skateboarding

We met with some rough waves on our trip to the beach this year. Even when trying different spots along the beach, the high winds meant choppy waters that threatened to shred you up. I had to boogie board, especially since previous years have sometimes been too calm to make that activity very rewarding. At one location, close to the point where the ocean meets the inter-coastal waterway, the waves were ripe for getting on top of and riding the crest until it dropped you in a rush to get to the shore. I managed to catch a few sweet rides in before a menacing wave forced my board into a vertical position and then threw me down into the surf. I was forced through a somersault, after which my back hit the shell-coated shoreline.

Getting up quickly, I rubbed down my wounds and walked back into the waves, wanting to redeem myself after such a heinous slam. My sons were watching from the tent I had set up on the beach. They didn’t spend much time in the water. My youngest took a pretty hard hit and decided that was it for him. My oldest just thought the waves were too rough to begin with and opted out early on.

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San Francisco rehabbed an area riddled with crime, stolen goods and drug overdoses by… building a small-scale skate park. Skateboarders and those in charge of city planning and maintenance have not always been easy friends. The relationship is starting to get warmer though, because the skaters have been instrumental in deterring the elements that drove the normies away from places like United Nations Plaza in SF. While the city had tried more expensive ways of improving the plaza, it wasn’t until they hit upon the relatively easy to implement idea of making it skateable that real change occurred.

A defining feature of the new skate park (or skate plaza, the name the city and skaters prefer) is that it’s a retreat from the grandeur that characterized earlier efforts. It also seems to be working better, with a $2 million price tag and just a few months of planning, than the catalog of failed projects, costing hundreds of millions, that preceded it.

The presence of the skateboarders practicing their craft acts as a protective watch in the area.

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