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  2020-04-30

  Pandemic Pool Skating

  If you believe Stacy Peralta‘s documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, and of course you should — he’s one of the Lords of Dogtown for heaven’s sake, then you’ll know that pool skating originated here in Los Angeles during California’s drought in the late 70s. Some forty-odd years later and we’re in a drought of our own, a drought of socializing, of congregating, as humans across the southland and the world shelter at home to protect ourselves and the weakest among us from the novel coronavirus. But the empty pools and skateparks across Los Angeles, built for beginners, Olympic hopefuls and every skater in between, are being filled with sand and mulch so they don’t become deep, glossy-tiled petri dishes birthing a new surge of Covid-19 cases. There’s one problem. Just as no one could keep skateboarders out of backyard pools in the 70s long enough to keep a new sport from blossoming in a literal desert, a few tons of mulch or sand won’t help to board up skaters. That’s because essential services are still available. Big-box home improvement stores are open for business, stocked with antidotes to debris: shovels and shop vacs, push brooms and blowers. But of course we pool-riders are already equipped with such technology. So go ahead and fill that pool with mulch, dump and spread sand across the street courses. Skaters will eventually show up at odd hours to push and blow it out of the way. We’ll don our personal protective equipment, helmets, wrist guards, knee and elbow pads, and get in a quick session before you ever notice. We don’t even need to clear out the whole pool. A half, or even a quarter pool will do — like the quarter pipes we would hammer and scrap together at the bottom of our driveways in the 70s and 80s. We’d risk life and limb skating to the top of those rickety booby-traps pushing our wheels over the edge like we’d see Stacy and Tony Alva do in magazines (those things we’d use if we ran out of toilet paper). Skateboarders are creative, resilient, unrelenting. Ian McKaye of Minor Threat calls skateboarding “a way of learning how to redefine the world around you.” We see the world differently. Where you see an empty swimming pool, skateboarders see the form and shape and flow of concrete waves to ride. Where you see a curb and sidewalk, skateboarders see an edge to grind, a platform to manual, or wheelie, across. Where you see an empty corporate plaza, skateboarders see a playground of infinite lines to skate, slide and grind across. Where you see pools safely filled with sand, we see an opportunity to perform a ritual baked into our DNA, a ritual of clearing and cleansing. And in the emptiness we’ll skate new lines, try new tricks, push to new heights. As Craig Stecyk understood, according to Skip Englbom in Dogtown and Z-Boys, children took the ruins of the 20th century and made art out of it. And in the ruins of this pandemic there will only be more art. A lot of pool skaters aren’t children anymore. We’re the old guard, Generation X skaters with kids to care for at home, and parents to shop for so they don’t have to risk a Costco run. So we will keep a couple arms’-length apart as we sweep and skate, clear and carve. Because we can’t help ourselves. Our godfathers showed us how. Lance Mountain explains, “skateboarding doesn’t make you a skateboarder. Not being able to stop skateboarding makes you a skateboarder.” A crisis created skateboarding as we know it. No pandemic or sand-filled dump truck is about to stop its progress.