Sunday morning, drinking coffee and getting ready to sit down with the fledgling book and coax out 3k words. My hands are patchwork of band-aids and medical tape, and every joint in my body is making itself heard, but in a good way. This is probably how folks feel after a good session of yoga, minus the bleeding.
I took a break from writing yesterday and drove down the mountain to Fort Collins. For years a friend and I have been eyeing this old, now defunct, concrete irrigation ditch north of town. It sits on public property, and once upon at time was used to channel water for the neighboring fields, but now it is just home to graffiti and trash. We skated the ditch for most of the afternoon, taking a break to get new batteries for Phelgm’s digital video camera. (Pics coming soon! Watch Harley bite it!)
The thing is, it is an irrigation ditch. This is both cool and painful.
Cool because we are making use of something that will probably be dug up and hauled to a landfill in ten years to make room for a new housing development.
Painful because it was built to channel water, not to skate.
First, the thing is BIG - between ten and twelve feet high, with steep walls that descend at a 50 to 60 degree angle. Not a big deal for skating in and of itself, since vertical is the point of “vert” skating, but read on.
The concrete is raw and chews up flesh on impact. The floor of the ditch is notched with deep cracks – more than enough to catch a wheel. Worst of all are the transitions where the wall meets the floor. That 60 degree angle goes flat at a corner – no rounding.
You drop in from the top of the wall, pick up speed screaming towards the bottom, and immediately things get funky. Make it through the drop in, across the cracks without hanging up a wheel, pop over the transition of the other wall, and if you still have speed maybe you can try a trick.
It’s challenging, which is the lure. Good times, and a good break from the life of Harley, responsible School Headmaster.
Expect a new video out in August. :)
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