Ode to Pools Past: "That Pool"

Long about the year 1999 or so me and my compadre--who at the time was going by the humble moniker of "C Bad"--were tossing back a couple frothy cold ones at our favorite Southern New Mexico saloon, El Splatio, listening to the Slayer tracks we'd talked the bartender into putting on the jukebox. Out of the shadowy corner of the dank shithole a crew of the youngens in the local skateboarding scene emerged, sidling cautiously toward us, waving a white flag to demonstrate that they'd come in peace. The usual tense pleasantries were exchanged before one of the crew lost his composure: "We got a pool," he blurted out. "You gotta come skate it!"

We looked at each other in utter disbelief. "Bullshit," we thought. "No way these dudes come up that way all of a sudden." Boy, were we wrong... and thank God we were. Those little bros wound up hooking us up with one of our all time favorite spots. Turned out that Reedical, who was getting into photography at the time, was chasing a lightning storm up on the East Mesa and pulled off the freeway onto a hill overlooking the Organ Mountains. To his eternal surprise he wound up stumbling across a demolished home site with nothing left but this sick little copingless right hand kidney.

The scenery says it all. No bust. No neighbors. No lurkers. Nothing. In all my years of skating to that point, I'd never had a situation like this: Skate at will. And that we did. This pool was good. In fact, it was much better than these pictures let on. Nestled in with a killer view of the mountains and close to my mom's house, the liquor store, and some of the best Mexican food in the world, this place saw heavy action for about a year or so before it got dozed. Everyone pretty much skated this bowl at some point. Tommy lived about a block away and would bring mixed drinks by for everyone and then fucking shred that place. If anything, this pool should have been named after him, but Reedical, the afore mentioned "C Bad," Adrian, Miguel, and a slew of up and coming groms held their own here. Characteristically of that strange era in skateboarding, there were a lot of other people invited out to skate the bowl ("Dude, we gots weed growing out there... we show up with a keg and fucking skate!!!!") who declined. Like the pool itself, they'll remain nameless.

We got so spoiled having this place to ride that we didn't even bother naming it. No one could agree on one anyway, and I heard a bunch of suggestions tossed around that never stuck. After a while people just referred to it as "that pool," since everyone knew what you were talking about and that you were going there to skate regardless. But more importantly, I think this pool truly defied any simple name. It meant too much to the people who skated and partied there regularly. It definitely represented skating in Southern New Mexico: The locals embraced the place and wouldn't have had it any other way, while most of the folks who came in from elsewhere to skate the thing didn't much care for it. "Not good enough for you, eh? Perfect. Fuck you. Leave."

This pool got ripped from top to bottom by the locs out there and no one but them will ever truly know what went down there. There aren't a lot of pictures of this place floating around, and we like it that way. A lot of memory, maybe a little myth: that's good history. For anyone who skated here, this one weighs heavy. And well it should. It was "that pool," the one we never took for granted.