John Ayres, Andrecht plant.
Rock 'n' roll drop, Pat Clarke.
the hill. His wheels grabbed and slowed,
but he didn't. A 20-yard imitation of
Raggedy Ann, over and over he flipped,
finally landing on his feet, stood for a
second, and then fell flat. John and I were
horrified. We ran up to him, expecting
some serious injuries, but we found him
with no more than a good case of mesh-
melt and laughing.
Of course our first pool was special. It
was a square, 15-foot diving well at a
prestigious country club in Maryland. Were
talking about five feet of questionable
transition and 10 feet of vertical. On a cold
day in January, Sean led us over the fence
to the pool. We had no idea how to skate it,
but Sean immediately started snapping
frontside flat-wall carves that defied
human flexibility. I was in awe of even
finding an empty pool, much less getting
this opportunity. Naturally there were
plenty of falls, and oh, did I tell you that in
the middle of the bowl there was a
six-foot-wide, two-foot-deep puddle of ice
water? And do you know how hard it is to
skate on a board covered with ice? Yes,
injuries were the rage, but it was still our
first pool. Who could say anything bad
about that?
Picture this. Three Sahara boys throwing
a stolen hose into an elevated pool and
starting a siphon that would run for weeks,
emptying thousands of gallons of water on
to a neighboring church lawn that turned
into a bog. Every day we checked the pool.
Finally came zero hour, with the water
down to a few inches. We prepared the
assault for that night-and arrived to find
the pool clean, refilled, and our hose gone.
I know these stories don't say as much
to you as they do to me, but they represent
the spirit of what skating meant to me when
I was nothing but a D.C. Sahara skater. So
you see why I was so disgusted with the
exploitation, the park-local snobbery, the
competition, and the pretty-boy image of
skating that appeared in late 1978 and
1979. I went back to the streets and put my
energies into a different field. That
aforementioned spirit still lives in D.C.,
which brings us to our text.
It was midsummer 1983 and Glen E. was
coming down for a visit. Owing to a near
airplane accident he missed the Faith
show, but there was another show coming
up in a couple of days. He decided to hang
out at Dischord, and we were more than
happy to have him stay-his mouth-rap is
endless entertainment. One day I
suggested that we drive out to Annandale
to visit the halfpipe so he could check out
some D.C. area skaters. I called a few key
friends to make sure there would be
something to take pictures of.
What could have been a long hot day of
nothing turned into a great session of
friends. John was snapping the grinders
after returning from an injury-forced
premature retirement from skating. The
aptly named Micro, who is the Annandale
halfpipe if you ask me, was being, as
always, the gnarliest. Puker, also aptly
named, from the legendary Toketeam, was
flying high over Pat Clark, the winner of last
month's contest.
I can't really describe the atmosphere in
words, so just check out the pictures and
see for yourselves what it is about skating
that makes me even bother to write this
article.
Keep it dirty,
lan
Puker, Lien air.
The current A-Team D.C. skatoids.
Micro backside air.
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