A Retrospective on skateboarding in Encinitas: Poseur or authentically involved?
Thousands of people have stories about their reasons for skating here. Here’s one about mine, and some thoughts I have on the line between posing and authenticity. I feel I’ve always been close to this line. I’m not sure what side of that line I’m on — maybe you can help me find out. I started rolling around my neighborhood in Village Park and then Spyglass in early 1986. 9 years old. No obvious natural ability, just a desire to ride inside the neighborhood subdivision.
At some point, three or four of us got hold of an issue of Thrasher and rented Future Primitive. That’s the first moment I remember a purposeful wish to wax a curb and start to try tricks. My board was no longer a method from point a to point b. It was the purpose in and of itself. I didn’t think about it at all like this at the time, but in retrospect it was me peering into an exciting culture (it was counter culture at the time) that was evolving in creativity and the number of people embracing it. Though they were only 15 minutes from my childhood home, I never skated the Del Mar Skate Ranch, or Steve Steadham’s ramp in Leucadia alongside the 5. Those guys were about 8 or 9 years older than we were, and I didn’t know them. I would later meet some of them very briefly (Billy Ruff, Kevin Stabb, etc.) at Street Life (new Encinitas location) demos or McGill’s skate park, but was too young to become part of that world that was largely focused around pools and vert. Their skating was super vibrant, and local. An example that it was absolutely possible to get rad. They were convenient idols and beacons of inspiration to keep pushing around on the board for years.
In hindsight, around the age of 13…a combination of having little to no park access, means of transportation, or parental supervision bent friends and I to skating what was available in town. This really started in earnest in junior high. Oak Crest, 1989 into 1990 when skateboarding really started to hockey stick and increase the emphasis on street skating. Useless Wooden Toys came out followed by Blind’s Video Days in 1991. The stars were aligned, and I can’t describe how awesome it was to have just become a teenager and feel a part of something so progressive at the time.
Also during junior high school, it became clear that I wasn’t really that good at skateboarding, and that many of the guys I skated with were progressing rapidly in terms of trick ability and stamina. There was some disappointment on my part that I wasn’t good, but there was absolutely no desire to quit. I didn’t press pause on skating until 11th grade, and that was for music — a story for a different time.
I liked the people I met through skateboarding and considered them friends, or close enough. I’m still friends with many of them today. My parents were cool and bought me skate clothes and shoes…I dressed the part, and tried my best to show up and skate, and belong. I got made fun of sometimes, maybe bailed on a few times, but largely felt accepted by the core group of about 15 kids my age roaming Encinitas. This was an enormous positive for me. I was socially awkward (still am), and most everything like sports or cliques or whatever I tried to participate in — with the exception of skateboarding and music — I was bluntly denied entry through humiliation, bullying, etc. Not with skateboarding. Lots of friendly people who just wanted to skate and have fun. Sure, some assholes too but way more accepting.
So, because I couldn’t do many tricks, but wore Blind jeans, Droors shirts and rendezvoused at the usual spots, did that make me a poseur? Probably, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I never asked my friends that I rolled around with if they thought I was. None really offered the suggestion at the time. Maybe they were punk and polite at the same time? Whatever the case, we had lots of rad times rolling around the Dust Bank and old K5 Curb. Again, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
