As restrictions are starting to ease during these pandemic times, the fourth of July rolled around this 2021 and what better place to have a BBQ bowl jam than at the Niebuhr bowl compound nestled in the wooded hills of Sultan, Washington.
The idea of building something in the town started in 2018 when Jon Aguirregomezcorta was skating alone in Eibar, Basque Country a similar situation as the skaters from the surrounding towns; he thought in his mind: “If graffiti writers can go painting in those abandoned factories to produce their pieces, why am I not going to build some ramps?!”
Since the conclusion of the Students center pool sculpture being built, we’ve been introduced to a whole new way of riding a skateboard, and to a new skateboarding style which, until then, we were only able to see on tape. In the same year, being skateboarders, we were facing great depression not being properly understood and listened to. We didn’t have anything. After ten years of riding street, now and then even a skatepark that was being demolished faster than it was built, we didn’t have as nearly as much room for creativity and progression as we needed to. A lot of us gave up on skateboarding.
I hate my parents can still resonate in the adolescent head of the skateboarder you are. It’s perhaps still the case, but try to love your friends’ parents because they could agree to give you part of their garden to build a sort of Steppe Side style / DIY skate spot. I don’t know them but I start to love them too.
Maybe this ramp doesn’t look special to you, but it’s very special to a couple of guys who live in Slovenia where you can count these kind of places with the fingers of one hand. And if you cut one finger off you’ll get the number of skaters who don’t wear hair gel and who don`t skate on supermarket parking places. People will hate me even more for what I just wrote. Fuck them.
…I am flat broke and live day to day. People think you design a shoe, or a frame, they see you in films or TV commercials, they see you on the covers of magazine around the world, they see your book of poems and they think that guy must be loaded, but its just not the reality of what’s happening especially in skateboarding. Sometimes I don’t even believe it. I look at my life, my accomplishments and all the places I have seen my name, and face and I go fuckin nuts…. why the hell am I broke??? But that’s not the point, the point is to be driven, to love what you do and do it, and that’s the joy I have in my life.