Not Your Parent's Country Club
Alex Nichols shuts his dorm door behind him, jumps on his skateboard, and skates into the city of Harrisonburg, scouting for new areas he can do skate tricks. He heads far from campus, deep into the “townie” neighborhoods, areas that most JMU freshmen don’t think to step into, much less know exist.
He rolls further away from campus and comes across a field. To his right is a townhouse complex, littered with broken bottles from an overflowing dumpster. To his left is Country Club Road with the Interstate 81 overpass running over it. A mosque sits to his left atop a hill. He decides to hop off his wheels and walk through the field. Concrete suddenly replaces the grass. Alex looks up. Tall weeds shoot up from what seems to have been a tennis court. Community members see this everyday; it’s just an old tennis court. Alex sees it for the first time and envisions cinderblocks, concrete ledges, a quarter pipe: a skate park. The tennis court, desolate but home to local illegal activity, begged for someone to fill it with life once again.
We could build a feature here, and build a ledge here, he thinks to himself. This is what a DIY skate park revolves around: local skaters mustering resources from trash and home improvement stores to create skate features in abandoned areas. Alex embeds the image of the court in his mind and files it away for later.
A few weeks later, Alex meets Troy Gamboa. Alex notices him skating outside his dorm window.
“Hey, man, you skate? I skate too!” Alex exclaims.
Alex tells Troy about this abandoned tennis court and the two begin to think of the possibilities. The desire to build grows, but university policy forbidding freshmen to bring cars inhibits Troy and Alex from attempting to build it.
A year later, Troy is a sophomore and has a car. He drives to the Country Club tennis court, working to accurately remember the directions Alex gave him. He turns one way and ends up at the mosque. He looks and peers down the hill past Country Club road. He spots what seems like a court but isn’t quite sure at first because of the weed coverage. Alex had said the place seemed rundown and sketchy so that must be it. He begins to leave but the surplus of long, cement parking blocks catches his eye. He scopes them out, remembering Alex’s dream of installing a parking block into the future skate park.
He backs his car up to a block, bends down, grabs the parking block with both of his hands and pulls up. It comes off the ground a few inches but the weight of the block wins and he drops it. He looks down and then glances over to the lonely court; they need this block. He grasps the block again, musters all of his body weight, and pulls the block up so that it rests on the side of his Honda CRV. He catches his breath, musters his strength again, and collapses the rest of the block into the trunk. The Honda sinks down a few inches.
Five minutes later, Troy pulls into a guest spot in the townhouse community across from the mosque. The late summer day beckons kids and dogs outside. Turning away from the houses, Troy passes the dumpster as neighbors warily watch him; the only people who visit this court are people they don’t want to tangle with. He crosses a creek, walks up a muddy field, and takes in the barren area.
The parking block sits on Troy’s porch for two weeks until Alex returns to Harrisonburg from summer break. On an early fall Saturday, the two heave the parking block back into Troy’s car and drag the car back to the court, stopping at Lowes to pick up concrete blocks and liquid nails on the way. They slowly slide the block out, Troy and Alex on opposite ends. Carefully, they cross a bridge on the far side of the field to avoid crossing the creek. They have to take a break, catch their breath. They pick up the block, go for a couple feet, take a break again. The neighbors stare. Thirty minutes later, they step onto the concrete. Troy’s eyes widen as his hands tremble and let go of the block.
“Dude!” Alex shouts as the 100 plus pound block just misses his foot.
The parking block is set atop cinderblocks and glued down with liquid nails. The court is no longer a court, but now a skate park. They name it “Country Club.”
Over the next few months, Country Club grows up. Twelve hours and 17 bags of concrete mixture result in a 4-foot long 2-foot high concrete ledge. The base of a statue is found in the creek bed and is rolled up the hill to the corner of the park where it becomes a feature for skaters to do tricks over. A local skate shop installs a rail.
On Halloween night, Alex and Troy traipse through the muddy grass to Country Club with sledgehammers in their hands. They slam down the hammers, one by one, busting through the top layer of concrete, and begin to dig. They fill the hole with concrete and proceed to shove a 4-foot long metal pole into the hole with a 45 degree angle to the ground. This is called the pole jam and requires skaters to gain enough momentum to slide up the pole and do a trick off. The two leave the pole there to set in the concrete. The next morning they return to check on it, only to find the pole had been ripped out of the ground and the concrete dried without the pole in it.
Skate sessions happen and the concrete mess remains without the pole. One year later, Alex and Troy return with the pole and begin to dig again. As they dig, Alex turns to see a man walking up the hill towards them. Alex’s stomach tightens a little.
“Hey, man, what’s up?” Alex asks.
“Yo, dude, what you guys are doing here is really cool for these kids.” The man never had anything like this pop-up skate park when he was a kid. This skate park was something for the neighborhood kids to do, something to keep them out of trouble.
Prior to Alex and Troy occupying the court with skate features, the abandoned tennis court had welcomed mysterious activity that left a trail of empty liquor bottles and the occasional used syringe. But the more Alex and Troy build, the more skaters come to inhabit the premises, forcing the secretive nighttime activity to vacate the area. According to Alex, this pattern is common across most DIY skate parks in America; sketchy activity decreases when skaters activity in an area increases.
The gratitude for the park remains, apart from a few neighbors who aim to vacate the park of the skaters. On a Saturday afternoon, Alex, Troy, and Harrisonburg skater Pat Landess are skating in the park when a man in a white pickup truck pulls up. He gets out of his car, crosses the creek, and walks up the hill to the guys.
“You boys cannot skate here and if I see you around here again I’m going to call the police.”
He goes on to threaten how he will rip up every feature. He’s the handyman of the community, a self-proclaimed citizen hero. The three guys agree to leave, but they return again in a few days.
Later, they find out that three of their friends were skating at Country Club when the police kicked them out. Alex’s heart clenches when he hears this. Once the city knows about the park and the proper people are called, they will demolish it. But despite the threats to rip features out, the park still stands two years after building began.
Alex looks at the small park with the same gaze a father has when watching his kid learning to ride a bicycle for the first time. It’s a warm evening in early March and seven skaters take advantage of the window of warmth in a cold season. The sun is setting and each skater takes his turn on each feature. They skate around each other, with an unspoken language as to who is going on which feature and trying which trick.
Skaters come to Country Club as strangers and leave as companions. Three local skaters were driving on Interstate 81 South and saw the skate park beneath the overpass. They pulled off to scope it out and immediately met Troy and Alex. They now meet up at Country Club to skate together frequently.
Country Club attempts to stay hidden from city officials, but the skaters proclaim its existence to other locals.
“Every DIY skate park has a life.”
Alex hops out of his car and walks over to the dumpster near the park. He sifts through and finds a broken piece of a bedframe. He envisions the tricks a skater could do over this piece of trash. He slides it out, hoists it beneath his arm, and carries it across where he lays it on the concrete.