Posts tagged art
From Ohio to California in 3 days
Photos: Ryan Young
Words: Travis Schirmer
Exhausted from over 40 days of zigzagging across the country seeking out shelter and skateboard spots, the crew decided to bypass Colorado and drive straight back to California. The territorial disputes over seats with access to a window for leaning on grew in viciousness and regularity, as all-night driving sessions became the norm. Every few hours a passenger would wake up and mumble, “Where are we?” It was unclear which state we were in at any given time; that we were still far from the West Coast was certain due to the surreal names of gas stations we passed (Kum & Go, Giant Eagle, Flying J, etc.) We took turns sleeping on a strip of floor between the van’s first bench and front seats that had been previously reserved for the soles of our shoes and oily particles of vending machine food. At rest stops, some of us worked through our delusional weariness by walking in socks through rainy parking lots towards the nearest fast food restaurant, while others chain-smoked in a haze propped against the van.
Miraculously, we materialized in Los Angeles to let off our first crew member. Many half-conscious goodbyes were uttered in the weak morning sun until the trip was concretely over—its reality carried on in the form of electronic imagery and subjective interpretations based on the meaning it held for each person who went along for the ride.
SKATOPIA
Photos: Ryan Young
Words: Travis Schirmer
At the bottom of a gravel road somewhere in the grassy city of Rutland, Ohio the van pulled up to a sign enclosed by pool coping with “Skatopia” written on it. The entrance lead to an 80-acre piece of land founded on ideas concerning skateboarding and freedom by a man named Brewce Martin. We drove by a pink school bus with broken windows, a house where the walls seemed to be made of nothing other than beer boxes, a three-story barn with a roof supported by a full-pipe, and a cement skatepark built on a hill at the highest point of elevation. A few minutes after staring at our surroundings, a car being chased by a pack of barking dogs came charging up the road. Brewce Martin emerged, introduced himself, and then jumped onto his skateboard to show us the lines of the park he built himself. At night, the lights in the barn came on and we watched Brewce, Joel and Ratface have a session in the vertigo-inducing 13-foot tall wooden bowl. Noteworthy events of the evening included a skateboard dropping from the top of the full pipe onto Ryan’s face, games of pool being played for low sums of money and two “bus tours” with Brewce behind the wheel and all of us trying to find a spot to sit on the floor where there was no broken glass as we went off road. We threw our sleeping bags into the pool and slid down to the bottom, but the sound of a revving chainsaw from outside kept everyone awake.
Along with multiple houses, barns and cabins on the property, Brewce constructed a skateboard museum. He gave us a tour, showing us his collection of hundreds of different boards from the earliest era through the present. There was a board with a pair of trucks that still had a “patent pending” label attached to them, along with clay wheels. Visitors are welcome to pick up any of the boards that hang from every inch of ceiling and wall space to stand on them or spin their functioning bearings. We finished our time at Skatopia by shooting handguns, shot guns and rifles at an old computer in front of the museum.
