Amended Memories

Photos aren't any more factual than the transitory memories they supposedly upstage. In fact, good photos will often open a proverbial can of worms when it comes to nostalgia that does more to obscure the alleged truth than to verify it. For me, photos aren't the end all when it comes to a memory or story, but simply the mechanism by which to get one started. For instance, one of the first pools I ever really got to skate--that is, without being chased out by someone--was Los Arboles in Albuquerque. It was going during a seemingly undying summer in the mid-1980s and, since I'm on an '80s nostalgia kick right now, it seems appropriate to post the lone picture of it that I've got.

The stories that go along with Los Arboles are cornerstones of my very own, highly subjective version of skateboarding "authenticity." As I recall it, Los Arboles was located on a cul-de-sac behind a vacant home that, for whatever reason, garnered little interest from its neighbors. As a result, the pool was skated heavily by literally everyone in the area and beyond. In fact, skaters became the pool's de facto owners and, before long, the locals pretty much came to view Los Arboles as their inalienable property. So much so, in fact, that I heard that people would actually show up early mornings and drain the pool after the house was sold and new owners moved in. It wouldn't surprise me, since the Team Radster-led Albuquerque scene was pretty epic back then and, whether it's true or not, I like to think that those dudes pulled that off a couple of times.

C. P. at Los Arboles

 

 

There's a lot of nostalgia at stake for me when it comes to Los Arboles: corner carves being ripped in the foreground of turquoise skies and austere rocky mountains, frothy, seemingly ubiquitous beers gripped between runs. Whether verifiable myth or mistaken memory, I embrace all the peripheral and anecdotal poolisms surrounding this spot as the gospel truth. And why not? When it comes to skating, or anything else important in life, we tend to amend our memories anyway, preserving and exaggerating the things we find validating and conveniently altering or even omitting whatever complicates what we'd like to believe. For better or worse, we wind up stitching together a memory-based autobiography that, one way or another, validates the things about ourselves we like. A photograph, it stands to reason, is subject to interpretation and liable to provide only so much more malleable "evidence" to pad one's personal fiction. Nevertheless, when suddenly confronted with photographic evidence of a genuinely formative spot in one's skate story, the type of picture that can abruptly invalidate everything you've chosen to recollect about a pool that helped make skating what it means to you, it's nice to look back through it and see something good. In a word, that was Los Arboles.