Shit You've Skated

I don't know, but for my money the list of "shit you should have skated" is pretty long and probably includes a lot of places that don't quite live up to their reputation. Today, a lot of those places are probably skate parks. I mean, if you get a chance to skate Orcas Island I'd say you'd have to do it... but that's just me. Nevertheless, there are other spots out there that aren't supposed to be all that great that just are somehow. I get the feeling it's because they capture the spirit of skating in a timeless kind of way. The coolest spots out there in my book are the ones that unexpectedly turn out to be memorable, even though they probably shouldn't even be there to begin with. A good skate spot has to capture your imagination somehow.

It seems to me that Kanis Park in Little Rock, Arkansas rates highly as that sort of skate spot. I mean, look at it: Doesn't it remind you of one of those crazy New Zealand parks you always see in videos? To this day no one has really satisfactorily told me the story about how it got there... please don't, by the way! I'm sure the story's really simple and would ruin the place's mystique for me. The coolest thing about Kanis is that both times I skated it, I was actually in the area to skate the Dreamland built North Little Rock park, which, by the way, is rad in and of itself. However, Kanis kinda stole the show both times. One, no one was there to skate it and two, it was just, well, fun. Really kinda the place you gotta figure out a little bit, you know? Arkansas is a weird place, if you haven't heard, and all the KKK activity around there is a little unnerving, and then there's this crazy park. What do you do?

One of the lamentations I have in the era of perfect skate parks is that places like Kanis get ignored somewhat these days. There was a time when skaters really focused on finding places that weren't made to skate and (though Kanis was) tried to conquer them. Kanis has always struck me as a really familiar place. That is, it reminds me of one of those epic, graffiti laced skate spots (the Toilet Bowl in Shalem Colony, New Mexico, for example) that were just going back in the day. No one ever really bothered to ask who was first, or why. Where did that whole ethic come from? And where did it go?--I mean for me, hopefully not you. Back then there just seemed to be such a strong desire to skate anything that was even remotely worthwhile and of course really get after it. There just seemed to be this drive to find stuff and ride it. Kanis fits in on that list quite nicely... And, for me, that's the list of shit I wanna skate, even if a lot of those spots aren't technically that good. Whereas a skate park is something like a porno, leaving nothing to the imagination, spots like Kanis make you think about them a little bit. For me, that's what makes skating so fun... it's about what you can do. Not what you didn't do.