditch , and eventually added cement to where the older kids has built up the transition from the flat bottom to the wall . It was crude at best , but we had a whole functioning skatepark back there complete with graffiti and empty beer cans everywhere .
The grownups didn't really get it and never bothered us down there . For the most part we were pretty quiet and didn't make a huge mess , it was a drainage ditch after all so it flooded every once in a while and washed away the scraps that we left behind .
Anyhow I was down there visiting my dad and thought to take a picture of the ditch that I really leaned how to skate in , blew out my knee in , used as a short cut to escape from stoner bmx'ers that would eventually chase us though the streets . . . it has water in it now every time I'm down there now and I'm sure no one skates it anymore. They have parks for that kind of stuff these days . We had a few parks back then , but they were pretty far away and seemed like a huge mystery to a couple 11 year olds .
Now days it seems like most kids are clean and safe and do their tricks in a safe area that was designed for that purpose , life guard on duty , cel phone in your pocket if you eat shit . . . we were in a fucking sewer channel with toilet water dust in our cuts & bruises , it was dirty and harsh , but the only thing I really remember was now much fun we had .
3 comments:
I know what yer talkin I grew up in phoenix-tempe AZ. we had those also spent many hours in them corse I had a buddy with a older brother that was cool and showed us the cool moves plus they had a pool we would drain!
Cool fucking post.
What a cool story about when you were younger!
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