A complete skateboard Mecca is going to soon be shut down by the Department of Transportation. The Brooklyn Banks, a skate park underneath the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge has long been an outpost for intrepid boarders. While workers prepare to gate it for six months for a repainting of the above overpass, it will serve as a loading dock for trucks working on the bridge – which indeed needs renovations – for the next four years. Gives the phrase skateboard trucks a whole new meaning. (Tear). This means that The Banks, as it is affectionately known to NYC boarders, will be gone for the first time since its opening in 1970.
Boarders are outraged. They plan to hit the streets in droves. Since their favorite park will be out of commission, pedestrians will have to vie with them for sidewalk space, so goes their logic. There are other areas to skate in downtown Manhattan, but none with the slick pavement, boxes, rails and homemade ramps that called The Banks home. But who knows? Out of this, another New York complete skateboard central may emerge, paving the way for a new generation of skateboarders to skate creatively.
Once, in a dark alley, a good friend of mine struggled to perform a backside Ollie, something he was long capable of. He looked to the sky and the skate gods, screaming, “Why? It’s not my grip tape! It’s not my skateboard trucks! Why can’t I stomp a backside Ollie?”
And the skate gods spoke through me – they said “Buckley, do not despair. Does the caterpillar become irate at having to wait to create its chrysalis? Is the sparrow enraged at having to rebuild her nest?
Does the tree scream when his leaves fall off? No. My friend, neither should the skateboarder become maddened when he is unable to execute a trick. For all things follow in the stream of complete skateboard such that he who waits impatiently becomes unhappy and mad, and he who bides his time and allows for the tricks to come to him, naturally, he is happy and satisfied.”
Such is the way of life and complete skateboard. And Buckley stood, dumbfounded, allowing it to sink into him that if he stops trying so hard, and simply acts, letting his own nature carry him along the curb, without worrying about the execution of his trick, then his backside Ollie will pass, and he will be the skateboarder he always has been.
And so it was.