Broken Back Chronicles

Let me tell you, doing without certainly makes one nostalgic for pools past. There were times in what I consider the hey day of my pool riding life when it seemed like they were almost too easy to come by, a proverbial dime a dozen. Looking back, it's hard to believe how much I used to take them for granted. That was especially easy when I lived in Texas because people would just call me up and take me to pools; I often didn't even have to sweep. I was lucky enough to fall into the right crowd of people and wound up riding a ton of good pools, even some epic ones.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, I looked at many of the ones I rode with a tinge of skepticism, as though I expected another, even better one to come along shortly. Oddly, though, there are a few pools that have made my memory's short list over the years that were anything but the really "good" ones. The pools I miss the most seem to be the ones, I guess, that summarize my relationship with skateboarding the best. The ones that really took effort on my part.  The ones no one else really fucked with.

One such pool was the Broken Back, which, I don't mind saying, I almost single-handedly kept going from 2000-2004. Don't let the pictures fool you. It wasn't an especially great pool. It was cancered out, elongated and slow. The motherfucker was always wet and, with the humidity, took forever to get skateable, which was why it got named the "Broken Back" in the first place (as opposed to the gay cowboy movie theory, thank you). The name also connoted the fact that, considering the pool was almost exactly fifty miles from my house out in the pine forest backwoods, it was one hell of a task to get ride-able in the first place.

This picture was taken about half an hour into our first effort to clean it. We had the gas pump going, but it was almost immediately clogged because the pool--which was eight feet deep--was fully three feet thick with leaves, tires, etc., debris that made use of the pump tricky and slow at best. I remember poking the trannies with a broomstick and swilling Budweisers the whole time, fully stoked out, while the dude I was with kept questioning whether it was skateable and mentioning that there was a mini-ramp session later. I was a straight dick back then and I remember calling all my friends that night in utter disbelief: these dudes don't skate pools! To my smug satisfation, dude and his crew wound up skating the thing only a few times and then left it to me. To each his own in the skateboarding world, but it used to trip me out that those dudes never bothered with this pool after all the work we put in to get it going. I guess they got the last laugh in the end because I know they scored a couple epic ones years later. But the Broken Back was decent! Yeah it was rough, but it had a good shallow and there wasn't a bad wall in it. You could tell once we got the main water out of it and were left with just the crap to deal with.

After a couple of trips and with the help of some rain it started to look better, but we eventually turned up everything from snapping turtles to catfish in the thing; it was a regular  self-supporting eco-system. I don't think this was anywhere near the nastiest clean up in skateboarding history, but considering the logistics involved and the fact that, in the end, it was me and one other dude who did 99% of the work, it at least makes it an interesting side bar.

 

It took some serious doing, but at long last she was clean, ready to ride. I really tried not to tell anyone about the pool, but one way or another lots of people came through over the years. By the time it was all said and done I heard a dozen stories about who found it, who cleaned it, even who skated it. The weird thing, though, was that I never ran into anyone there. Occasionally I'd show up and the fence would be left open, or a brew can would be laying on the deck. Despite clear evidence that it was being skated, if only so often, I never actually saw anyone do it.

I know for a fact that some homies from a nearby town used to hit it up when I wasn't around. I remember being pissed off at first, since they'd found out about it via the internet and from people who I'd let in on it. But after a while I was honestly glad when anyone else but me had to schlep rainwater and debris out of the thing for a change. One thing's for sure: I never once showed up at the thing in over four years of it going and found it clean. There was always some shit to deal with and, more often than not, I didn't even get to skate it. That's why I always made sure to show up with a twelve pack. I did skate it a lot, though, and almost always by myself. Considering its location, which was deep behind the pine cone curtain and not far enough from Arkansas to make anyone feel safe, plus the fact that I often couldn't get there until the evening and almost always skated solo, the thing looms in my mind even now kind of eerily. On most days, though, I had to deal with about two feet of water thanks to the constant rain.

The pool was so far off the beaten path that only a few of my friends made it out. After a while I even considered just posting up directions and letting everyone at it in the hopes that maybe I'd find it clean more often. Fortunately I came to my senses and pretty much tried to keep it to myself. The one dude who took a special liking to the pool and would actually come down and ride it regularly, and thus bring some real energy to the place, was my homie Jason, who skated it about as well as anyone I ever saw there. 

It's funny. All that time spent there and aside from about three minutes of lame video and about twenty photos, I don't have anything. No relic. No piece of brick coping. No tile. No scar. But that's exactly why I think the Broken Back works so well as a metaphor for my life in skating. When it comes down to it, I don't want anything from it.  And, given the choice, I like skating by myself. Always have. The Broken Back never hosted an epic session, never came close to making skateboarding's radar. For the most part, no one--not even the skaters who lived closest to it--had any idea it was going on. Thus, as much as any place I've ever been a part of, it represented that pure kind of devotion that only skating seems to elicit from its participants. There was no motivation that went on in or around the Broken Back that didn't revolve around the simple act of riding it. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who skated the Broken Back is down for that very reason. And I'm sure that, while their story may not include me, it's probably pretty damned similar to the one I've related here. After all, if you found your Holy Grail, would you bother to tell anyone?