TUESDAY, JULY 13, 2010


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PHOTOS BY MICHAEL TEMCHINE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST SMOOTH OPERATORS: Joe Shetz, left, Mike Buckley, center, and Ryan McGehee start their run at a Towson garage. “To a normal person, that’s just a garage, but to us it’s a piece of art,” Shetz says. On a ramp and on a roll: Longboarders rule longboarders from C1


ban surf’s up. Wind in your face, wood underfoot, the vibration of the wheels running the length of your spine. Rolling with your tribe. Barely legal. Now this is how you do the night! Twice a week for years, without pause, it has been the regularly scheduled mainlining of Whoosh! An evocation of freedom and bonding; a night of thrill rides decidedly not for kids. For these longboarders, that’s almost


exactly the point. The sun still has a few fingers in the


sky when Scott Frias arrives at the Tow- son garage. He claps hands with others, who share


skating videos on laptops and phones, or adjust the wheels on their boards as more people start to skate up. The text message, which beckons them


every week, was simple: Session at Tow- son garages tonight at 8:30. If you like pushin’ wood, you will be there. By 9, nearly all the parked cars are


gone, and most everyone who is coming, eight guys and one girl, is there. Most wear helmets; a few also have kneepads and gloves. That’s especially true of the guys over 40. The girl, Haley Clough, is 19, and Ryan McGehee is 21. They’re the only ones without helmets. Everyone else is late-20s and older. Some quite a bit. Frias is 43, a systems administrator for a medical software development com- pany in Bowie. For him, picking up the longboards has been a way to marry the rebel yell of the skateboard with the real- ities of career, family and aging knees. Divorced, with a 20-year-old son and 16- year-old daughter, Frias grew up doing tricky skateboard stuff in the ’70s. He started again when his 45-year-old brother, Robert, “a wild-haired slalom madman,” gave him a longboard. They usually hit the garages together. “A lot of us started as kids in the ’80s


and got out of it as we got older,” says Mike Buckley, 35, who owns an online company catering to outdoor sports. As a teen, he had a backyard “half-pipe,” two facing concave ramps for doing extreme tricks, but that was before he sported a neatly trimmed beard and added a bit more substance to his frame. Tricks are for kids and “I wanted to get back into it in a way that wasn’t as dangerous,” he says. The design difference between the longboards and “short boards,” the famil- iar skateboards everyone knows, reflects a different philosophical bent, Frias says. Skateboards come in a 30-inch by 10- inch standard and conform to a strict shape and thickness to maximize board control for better stunts and tricks. “That is not what we do, baby girl,”


Frias says. “In longboarding, there’s a wider variety of shapes and styles and different performance capabilities.” Some boards, typically longer with the wheels more exposed, are better going downhill. Others, with a slightly shorter wheelbase and an inset deck that drops down, are good for “carving” and turn- ing. “It’s all about being one with the ground.”


But there’s more to it. It’s guys from


different walks of life “meeting up in a garage on the common ground of hang- ing out on the roof to have a beer, talk about the world, but especially going down that hill and going up in the eleva- tor again just to carve out those graceful


then rise again as they step out of the el- evator and back onto the roof. Another skater, Mike Zimmer, 24, arrives. Then 40-year-old Jack “Jackhammer” Denning, a 6-foot-4 Baltimore music re- tailer with a six-inch beard, skates up, and the group hits the streets — a line weaving through late-night traffic to the next garage. This one’s a favorite con- nected to a well-known public building. Very fast. Very illegal. A couple of runs and a security guard in a white Balti- more County Revenue Authority truck drives up. “Y’all know y’all can’t skate here. Y’all heard that before,” he says. Head out and down Washington Av- enue to the next spot looming in the dis- tance. Beckoning. “To a normal person, that’s just a garage, but to us it’s a piece of art,” Shetz says. “It’s like a Monet right in the middle of Towson.” “And we’re about to go for a viewing,”


Frias says as they skate up. One level from the bottom, he hits a


wet patch from an earlier rain. The ga- rage’s rubber resurfacing, designed to keep auto fluids from seeping into the concrete, made it invisible and Frias pitches forward, just breaking his fall with his hands. “So glad I had these gloves on,” he says. Too dangerous, they decide and they’re off again. (They’ve all taken their tumbles, but no one has been seriously injured.) The door leading to the elevators in


the next garage is locked, so a skater pulls out an Original Steakhouse gift card, jimmies the lock and opens the door. Once off the elevators, the boards go still. The peace of the place speaks to them and the group lingers, sitting on the roof in the moonlight. When you’re skating, “everything else


