Santa Barbara Tour Pt. 2:
Downhill skateboarders escape our regular lives almost religiously. Most live like secret agents, one day wearing a suit and tie, or a lab coat, or an apron with a name tag and the next donning fresh road rash and slide gloves. We choose not to believe the lies told by society that we should keep our heads down and shut up, to live in a bubble, in front of a screen to work down to the bone for a retirement that will never come. Instead of living in a comfortable space in an uncomfortable existence, we choose to live out our own little piece of paradise, even if to the outside observer it more closely resembles Golding's Lord of the Flies than Dante's Paradiso. Trading the softness of down quilts and tempurpedic mattresses for hardwood floors and short, lumpy couches isn't the ordinary person's perfect weekend, but for us, if there's radness on the horizon, we'll sleep anywhere.
It is a generally agreed upon that our lifestyle is unsustainable for long periods of time - you'd simply go mad for lack of personal space. Regardless, we construct our live's framework to indulge in short periods of wanderlust to regain some wide-eyed wonder of day's past. To look at the world with new possibilities, to skate the unskateable. You might find yourself at 5000", about to skate a mountain through the fog one day and in the hustle and bustle of The City at sea level the next - all par for the course. It has taken us to the biggest metropolises, where millions of bodies are crammed together in a mere seven mile square space, and towns of the same size containing less than five hundred, and everything in-between.
With skateboarding, people are incidental. We seek out the rarest of roads in hopes that we can cut corners without fear of consequence, and tend to skate the cities at night when evasive maneuvers are required far less often. We interact with the pavement surface, with what we call gravity, with dirt and rocks and traffic cones and tall grass hanging lazily down over the road that so resembles the glassy wave barrels of surfing. People, especially driving cars, we try not to interact with - ironic because it is these very rubber booted death machines that have given way to the infrastructure of roadways of which we are so fond.
By seeking out clusters of these prized roads, we can schedule short, tightly packed periods, away from the drudgery of whatever job we currently have or school class to get a degree in being unemployed. We choose willingly and often to participate in this live-action, Reality version of Lord of the Flies, complete with sacrificial head on a stick, and somehow largely escaped, the usual bevy of ass rash notwithstanding. For most, in the PDX crew, it'll be months before they see another dry road. The Sunset Sliders are currently escaping the usually depressing rains in favor of an unusually bone-dry winter, but can still be caught daydreaming that the slopes of their coveted driveways could teleport them back to the endless mountain roads of their journeys.
p.s. the boys at Santa Gnarbara put together this sweet edit from the trip. Check it out!
http://youtu.be/ifN5vOe7MUM
