Four Wheels In The Ditch

I generally like my work, but there are occasions when spending 37.5 hours a week with TV news can feel like drowning in a dark pond of depressing world affairs into which political animals dump septic bullshit. You try to get out, but a heavy foot holds your head under. Above you, a water-skiing squirrel disturbs the surface, but it is soon obscured by the murk of natural and man-made disasters, ignorance, poverty, and low-minded celebrities, pundits and sportspeople. Gah. This is why it's nice to get away, and where better to spend a weekend than Canberra, AKA Canberrrad, "home of the Australian Story."

Last weekend I went there to visit friends and attend a party. On Saturday, in an alternative universe, the optimal party-version of myself danced the funky charleston as a whooping crowd looked on, and then they all laughed at my stories. In this universe I was not so crass as to pull focus from the lovely people who were celebrating their imminent marriage.

I partied (left)

On previous visits to Canberra I had noticed some drainage ditches that looked very skateable, so on Sunday morning skipped breakfast at Tilly's (and an actual sighting of Peter Garrett devouring nourishment), borrowed Tobi's bike, strapped my board to my bag, and set out in search of the Spence Drains.

I followed a bike path beside a ditch in which a dispiriting trickle of water flowed.  I hoped the Spence ditch would be dry. Canberra is crosshatched by bike paths, and it's refreshing to ride on these after Sydney streets, but there's a feeling of desolation to the place. It's so empty and open, and the landscape is so managed. 





Further on, I found a wider section of drain with sketchy skater-built additions to existing structures . I stopped to skate, but the small stream in the ditch and some broken glass made a run-up difficult. I had no water and the heat was becoming a problem, so I didn't stay long.

sketchy concrete transition

storm drains at Lawson

I pushed on to Spence, making a lengthy diversion to the kind of liquor store normally seen through police cordon tape after an armed robbery, where I bought and consumed nature's finest Pepsi Cola before continuing through the midday heat haze. By the time I arrived at the drains I had rode about 16 kilometers. It was around 35 celsius. There was no shade. The ditch was dry, but the main skating area was covered by a layer of dirt that rendered the benches, quarterpipes and (amazing-looking) hip unskateable.

Spence quarterpipe, hip and dirt

Spence ditch, quarterpipe and dirt

 I'd never skated a drainage ditch before, but had wanted to ever since I saw the Wallows section from Animal Chin. I had visions of long fast downhill runs of multiple tricks and carving, with the possible accompaniment of a funky bongo jam. But the gradient at Spence is minimal, its surface too rough, and my wheels too small and hard to sustain speed. It had also become scorching and was without shade, and I barely had energy to hoist a boneless, which is the least this place deserved. I shot some video before I left, and I can't wait to come back with some bigger wheels and more energy:

WHEEE!

I was a wee boy (on the right) and so was my brother Adam

When I was a wee boy I liked to slide on icy puddles. I knew the best places where water would sit in shallow depressions on the pavement, and on nippy mornings I'd groom the icy puddles, tamping down and smoothing a layer of frost with the soles of my shoes to improve the slidiness of the ice. I liked to learn different tricks, which were essentially stances in which I would slide. There was a head-on slide, a backwards slide, a side-on slide, and there was "the wee mannie" - a slide performed in a crouching position. When I did a slide I would say "wheee," which expressed the way I felt about it.

A Recreation of A Wee Mannie Slide

My obsession with skidding on ice progressed to the point where I snuck out the house with buckets of water one cold winter evening, and splashed these onto the pavement at the foot of the cul-de-sac we lived in, where a downhill footpath terminated in a small flight of 3 steps. This was a precursor to the self-absorption at the expense of personal and public safety that I would later indulge with skateboarding. The following morning I returned to skid along the ice and  leap over the steps at its termination. Wheee! I knew it was hazardous, but I took the risk in favour of that wheee. I'm glad no-one was hurt.

A Skuda Skateboard

I would soon buy a plastic skateboard from a primary school jumble sale. It had the word 'SKUDA' embossed in its top, and a sticker that said 'The Shaggy D.A.' on the bottom. This soon came to replace icy puddles as the source of the wheees. I learned to ride the skateboard down the short length of our driveway, and then I learned some tricks. I also learned to internalise the wheee.

SK8 $HOPZ

There weren’t many skateboard shops in Scotland when I started skating, and they were located far from city centres so were hard to reach. I would pore over the product pages of skateboard magazines and work myself into a covetous frenzy before the rare occasions I got to visit a shop. The nearest was Clan Skates 2 in Dundee, a poky wee place with such little stock that I had to compromise on whatever deck I had formed a fixation upon in a skateboard magazine. But I had no frame of reference, it was the only skate shop that I knew, and I loved it in there. I love skateboards. I love skate shoes. I love skate videos, and there was usually one of those screening on a little portable TV in the shop. I retain this obsession with skateboard products and skateboard shops, and I still can't pass one by.

There is a new shop right next to Waterloo Skate Park, which is the main place that I skate in Sydney. But this is all I've ever seen of the place:

This isn't photoshopped. It is actually called that.

First, the name: BOYZ SK8N. It could be the title of a gay porn movie. It sounds as if it was named by a pathetic old pederast as part of a seedy plan to get his mitts on little skater kids, but whose only point of contact with skateboarding is that Avril Lavigne song. It makes no commercial sense for it implies exclusivity to males, inasmuch as it implies anything, being nonsensical pseudo-textspeak mishmash of such insulting stupidity that I hope for its speedy and catastrophic failure.

All I have ever seen of this shop is closed shutters. It hasn't been open any time I've been there, and I go to the adjacent skatepark two or three times a week. It’s common to find a lackadaisical or inept approach to business among skateboard shops; lost and bungled mail orders, badly stocked shops, shops opening late, and shops staffed either by non-skaters who don't know their product, or by skaters who are hostile to everyone but their immediate friends. 

It isn't difficult to run a skate shop - skateboarding is a thriving scene with a covetable cultural cachet for non-skaters (everyone wears skate shoes and clothing these days) - and although there will be many pressures upon a small business of this kind, I have seen dozens of skate shops fail over my years skating, and I've seen those with rudimentary competence flourish. Like most skaters, I harbour ambitions of somehow making a living from skateboarding and I have toyed with the idea of opening a skate shop, so I don’t blame skaters for giving it a go. But we’re not entitled to make a living out of skating in this way unless we have the requisite skills to make a retail business work, and for that shop put something back into skating. BOYZ SK8N does the opposite – it’s an embarrassment.