Defenders of the Ditch

This is our ditch, of which I am extremely proud. Maybe it's like a mother that loves her ugly baby even when everyone else agrees the baby is ugly. It could be like that. Dave and I spent hundreds of dollars and a lot of time last summer repairing and creating skate spots, this one being the poster child of them all. Neither of us had ever done cement work, but that didn't stop or discourage us from buying $250 worth of cement and just going for it. By the end, we kind of figured out what we were doing, and the section that we did last is the only smooth part of the cement. That's the part I ride on. But all in all, the roughness of the spot makes it fun to skate, and you feel good even if you do a little grind on it. Or even just pumping back and forth is an accomplishment. But as soon as we finished it, word got out it was here and kids started riding it and busting up our cement job. What can you expect from skater kids? But then someone had the great idea to spray paint a purple robot and an eye in the ditch, both of which suck really bad. That's right mister tagger, I'm calling you out! Your work sucks! You and us, 5:00, at the flag pole behind the middle school, or the abandoned house on vineyard ave, your call! But we'll be there, and we're coming out swinging! So Dan and Nick were the ones that really embraced the power of the ditch, and they could pull of maneuvers that nobody else dared or cared to try, like 360 body twirls and crazy stuff. Oh yeah, funny story, this one time we were here and a cop pulled up behind my car parked on the road. Dave and I had told Dan that we wouldn't let him fall into the law's hands in case a cop came (we didn't think a cop would come), so when we saw the cop, we told Dan to high tail it while we smoothed things over with the cop. The first thing that came to my mind was how Martin Sheen lets Leo go on The Departed when the mob surrounds them in the building, and Martin Sheen thinks he can smooth things out with the mob, but they just throw him off the roof. I kept thinking that as Dan was fleeing the scene, he'd hear gunshots and come back to find our dead bodies int he ditch. But even with our very lives on the line, Dave and I held our ground in that ditch. We're loyal like that. Anyway, the cop didn't care at all, he even gave us permission to skate there whenever we wanted, so I called Dan, who was running up a hill, and told him to come back out of breath. All in a day's fun...