2/23/2005 09:44:00 PM|||Britt|||Twenty-one years ago (this summer), one of my weekends was spent in a trailer park in the middle of Kentucky. Little did I know that one day an old friend would email me a link to a video of me (scroll to bottom of the page, click on Run #4) from that weekend. But that is part of the inherent joy with the internet. It's like a Santa Claus who can strike at any moment, a Santa that leaves cookies rather than eating them.

Skateboarding was my life from 1979 until 1991. It started and ended in Tennessee, although it took me to the motherland, Southern California, in between. I never intended for it to end, but I could no longer base my relationship around the availability of a good halfpipe.

I couldn't find a ramp in Chicago in the early 1990s. Now I can drive in any direction and be at a skatepark within fifteen minutes, an even better skatepark in half an hour. When I was working at Transworld Skateboarding Magazine, I never would have imagined it could eventually get this good anywhere in the U.S.

Whenever I am driving around a city, I still am on the lookout for skate spots. In the 1980s, we used to comb areas to find anything with a semi-smooth curved surface, such as a loading dock. We'd hop out of the car, grab our boards, and skate for a couple of hours on something that wouldn't even grab the attention of most skaters today.

The one thing I learned from all this is that it wasn't the skateboarding. It was the people. To be sure, the people were ones who stuck to a dying trend, who were ridiculed, and who were chased away from plazas and drainage ditches, but they were also the ones who knew the potential and did not let it go. I'm glad they were my friends.

Whenever I go skating again in one of these nice, free skateparks, I will be thinking about them.|||110922605721012543|||I got a gut feeling