Skate Zoo

Throughout their youth kids are inclined to follow a hobby or activity that will help form their identity and highlight the individuality that each person contributes amongst their peers. Skateboarding does just that. Kzoo Skate Zoo doesn’t look like much at first. Sitting on the side of a highway street, next to an extreme hardware store (which must come in handy) and surrounded by forests, it’s the perfect location.

As soon as you walk in, you notice the posters that cram the entrance. One states rules for the park like: “Take turns skating (don’t go forever), “Don’t cut people off”, and “Skate within your ability.” Each rule echoes of the experienced problems for which those rules exist. The same goes for the sign that italicizes “thieves will be banned for life.” Taking the hint, I hide my valuables in my bag and put it in clear view.

There are no bleachers set up for audiences. It is the type of place that says: if you are here, it is to skate, rollerblade, bmx, take your pick.

Little do many people know but skating has its origins from surfers who were frustrated from the lack of waves. To solve their wave-withdrawal they first attached wheels to a surfboard and then to custom made boards of wood. The sport made sense, it was surfing without the water, without having to wait for a swell, without the surf wax, jelly fish to worry about, or waves to catch. Instead of coral reef to worry about it became streets. Instead of avoiding sharks, they avoided cops.

As I walked up to the hangar, uneasy about how I would be accepted, two guys sat on the curb outside and one said “Hey”.

“Hey” I responded.

“You here for the shop?” he asked.

“Nope, im here to skate.”

A short pause and then he asks, “With that?”, referring to the bamboo longboard with larger than normal clear rainproof wheels.

Today a new form of skating is gaining popularity that bears many characteristics of skateboarding but it closer to the original intent of its creators. This is longboarding. Not to be confused with longboard-surfing, in which seven to thirteen foot surfboards are used to get hang-tens on real waves; longboarding is done for the ride, for the carving, for feeling like you are on a wave and not a street. It’s has a much more fluid dynamic that is not concentrated as much on the tricks that you can do with the 45 degree angled tails of regular skateboards, but on the journey itself. That’s not to say that there are no tricks, but its not as important. For this reason they are great for traveling short distances stylishly.

The inside of the park is very spacious. The 25 foot high ceiling of the gray hangar is propped up by bare wooden beams, which large speakers hang from. The music here never stops playing: rock, punk rock, rap, hip hop and beyond. But its harder to hear in the outside section of the park they have outside. This part is almost as big as the inside, but strangely, always less crowded.

I take a seat on the one bench available, perched on the top of a ramp. In front of me two rollerbladers take turns on the half pipe doing grind after grind, backwards, forwards, spins and eventually bails on a trick and crashes to the floor. He gives a loud groan of frustration and then his friend calls out: “You okay dude?, “Yeah im good”, and it all continues on. Trick after trick, fall after fall.

Just next to them a group of three skaters take turns on another ramp. This one heads down to a rail and after that, against the wall on the far end, finishes with a ramp nearly 12, bodacious feet high. The height they are getting is impressive and it’s done with a non-chalant swagger.

Ready to take my own stand, I take position and begin my feeble attempt of taking the longboard form of skating and adapting it to the ramps and rails of the kzoo skate zoo. I zoom down a ramp and try to carve the inside of one of the ramps only to bail onto the floor. A few more tries teaches me that my wheels don’t skid as easily on the glossy wood of the ramp as they do on the street. But my scrapes are not as painful as usual—instead of bleeding scrapes I’m covered in what feels like rug burns that sting at the contact of dirt and sweat.

After a short while my effort seems to be paying off as I almost grind a rail on one of the pipes and I’ve gained a bit of attention. A ten year old kid named Gerald asks emphatically “Wow, can I try that board?”

“Sure, give it a whirl”

Gerald is about four feet tall, has curly brown hair that touches his shoulders, and is covered in a helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, and couple sweat bands. He also wants to be a pro skater when he grows up. “I come here to skate every day after school and on the weekends too.” Clearly an expert, he trades boards with me and after dropping in on a couple ramps and riding around concludes with a smile that my longboard is “really scary”. We trade back our boards and all of the sudden, we are already friends.

It doesn’t take a zoologist to understand why kids skate at the kzoo skate zoo. Without a specialized arena in order to skate in and with the explosion of the popularity of skating a predictable clash occurred between the pioneers of this new sport who had no designated arena and those who saw and could not understand or emphathize. People tend to fear what they don’t understand. Skating is not like soccer or hockey with boundaries and goals. The world is their playground. Or at least it was. It remains to be seen if longboarders will adapt, create their own parks or continue to be able to ride the free road.