BREAK TIME! The skateboarders relax, top, after a night rolling down the ramps. When you’re skating, “everything else that happened during the day is gone,” says one. Above, Mike Lippy sizes up the next run. Left, Jack Denning heads into a curve.


arcs on concrete,” Frias says. Joe Shetz, 27, a service adviser at a


Harford County Honda dealership, orga- nized the Towson skates nearly 10 years ago. “When people think of skateboard- ing, very generically, what pops in their heads is kids,” he says. “That’s the beauty of longboarding. The essence is not do- ing these very technical tricks that are associated with shortboarding, and be- cause of that, it allows people of a lot broader ability and age to participate, because it’s not nearly as physically de- manding on a very basic level.” As he got into longboarding, Shetz found himself driving the city, distracted by angles in the pavement, which drew him to the garages. “Here are these mag- nificent structures of concrete that all day are full of cars and people in the rat race, in the daily grind. As the sun goes down, and the streetlights come on, the cars empty out and these structures are lefty empty and you just get to thinking: This is perfect!” You can make endless runs, and you’re not interfering with the public or damag- ing property. “You’re not a nuisance, which is definitely a word people not fond of skateboarding use,” Shetz says. It’s a subtle difference, easily lost on the security guards who chase them from


the garages. But Shetz thinks the mes- sage is getting through. Not all security guards automatically run them off now. Especially when they see that some of


the skaters are older than they are. Mike Lippy, 44, owns Liquid Earth, a


vegetarian restaurant in Baltimore, which he lives above with his wife and two sons. He scouts the Baltimore garag- es to report on the pavement conditions for the Wednesday skates, which he and a friend organized a couple of years ago. The Wednesday skates are confined to one or two garages. “It’s only the young’uns who like to skate all over,” Lip- py says.


Lippy still has the first skateboard he


got, when he was 8. “Most people take that first spill and never get back on that board again. You can find a thousand boards on eBay.” He used to ride his skateboard around Manhattan, where he and his wife went to art school, but he moved to Baltimore in 1991, opened the restaurant, and skateboarding fell away. One day he used his skateboard to dolly a heavy box and it made him feel like he was being disrespectful toward some- thing he loved. His friend Max suggested he try a longboard. “We went to Rock Creek Park, I went down the steepest hill and carved


At 9:30, somebody drops a board to


the pavement and disappears into the Towson garage. They call that guy the rabbit, and the whole pack chases him. There’s the swoosh as someone zigzags past, or makes a wide turn around a sign that says no vans, trucks, SUVs, but says nothing about the riders pushing wood down the ramp. Clough, the lone woman, carves the space with a Rockstar energy drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The sounds of wheels and voices become a distant echo as the longboard- ers get two, three and four levels down,


it, and I was hooked.” He would drive to Washington for a sunrise skate, and Max would come to Baltimore to skate Wednesday nights. They skated giant parking lots before Max suggested the garages. Lippy started inviting people in 2008. “Coming up on our 80th one,” he says.


“There’s never been one time we’ve missed. . . . I’m the one who sends the text out — ‘Always chase the rabbit down the hole.’ Or, ‘If you don’t come, it’s not fun.’ I try to put something in there to re- mind them that it’s easy to sit your ass at home, but the next day you’re not going to feel good about that.”


that happened during the day is gone,” Zimmer says. “You broke up with your girlfriend, lost your job, went negative in your bank account,” Shetz begins. “You can still skate,” McGehee chimes


in.


“During the day, I have to care for my responsibilities, but these are the last few hours I can carve out of my day for myself, when my wife and daughter are asleep,” Denning says. “I gotta take my kid to a swimming lesson at 8:15 tomor- row morning.” “I own my own business and this is the only relaxation I have,” Buckley says. Dallas Childers, 42, a freelance TV


cameraman, hands Frias a beer. “Who else is doing something they love?” Chil- ders muses, and the others weigh in. Somebody is making love, or at a bar. Somebody is reading a novel, they say. “My friends are spinning records,” Denning says. “A lot of people are doing what they


love,” says Frias. “We’re just among them.” They sit, quiet for a few moments, en- joying the stillness of the night and their own thoughts. Then Frias crushes his beer can.


“All right, we gonna skate this or


what?” Childers says. He takes to his board and hits the ramp. He’s the rabbit and in an instant the others are skating after him. It’s a quarter to midnight and the ga- rage is full of promise.


oneall@washpost.com


VIDEO ON THE WEBWatch a rip-roaring video and flip through a photo gallery of


these wheeled daredevils at washingtonpost. com/style.


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