Under the overpass

Bring a broom. It won’t clear away everything, but it’ll make things manageable. The big rocks, the little rocks. The lid from a Snapple bottle, the glass from a Snapple bottle. An empty bag of kettle-cooked potato chips. A small bouquet of drained hard seltzer cans. Someone was having a good time down here. 

You’re about to have a good time down here. 

Under the overpass, you feel the traffic above as much as hear it. A reverberation that makes its way down from whatever-sized roadway you’ve decided to ride your skateboard beneath. Wheels spinning with purpose, as above so below.

What’s down here? Could be anything. A hole in the ground. Some raggedy stack of cinderblocks affixed with angle iron along their length. A janky DIY quarterpipe that wouldn’t pass professional inspection but is better for it, in the spiritual sense. Or perhaps a stretch of Jersey barriers with concrete splashed along their base, turning the abrupt masses designed to halt movement into something that encourages it. 

Ride up, down, out.

The one constant in these spaces is the ground. As long as you’re down here, it will be, too. You will meet it with force, whether you’ve fallen onto it or you’re riding away from some trick that has taken you anywhere from minutes, hours, or days to complete. Be wary of wearing white. What the broom can’t push away is the grime that will streak across your back as you tuck and roll. That will cake on the ass of your jeans. 

What is it? Dirt, dust, car tire rubber broken down into particulate sludge. Salt from winter road maintenance. Piss. Always piss. It hangs in the air. That’s fine. Besides being a great place to ride your skateboard, this is also the perfect place to relieve yourself. Private. Low foot traffic. Sometimes you have to square away and swallow separate truths.

There’s something about it, the dank that pervades these spots. If you spend enough time in them, it becomes a comfort. The ever-present grit that finds its way under your fingernails, how the discordant rush of traffic turns ambient like the smell you forget you’re enduring once you spend enough time sweating in it. The taste that sits in your mouth like car exhaust.

Can you commune with a feeling?

In the book Skateboarding and the Senses, skateboarders and academic researchers Sander Hölsgens and Brian Glenney write of the somatic realities of skateboarding’s physical and cultural practices.

Learning to skate in the built environment echoes practices like mushroom hunting in forests, described by anthropologist Anna Tsing as an art of noticing. Learning to notice something, to discriminate between useless and useful phenomena, is a decidedly embodied practice. It implies cultivating a bodily register to attend to what’s meaningful: from matsutake mushrooms in the forest undergrowth to skateable spots among urban detritus. Like mushroom hunting, skateboarding is learned by doing — by training the body to sense, discern, and be attentive. Such a sensory education, we attest alongside Tsing, is enveloped in contingent ecological and capitalist systems — denoting much more than the bare techniques themselves. Skaters are intimately familiar with the ruins of the Anthropocene, creatively reappropriating its grey spaces for trick play and, at times, activism. 

Everything becomes meaningful under the overpass; that’s why you’re here. Snap a 360 kickflip and the echo will bounce around like a rumour. Scream in frustration and wait for it to be swallowed by the screeching of tires. Where else can you be like this? Good, bad, or otherwise, these places become familiar as a set of experiences. A rock your broom didn’t catch slipping under your wheel and pitching you to the ground — old hat. Discomfort as a friendly jape.

Other people come down here for similar reasons. It’s a great sanctuary. Some will come to walk their dogs, others take shelter, a few will spraypaint massive cocks along the vast concrete canvas of public infrastructure.

Are we in communion with the ruins of the Anthropocene?

That tracks. What have we as humans ever done but attempt to make sense of the world we build up and tear down around ourselves? A world that we’ve pushed to the brink, where play feels best on its underside. A place where dust can’t be swept away, just pushed around. Blackberries grow at the entrance. Eat as many as you want. No one will tell you not to, just be sure to rinse them first.

You have to care to come down here. You also have to be looking for something — an exchange. Person extracts from place, place extracts from person. Sometimes you know what you want in advance, other times it’s not until long after, like when Louise Glück opened an old copy of Death in Venice and found a photograph.

I wiped the dust from my mother’s face.
Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistent
haze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood.

If you watch the footage, you can go back there to see and hear what it was like that day, riding your skateboard in that place. The din of the wheels above, the rumble of pocked asphalt below your own. There’s dust on the lens. Light, overexposed. A haze of nostalgia.

What’s more honest is the smell. If you look hard enough, your nostrils might flare — olfactory flashback. Soon, there’s dust on your tongue. It’s streaked on your shirt. Sweaty, it all sticks to you. When finished, simply press stop. Close the book.

Thus the little photograph
was buried again, as the past is buried in the future.

This is why you came down here, why we keep coming back: to create relics.