![]() ![]() Whenever I’m angry, I just go skate, and it kinda soothes my mind because I’m working on something that’s meaningful to me,” said Robert Goodale, a senior at MVRHS, as we sat atop one of the larger skatepark ramps with a few other skateboarders in the middle of a gentle snowfall last week. “It’s a way to get off a lot of my anger. So you’re never gonna find one person that has the same story as another … For me it’s the violent movements, ya know, just slamming on stairs, then landing the tricks, the adrenaline rush, like, ‘Damn dude, I landed that.’” But then you have to add in grinding… the lack of binding between board and rider makes the connection so satisfying, regardless of whether one is just cruising around or ollieing over a garbage can.”īeyond the inherent enjoyment of the activity, skaters spoke to more personal aspects, such as its role in their life growing up, its therapeutic nature, and other individual insights.Īs Hunter Broderick, a seventh grader at the Tisbury School who is sponsored by the small skateboard company 1989 Skateboards, had to say after the street-skating session, “I guess skating’s just like, it’s different for everyone. The feeling of skateboarding is as close as I can imagine to flying, with elements of gliding, hovering, and floating. “I always see skateboarding as utopian and futuristic, because it is so improbable. skatepark ledges.Īfter a weekend street-skating session in Oak Bluffs, where he focused on ollieing (the controlled popping of the board into the air) small gaps, and holding out powerslides (sliding the wheels across the ground), 19-year-old Ryan Mendez echoed similar sentiments in his first words about skateboarding: “It’s really fun.”Ĭalder Martin, a longtime skateboarder and surfer who teaches mathematics at the Charter School, tried to provide an in-depth articulation of why the word “fun,” such a general term, is so synonymous with skateboarding, especially when compared with similar activities. He has skateboarded since age 11, and this summer he could be seen working on slides and grinds atop the M.V. Reed moved to Burlington, Vt., after growing up on the Vineyard. ![]() Wherever you are, whether you have a skatepark or not … it’s always fun,” said Oliver Reed, 36. “Skateboarding is always the same it’s always fun. You can do it a lot, and there’s always something you can learn.” At the time, he was trying to learn a Smith stall on the quarter pipe, a trick where the skater locks the back set of his wheels onto the metal spine atop the ramp while letting the rest of the board rest in front of it. Though we may seem aloof, or perhaps reckless (and sometimes we are these things), and though one may think there is a disconnect between the young skaters, still in their tweens, and the older crowd, we are an unspokenly cohesive community, both unified and diverse, with motives both simple and complex.Īt an afterschool park session, when asked to speak about skateboarding off the top of his head, Leo Napior, 12, said this: “It feels really nice, skateboarding, like the style of it.
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