MM MECC ANICA

We’ll get to the skateboard…a 1960’s Hobie Super Surfer…

My wife and I exit the hotel, groggy and exhausted from a 12 hour drive the day before, proceeding to breakfast, but carrying a mix of confused feelings and emotions that create a divide that takes most of the morning to sort out. After resolving our issues over awkward bites of food, we begin heading back to the hotel.

Our surroundings begin transforming from somewhat known to lost as we discover we misinformed the GPS of which hotel we were staying at. As we try and orient ourselves while in motion, a path for the next two days presents itself in the form of a hand written garage sale sign taped to a cardboard box at the side of the road.

My gut was to was to follow this fluorescent promise of treasure hunting, but I let a ‘we have somewhere else to be’ and ‘fear of reigniting the mornings entanglement,’ feeling take hold. I sat in silence, letting the imaginary fear and rush prevent me from going with a flow that felt good.

My wife speaks up, “Hey look! A garage sale, do you want to go?”

I respond with a subdued, “sure,” still concerned with assumptions.

Excitement builds and opens up a conversation about the last time we remember seeing someone posting up a hand written garage sale sign. A few geriatric jokes about Scottsdale residents later, we are deep into a maze of track homes guided by Magnum 44 (Sharpie Magnum for you young kids) pictographs affixed to Amazon boxes; a beautiful incongruity of shopping past and present.

We roll by like a couple of criminals casing the joint, our eyes scanning someone else’s possessions littering a driveway. I see a couple of mid 90’s mountain bikes and a few longboards. There’s promise.

We park the car and I introvertedly walk up and start assessing the spread. I’m drawn to the old Specialized FSR hanging from a hook on garage eve. I begin chatting with the (not geriatric) owner, who beams, “Welcome to Michael’s Cycles and Longboards!”, and discloses these garage sales are a frequent social happening for him and his wife, that also allows a purge of collections (at his wife’s request) and the expired usefulness of things that we all gather.

I look into the darkness of the garage as it brightens exposing 50+ skateboards and a handful of bikes. I enter with my historian/tour guide. The conversation transforms into an excited chatter of my days as a kid riding bikes and skateboarding in San Diego. The host, who’s had a much wiser approach to play than I’ve had since high school, shares his passion and the collection it amassed over the past 30 years. A 90s turbo legacy appears in the back of the garage… I could be here all day…

My wife breaks away and starts interrogating the hostess about outdoor excursions in the area and discovers a hike that we now are destined to complete in the afternoon. The conversation wraps up, not due to staleness, but the new direction to take our day and adventure with our pups still back at the hotel.

An old beat up ‘skateboard’ with roller skate trucks catches my eye and establishes an emotional draw as we go back to the car and onto the next adventure.

We head to the hotel and pick up the pups, deep in a flow content with the direction everything is heading in. After an hour in the car discussing our limits of long drives and the difficulties in surrendering into the unknown really helping us more than hurting us, we enjoy a beautiful pleasant hike in perfect springtime Arizona weather.

We return to the hotel with two fulfilled dogs still high on the day. We change, and start on the next adventure, Pizzeria Bianca in downtown Phoenix. Discovering that at 7pm at night there is still a 3 hour wait to enter… go with the fucking flow… we find a perfect multi generationally owned boothed Mexican restaurant off the beaten path to throw our feet up and enjoy refueling ourselves before sleep.

Waking up rejuvenated, we join a close friend and finally get to meet his MUCH better half at a joint in northern Scottsdale. The conversation flows between hobbies, prospectives of our world’s current state, insight and connection, without barrier, even if there is not common ground. It was not long enough, but conversations with these type of people never are.

Again, we return to the hotel, grabbing our pups for a walk and we exit into the parking lot to find a Jefferson tumbling across the warm Arizona asphalt. Fucking flow man.

We head out walking the dogs into the somewhat familiar neighboring maze of track homes and walking paths, and there it is again, the fluorescent pictograph directing us toward flow. We follow, no hesitation this time.

Showing back up to visit our garage sale friends, we thank them for the hike recommendation and enter familiar conversations from the day before. My wife finds a collection set of Roald Dahl books, amoung her favorite during youth, hesitating to buy it for her own reasons, and then the found cash burning a hole in her pocket becomes my ticket to the skateboard drawing me in. The connection can’t be broken by $20, and I exchange the parking lot paper for another lesson.

We part ways and meander our way back to the hotel, high on life. Taking a different route back, we find a community book library… and what’s there… a Roald Dahl book for my wife. Beautiful. Higher on life now as everything comes together we are confronted with a young kid, in full temple appropriate Orthodox Jew attire, ripping on a longboard down the sidewalk in front of us, courteously deviating onto the street so that we don’t have to move, grinning ear to ear making eye contact to us and saying, “a beautiful day it is today…”

…the fucking flow…

We drop the pups off and without a wait grab a seat at Pizzeria Bianco.

…the fucking flow…

Ok, ok…the board…my extent of knowledge around the board is that it is a Hobie Super Surfer from the 1960s and is not rideable due to a cracked facet of the roller skate trucks. I can see it has clay wheels still (cool), and a very weathered deck. Here is a great history of it (LINK)

What does this board mean to me? I dwell on it as I refurbish it at my father’s shop on the next stage of our trip.

It is a beautiful example that you have to start somewhere and where that is doesn’t matter. I can look at this skateboard and pick apart the design flaws and archaic nature of its design with 60 years of evolution behind my thoughts, but the skateboard is more than my judgement of it today as a snapshot in time. I can pick myself apart, and be mad at myself for not going with the flow sooner, but I did start going with the flow and that’s what counts, just as this deck and it’s history kicked off a subculture of skating against all odds in the 60s. It was all it could be and needed to be for the time, and I’m all I can be and need to be right now. Where I’m at is ok, cherishing my stage at the moment, learning from it, and evolving. Hopefully in the future I can look back at the me now and have the same sense of acceptance as I have for the symbol of this skateboard, and not my historic judgment of self I have traditionally held.

Some new life for the board after sending through the planer a few times and oiling. Red and white oak stripes standing out!